Planning and Prioritising

Two weeks ago I signed up for a marathon to be held in mid June. A real one, but those virtual ones people cheering for each other online.

Yes, I am blindly confident that the pandemic will be gone by then. Not because of the effective deployment of the vaccines — we all know how many will be produced by then and we would be super lucky if 5% of the world population would have enjoyed the privilege to be presumably immune through the process. I would neither be imaginative to belief there would be scientific breakthroughs which would beat the disease quickly and minimise the impact of infection — the virus causing the sickness has infected large amount of number of people in all corners of the world to have better chance to mutate quickly enough to be a moving goal post, increasingly difficult to catch but more likely to become amenable to get more parasitic than killing the hosts (i.e. us) outright.

It just seems that by that time, there will be enough people to have adjusted their expectation adequately to accept and realise that most, if not all, the control measures currently in place would be overwhelmingly ineffective and disproportional when accounting for the cost paid for their implementation. We will eventually have a much more relaxed environment for social activities.

With five months to go, I am therefore quiet optimistic of the likelihood of having the race proceeded as scheduled. After all the race is in the same country I am currently staying and an exactly same race was held last month.

Right, I am running the same race as the last one I did recently.

I would call this a “revenge race”. On reflection, the last one was done rather unprofessionally. It is beyond my imagination that I would have walked for more than 10km, which I have never done before. I would blame the poor psychological preparation. Given the post-race injury stock take, there shouldn’t be any problem for me to run through the whole race. It was the lack of preparation and persistence prevented myself from pressing on throughout the race.

A race preparation plan would be required and should be reasonably challenging (to have an effect) but reachable enough to be adhered to throughout. This is what I will focus on for the twelve weeks running up to the race.

So I will have one and half month before the first week. What shall I do?

“everything else” — that’s my answer. Yet I won’t give up running. I will continue to run as much as I can but make sure it will be secondary. Priority should be given to other exercises or hobbies and I hope there could be at least a step leap forward for the others before I head back to running.