The Comrades Marathon 2013 : The Training.

I just completed my toughest and most memorable race to date...The Comrades Marathon. They called it the ultimate human race. It's the world largest ultra marathon with 18000 entrants. Thats bigger than the Hong Kong or Singapore full marathon category.

The distance is 87km for a 'Up' run and 89km for the 'Down' Run. It's the Up run this year with the worst conditions of the past 14 years according to one of the runners. Temperatures as high as 30 Celcius and cross wind up to 20km/hr. Some of the distance markers were blown down.

I signed up after I saw Frank Chong's finishing photo at The 2012 Comrades Marathon in June 2012. I just completed my 1st ultra distance of 50km in Ireland. It was so fulfilling.

I planned to 'up' my game slowly after I signed up for Comrades 2013 in September 2012.

I signed up the 50miler (78km) of the Craze Ultra in Singapore in September 2012.

Chee Kong brought back the book..'Make Sure of Your Comrades Medal' by Don Oliver when he was back in Malaysia in Nov 2012. He works in Johannesburg.

I read the book and signed the commitment card on the 15th Nov 2012. There was a training program in the book and I started my Comrades training officially in Jan 2013. That was my only reference to train for the Comrades.

My mileage for Jan and Feb 2013 was 225km and 221km. I ran the Yangon Marathon and Hong Kong Marathon in these 2 months.

I increased my mileage to 362km and 332km in March and April. I ran my Twilight Ultra Challenge of 70km in March and the Island Ocean Marathon in Langkawi in April.

I need to do another ultra distance on the 1st week of May. I was so disappointed that the Borneo Marathon was cancelled. However, the Borneo Running Club organized a training run thats exactly the marathon route. I ran to and fro to the Kota Kinabalu airport and I ran to the start at the Likas stadium. Then I did the marathon distance. It was about 58km that night.

After that, I tapered. My longest distance was 20km for the next 3 weeks. My total mileage from Jan to May was 1360km.

Then on the 29th May I flew to South Africa..