Surviving a twice-rescheduled marathon with severely inadequate preparation — the pre-race

Dialing back the clock for 18 months, I had participated in a marathon that the outcome was so bad that I deeply regret.

It was the Laguna marathon in Phuket of Thailand. Basically, I stopped running at 27km and walked back. The time taken at 5:17 wasn’t too bad as an amateur, yet it was a significant deterioration of the 4:30-ish I did for many times, before and after a major injury at my right sole. I thought I was training more or less as usual, though living in a perennial tropics for almost two years by then, it wasn’t quite practical to train as disciplined and as frequently regular as in the past when I was in my sub-tropical hometown.

The race started at 4:30am and it was a dry day. The sun was in full blast around 6:30am so my patience and energy drained quickly. I felt sick hence slowed down, and eventually became walking mode. It was super boring to walk over 10km, even if I was walking briskily and was surprisingly still faster than quite some other fellow runners. Still, it was a discouraging experience. For the several years I was in marathon running, I was trained to believe that the “proper” way of participating in a marathon was to keep running, no matter how slow it is, throughout the race. Walking is like cheating and defeated to me.

Therefore, once I completed this embarrassing race, I vowed to myself that I should try this route again in the next opportunity to get my redemption by being a respectable marathoner.

The next race was scheduled in June 2021 so I signed up at the earliest opportunity available. Then in April 2021 Thailand was struck by the then so-called “third wave” of caused by the delta variant of COVID 19 hence the race was deferred to December 2021. And then latter on the race was further deferred to June 2022 because of (if I remember correctly) omicron.

The on-and-off of various waves disrupted my, likely also to most people, daily routine badly. I need to get used to train while wearing a mask and various life events got me into experiencing other sports and exercising adventure. The aggregate result was that I got more diverse in exercising but losing focus. Worse, I gained weight by 3–4kg which made running increasingly challenging to me.

I managed to run 3–4 times per week, but never able to accumulate the 80km+/week mileage required for “productive enhancement” in running. My casual running became even more casual-er so strictly speaking, I was merely fooling around and spending time in running ineffectively, merely for the sake of convincing myself as if I trained anyhow, even though it had contributed little to my physique and preparation for the actual race.

During these period, my injury on my right sole disappeared, but had “switched” to my left sole. I had regular sessions with a physiotherapist because of hip pain arising from driving long-distance so I got treated for my sole as “additional”. For me, the physiotherapist was helpful at least in the sense that he didn’t, as if physicians normally would, recommend me to stop running, so I can continue with my aforesaid “training”.

The two months before the race in June 2022 witnessed a complete destruction of training routine. The reopening of Thailand had thrown my life upside down because at work we were trying to catch up with the time lost for more than two years. My schedule was full of events and business trips and the training sessions had taken a back seat as a result.

Therefore, by the time I was about to fly to Phuket for the race, I realised how little and ineffective my training has been, so bad it is to the extent that I was most ill-prepared for this marathon comparing with the dozen races I took part in over the past several years. I am in uncharted water for myself on this. I don’t want to give up because this would be my last opportunity for this race in the foreseeable future and the travel package was amended twice to cater for the rescheduling. I wanted to insist going, at the risk of having this race as my first “DNF” if things had gone very wrong during the race.