The Konings: Malaysian Women's Marathon.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Malaysian Women's Marathon.

In the fall, my friend Amy asked me to run a 1/2 marathon with her. Her first. I have adjusted well to the heat of SE Asia and decided to give running a shot again. We recruited a couple other friends from BKK to join and Team Sparkle Skirt was created.

KL Towers.

The start of my training started off well. I was hitting the miles on my plan and feeling good about it all. Until...a month before the race I became cursed. I first decided to have hand surgery (timing way off). I thought it would be a simple procedure and a maybe a couple days of no running. Nope, it was two weeks. The taking of bone from my elbow was an unexpected setback that made running a little painful. I was also pumped full of anesthesia that took weeks to wear off. Then...a week before the race...I was hit with 5 days of stomach flu. There is not running with that. That left me with one week to run, before I ran 13.1 miles.

Team before the race.

The race was the Malaysia Women't Marathon in Kuala Lumpur. Friday night we all flew in and headed to Amy's. We spent Saturday touring around KL and resting up for the race EARLY Sunday morning (beat the heat).

Start in the dark.

The only expectation I had for the race was to finish. This meant walking or crawling over the finish line. I knew I could do at least that. It also allowed me to not have high expectations of myself by taking it too seriously and just have fun being with friends.

Male pacers in skirts. Balloons attached.

The race was a women's only event..in a Muslim country. When we were signing up, there was an option of getting a male pacer...because women are unable to pace themselves. At the race, the male pacers wore skirts to "show their belief that a women can find the strength to run that far and finish. (or something worse then that!)." With Team Sparkle Skirt being made of Western women, we stood dumbfounded about the words the speakers preached. It was at that point I decided to run and make my motto "Pace this!".

I started the first 5k with some my friends (Caroline took off early). The race was so quiet that I had to put on my headphones. Girl Talk pumped into my head and I had to break ahead. I picked up my pace and was able to finish by running the whole time. It wasn't a PR (everyone else on my team PR'd), but I did finish well at 2:04hrs and placed 59/7??. It was under 10 min splits (9:30 min), so I was happy.

Way to finish Team Sparkle Skirt!