10,000

Nope, its not the number of days Chunnie and I have been dating.

Its the number of page views that this blog has had!! The statistics for the site just ticked over the 10,000 mark yesterday… WOW!

The 2009 “Season” – Not Quite According to Plan

Quite some time ago I posted my race schedule for 2009 but things have not quite worked out the way I wanted. Let me start with what has already been written about on the blog.

Raw Duathlon 2009 Because of my ankle injury I was forced to pull out of the race not long after I started, my first DNF which you can read about here.

Desaru Half-Ironman 2009 I had intended to do this race but because Chunnie was going to be in town the week before and I like it when she’s there for my races, I intended to take part in the Ironman 70.3 Putrajaya which fit perfectly into her travel schedule. I then KIVed doing Desaru for another year or so.

Ironman 70.3 Putrajaya 2009 As it turned out, i decided to do this race but then not long after I got my ankle injury. I decided that it wasn’t a good idea to build up from no running to running a half-marathon in a matter of a couple months so this race ALSO went out the window!

Bintan Triathlon 2009 (Olympic Distance) Since there weren’t any races scheduled in May i signed up to do this race together with Marisa (her first Olympic-distance). But as luck would have it, I fell sick with the flu just the day before! So instead of racing I was left lumping on the couch at home.

OSIM Singapore International Triathlon 2009 Having missed two successive races (Raw and Bintan) I’m wondering whether I should try my luck and sign up for another race where I might end up having to pull out!! I’m wondering… but then again I have a feeling i’ll just sign up.

What a season so far! Based on the fact I haven’t done anything especially “long” I’m really thinking about doing the Ironman 70.3 Singapore again in March next year. Chunnie will be home, it won’t require any travel and it is well organized, we’ll see…

Cycling in Central Park

I went cycling in Central Park today for 3 reasons –

1) It was a brilliant Sunday afternoon…sunny and warm (relatively) at 18C;

2) I got too lazy to do what I’d originally intended, which was to take the train 80 mins north to go see the art museum at Beacon;

and most importantly..

3) Ian scoffed at me because he didn’t think I could cycle an entire loop around Central Park without stopping to push my bike up the hilly bits on the east side.

As it turns out, I managed to prove Ian wrong.
Well, it was quite a pain riding uphill, and I was embarrassingly slow that runners whom I’d passed earlier caught up and went by..but still, I refused to get off my bike and persisted.

It was a pleasant excursion, it’d only been a month ago since I was last in Central Park and the trees were still somewhat bare. Summer is obviously around the corner because the trees were full of leaves and there was grass all over the ground, so much so that for awhile it was difficult for me to recognize the places that I’d always ran past. Interesting how plants grow so quickly.

I did my obligatory loop, then gave up in favour of a hotdog and reading my magazine in the sun. Need to work on that tan now that it’s swimsuit season.

From Random Photos

PS OK Ian, you can scoff at me for stopping after a mere 5 miles, but I win on the uphill one.

Raw Duathlon 2009 – My First DNF

Well it turns out the ankle injury I got hadn’t completely healed because just a couple kilometers into the race I could feel it hurting. I honestly wondered to myself whether I could ever make the decision to retire from a race given that I’m competitive and just plain enjoy doing them. But after those first 10 minutes or so, it was pretty obvious to me that I wasn’t going to get through the first 10km of the run let alone the second 10km. Even if I did, it would definitely make the injury worse with not a lot of benefit either. Since the course was an “out and back” i kind of slowed down to a crawl and jogged lightly back to the start. I didn’t really fancy walking back all the way since it would take so long.

It was kind of a funny feeling watching all those people run by me as i slowed. They must have wondered what an idiot I was starting so far up front if I couldn’t even handle the first 5km of the race. Nevertheless I trudged on and sadly stopped my watch at the end of the first lap and went to meet the support crew. It was a sad day for me, more so because I knew that it was a serious injury and it kind of puts doubts into my plans for the next few months which actually has a number of races.

Since I was out of the race I decided to take up cameraman duties and snapped a few for Marisa, Revant, Phyllis and Wei who were taking part. But to go with the theme of the day, my camera ran out of batteries and stopped working.

