I wasn’t able to beat my previous PR for 10k as expected.

Here’s a guide on how NOT to beat your previous PR:

- After you hear the gun fired, ignore your own pace and observe first all the runners around you. You will start to notice they run fast and so, you try to keep up with them by sprinting a few kilometer just to ensure you stay with the leading pack
- After a kilometer or so, you start to grasp for air as you’ve been sprinting like crazy for more than a kilometer. You start to slow down and began to notice all the people you’ve overtaken minutes ago are now within your reach and are starting to overtake you.
- You began again to increase your pace, however you become too tired to increase no more and so you walk.
- Now you really notice that every seconds, people are running ahead of you.
- You began to think you’ve made a stupid start and you plan to catch up with them later in the race
- Near the final kilometers of the race, you began to execute you’re plan but the road ahead are full of uphills and you end up walking them, as you’re are not prepared for it.
- You see the FINISH sign and you sprint like crazy.
- You check you time and you realized, you didn’t beat your previous record and you feel sorry for your ass.

And luckily, you’re not alone. I’ve committed all those mistakes above *hahaha!*. After the race, a couple of takbo.ph guys were commenting I sprint like crazy like Jinoe (takbo.ph admin) and Luis. I believe they beat their own PR while my sorry ass missed my own record by almost 3 minutes! I couldn’t blame anyone else but myself. However, during this race I noticed I stopped a couple of times as I felt a stabbing pain on my lower back. I also noticed this on my GreenFields race but it was manageable so I just ignored it the entire race. However this time it was so uncomfortable and painful. I plan to see a massage therapist/chiropractor tomorrow to check it out.

To add insult to the injury, running officials released the results right after the race and thought it would be best to call me “AMMY” instead of my name “SAMMY”. See below:

I hope takbo.ph peeps who noticed this won’t start to calling me  Ammy on our next run this Sunday!

Now on the race itself, it was a challenging course because of several uphill roads as compared to Greenfields. However, I’m pissed big time when one of the water stations was not able to give us water. The other water stations still have waters on the container but with no plastic cup we (including I) ended up using our hands to drink water from the container. No kilometer markers. At the end of the race, runners were treated with coffee, however it also ran out empty I pity those souls who waited in line for an hour only to get nothing.

One thing I like about this benefit race though is that without the singlet, they were able to bring down the cost of the registration fee. I only paid 200 pesos and it could have been 150 if I registered earlier.

Now here are the pics courtesy of Carlo a.k.a  hydraice:

Time to prepare for 21k on Sunday!