Yesterday my future brother-in-law got stuck in traffic for an hour due to the first Quezon City International Marathon. The city government and police closed down some major thoroughfares until about 10am, causing massive traffic jams throughout the city.
Today at the gym I caught a woman (a very toned, tanned one) wearing a QCIM singlet. Since we were sharing the same mirror space, I asked her how yesterday’s race was.
Her name is Rose, and it turns out she ran the full marathon (well, about 36 kilometers of it per doctor’s orders) as a tune-up run. I can barely manage 10K without my legs feeling like mush the next day, and here’s a woman who’s serious about marathons! (On a side note, it just irks me when people say they’re running a marathon, and then it turns out they just signed up for the 5K side event at a marathon.) She told me about the Kenyan runners who had come to the Philippines just to race, and their amazing 2-hour time on the marathon. (It takes a normal human being around 4 hours to run 42 kilometers!)
I asked her if the QCIM was a well-organized one because I’d heard about the chaos it brought to the city roads. As far as races go, it seems it was a good one; she was all praises about the entire Quezon City police department that had deployed for traffic and crowd control. The 42K route passed through the La Mesa Dam in some parts, so Army personnel had been deployed there. The downside, according to Rose, is that the 6 kilometers inside La Mesa had no water stops!
She asked me if I ran, and I self-consciously said I only did 10km at most since I got impatient if running took any longer. I had on my running shoes and was clutching my iPod in one hand, about to do 5 kilometers on the gym’s treadmill. I hadn’t run since Ondoy and I was just trying to ease back into running in preparation for this Saturday’s Race for Life and Sunday’s King of the Road. (Yes, I’m running two races this weekend; yes, I know I’m crazy.) She smirked good-naturedly and said, “Parang nag-window shopping ka lang.”
Looks like I’m going to have to increase my mileage in the next few months. Ü