From Raw Duathlon 2009

My birthday ski trip

This post is a tad late, but I was inspired to post it as I was looking through old photos and a very funny video of Ian, and realized that neither of us had mentioned this trip in our previous posts about Ian’s New York visit!

Well, one of the highlights of Ian’s visit was that we drove about 5 hours north to Okemo, VT to go skiing over my birthday week.

Interestingly, I thought the best part of our trip was lazing in our rented apartment -

It had a real working fireplace, and “Man Make Fire” Ian proudly tried to start a fire…

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

We had hot chocolate lazing on the couch, and watched lots of Friday Night Lights which was how Ian made a fan out of me

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

I gave Ian some “lets hit the slopes” attitude

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

Ian took me out to a nice dinner, and got me my birthday cheesecake!

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

I woke up one morning to find Ian busy cooking away in the kitchen – turns out he was making me a surprise breakfast! What a sweetie!

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

Oh yes, and we did some skiing too!

From Ian in NYC – Feb 09

Singapore Sprint Series 2009 – Triathlon

About a week ago I went for a “long run” of about 15K and towards the end of it i started having a pain in my left ankle, it got bad enough that eventually I stopped running and just walked home. I wasn’t sure what brought it on but i RICEd it all the same (Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate) and was disappointed when a day later I didn’t see an improvement, in fact it didn’t feel any better until possibly Friday. That meant throughout the week I didn’t think I would be able to take part in the Tribob Triathlon (750m swim, 20km bike, 5km run) on Sunday – I was bummed! But luckily since it felt better on Friday I decided to test it out for a short bike ride on Saturday and that went well so i figured i would give the race a go!!

So, I was fit enough to race and I had my brand-spanking new Speedie 3.0 to race as well. Team Hall was there as were many members of The Breakfast Club.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Swim
It was an interesting test for me since I’ve been going for swim classes at SeaMonsta for about a month and I was curious to know if it has been helping. I didn’t find the swim nearly as tiring as the Aquathlon and despite me getting smacked in the face by somebody, it felt like it went by quite fast. My time from the race last year was 16:42 but this year i was shocked when i looked at my watch when i got out of the water because it read 14:46!! I would later find out my official time was 15:38 which is still more than a minute faster. Wow! Although I think from Marisa’s big grin she found the swim EVEN EASIER.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Bike
I made a big mistake here because I forgot to take off my cleat covers from my cycling shoes before setting up transition which meant I had to stop and take them off during the race. This felt like it wasted like 30 seconds just fiddling with them. The ride itself was shocking initially because i didn’t realize there was a head-wind and I actually thought i was so dead tired i couldn’t get up above 30km/h. Luckily when I turned around i was going about 36km/h and it was obvious there was a head-wind in one direction and a tail-wind in the other.

From Tribob – Triathlon

Run
I found the initial 2.5km lap of the run pretty difficult, perhaps I had not been doing enough run practices off of the bike or perhaps I had pushed a little hard on the bike? In any case I ended up having a time one minutes slower than last year. The good news is that my ankle got through the race unscathed. After that I stood at the finishing line taking pictures of fellow Breakfast-Clubbers. Some of them even looked like they won the race:

From Tribob – Triathlon

When the results were tabulated, I finished 9th in my age-group for the race. In the series, I went one better this year and finished 8th although I would value this 8th place finish more since there were 204 participants in the series which is more than double than the previous year.

Another piece of exciting news is that Team Hall got some publicity on the website covering the race. Check out our dear mother in the last photo on RedSports.sg. Fame!!

From Tribob – Triathlon

Speedie 3.0

So its been 7 months and its that time… The time when I get a new bike!!! After the sadness of realizing Speedie had been scratched during the Tribob Duathlon , this was a welcome surprise. I took Speedie in for regular servicing and was shocked when i got a call from Viki at Cycle Craft telling me they found cracks in the frame and that Scott would be replacing it with a 2009 version under warranty. So the chameleon of a bike that is Speedie has now gone from a white 2008 Scott Speedster S30 frame to a silver 2008 Scott Speedster S10 and now to a white/black/gold 2009 Scott Speedster LTD. Fancy eh?

