Walking is hard to do

If there one thing that I sucks at that is worse than running, its walking! My colleagues are always asking me why I walk so slow when I can run so long distance. And its true. On my walk to/from work, I am often overtaken by ladies in heels and sometimes aunties and uncles! I remembered when I did my first marathon, I managed to do a mean 6 minutes pace for the first 30km or so and then cramped badly after that and walked the balance 12km back to the finish line. That 12km walk took me more than 2 hours 15 minutes. Ditto the next marathon when I walked 10km in 2 hours 40 minutes!

So anyway I know for the TMBT, there going to be a fair bit of walking so I figure I better get my walking in order. And since the sidekick was complaining of knee pain, decided that for the week, we will skip the hills and trails and just do road run. 

On Saturday together with another couple, we went for a long road run. The plan was to run 35km but as usual after 25km, the lazy mind gave up and I almost wanted to quit. My friend who was pacing me throughout was encouraging enough to nudge me gently to carry on. So I got a brainwave! I can use the opportunity to train my walking!  My friend who incidentally was last year Singapore's TNF 100 first pure Singaporean finisher, informed me that the average walking pace should be around 10 minutes. 

And so I started walking. About 1.5km into it, my left calf started to tingle. I can feel a cramp coming! WTF! Stopped, stretch and hang loose a bit and continued. As the sun continue to rise and the temperature rises, the walking became more and more labored. My mind started telling me to run and just finish off the darned thing and go for a nice brunch. But I already given up running the full 35km so I was determined to at least complete something that I started. So I forced myself to walk. And seriously, it has to be the longest 10km I ever did. It was hard work trying to maintain a pace of 10 minutes. But somehow I did it and completed the 10km walk in 1 hour 41 minutes.

And boy was I glad I did this because now I know I gonna have a lot of work to do - to brush up on my walking judging from what my 2 time TMBT 100km finisher got to say: