Running a Marathon

It has been many months, nearly half a year I didn't update my blog because I had been busy since the start of this 2013 to carry out my new year's resolution. 
Well the main motive when I started this blog is to aim improve my skills of writing both in Mandarin and English, it really needs a continuous motivation to write. But it is often burried by laziness.

Part of my planning for this year is to learn Japanese, learn swimming and run a marathon. In runners world, when we say run a marathon it automatically means running a 42.195km marathon, the so called full marathon. Running a 21km run is called half marathon while running 10km run is not categorized as marathon, it is normally called 10km race or fun run.

I started my Japanese language class since March 2013. Learning Japanese language is an ongoing process and still a lot of things to be learnt and memorized. Regarding swimming, I did not know how to swim even float in the water at all. I always wanted to know the feeling of moving in the water since many years ago but now only I started to learn swimming since March. It was a great experience in learning swimming, at the initial stage it made me realized that how poor my body's coordination and how stiff my body was when I was in the water. But it also made me realized that my learning ability is quite fast, I could float and started to learn breaststroke kick during 1st lesson, 2nd lesson learnt hand movement, 4th lesson breathing, hand and leg coordination, 5th lesson fine tuning breastroke and 7th lesson started to learn freestyle.

Let's come back to the title, running a marathon. I will be running a marathon in this coming 30th June 2013, in the Standard Chartered KL Marathon (SCKLM) 2013, my first (full) marathon in my life. I ran few 10km races, two 17km races, and two half marathons. Last year I had my first half marathon 21km in the Penang Bridge International Marathon (PBIM) 2012, will write about the improvements I made in another article later for my own documentation as well.

Running a (full) marathon, is not an easy stuff, it's killing! People often said you must run numerous half marathons then only can try full marathon. But I don't believe, I believe in a stronger leg and not the numbers of races. This is because I never ran many half marathons but I made a 30mins improvement in my 2nd half marathon this year compare to my first half marathon PBIM last year. So I ran twice in half marthon and this year I am going to run in a (full) marathon. The cut off time for SCKLM 2013 is 6 hours to complete the 42.195km in order to get the finisher medal and finisher tee. I believe I can finish it within 6 hours, but my concern is how fast I can finish it.  

So, another 30days for my first (full) marathon in my life, I feel excited! There are many training programs and guidelines being suggested by experts for running a (full) marathon such as HIIT, hill, tempo training, LSD and so on. Well, I neither read any of those articles nor have time to accumulate weekly millage. It's good if one can follow those suggestions. It definitely can improve one's stamina. But I don't have enough time already, so I'm using my very own approach, the combination of weight training, swimming + running 3x per week (if possible). I believe weight training plays an important role for stronger legs, better endurance and to run faster. So for the next few weeks I will do more lunges, squats, dead lift, and back strengthening for a stronger posterior chain.

My target is 5 hours. Let's see!