From Speedie

My Xbox… RIP

My poor boxie has the dreaded red ring of death.

In actual fact this is the second xbox I’ve had since the original one messed up almost immediately. Its a good thing I got the extended warranty!

A skip and hop across the Pond!

It’s been a year since we’ve gotten engaged! And although Ian didn’t want to make this a big deal, I did make the effort to speak to him while waiting at the airport and he was getting ready for work.

For 121, I took a trip across the Pond to reunite with my girlies in London. Somewhat of a deja vu, since we did the same trip in March 08, just before Ian proposed. This time, we met up for a week-long girlie trip that was meant to be my “hen party week”!

We actually didn’t party that much, but it was nice and relaxing to catch up. We took a long weekend trip to Bristol and Bath, both very nice and peaceful cities very different from London.

From London, Bristol, Bath – Mar 09

I also managed to squeeze in the time to do a lunchtime race on Friday – the Brooks Last Friday of the Month 5K race around Sepentine Lake in Hyde Park. The scenery was really pretty, and it was good weather (esp for London!), and even though I had a hangover from Thurs night drinking, I still thought I did pretty well with a time of 28:18 min.

From London, Bristol, Bath – Mar 09

And the best thing about my trip to London? I found “cheap” Louboutins! If the recent financial crunch has taught me anything, its that we should always ensure that we get good value for our money… which was what I did by buying my dream pair of Christian Louboutin Very Prive patent pumps that I’ve been eyeing for almost 2 years!! Hee hee, with the weak GBP and the VAT refund, I managed to save US$200 compared to what they would cost in New York!

From London, Bristol, Bath – Mar 09

Note: Ian’s initial reaction was “How much are the shoes that you can save us$200?!?!” .. BUT after awhile, he too came around to how precious and sexy those shoes are, and he now has them up as his MSN profile picture!

Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009 – A Spectator’s Report on “Crowie Vs Macca”

Well this morning i woke up really early for a race, the funny thing is, that I wasn’t even taking part. I was going to watch the 2009 version of the race I did because there were a couple of big (triathlon) stars in town for the race. Just as promised, Both Craig “Crowie” Alexander, the reigning 2008 Ironman World Champion and Christ “Macca” McCormack, the 2007 Ironman World Champion were in town.

I got to the start just shortly before the race started (at about 7am). I milled around and then took my place on the jetty that overlooks the swim start. I found it hard to recognize the pros in their swim caps and goggles so pretty much took pictures of everything in the hopes of identifying them later.

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

While the pros were still in the water i scampered off to the transition where I knew i could get a good look at them getting ready for the bike leg. I was curious whether Crowie and Macca would be close at this stage. Sure enough, they were neck and neck. They were even positioned next to each other in transition.

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

Another person that I came to watch was Yvonne Van Vlerken because she is actually the world record holder over the iron-distance. Although she started the bike leg, she retired from the race for some reason.

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

The bike, all 90.1km of it did little to separate Crowie and Macca, but the run was a completely different story. As soon as they were off onto the run, Crowie started putting the hurt on. He moved past Macca and just kept extending his lead throughout the 21.1km segment. Crowie didn’t even look like he was trying that hard and it was amazing that somebody as good as Macca could be dropped like that.

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

Just before Crowie was about to reach the finish i positioned myself JUST before the finish line and waited. Soon enough i saw him approaching the finishing chute.

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

As he ran by he high-fived people in the crowd INCLUDING ME!! He stopped short of the line, turned around and bowed. It was quite fitting since it was indeed a great performance. He then went on to win the race in a new record time!

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

When Macca did come in, he also high-fived me on the way through. Actually Simon Thompson and Peter Jacobs also did that! I had a great time watching and the four and a half hours i spent watching really flew by… amazing! A couple more photos are below, but there’s a bigger set at http://picasaweb.google.com/ianhall/AvivaIronman703Singapore2009

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009

From Aviva Ironman 70.3 Singapore 2009