Taiwan Sun Moon Lake Marathon 2018
My last Marathon was Sun Moon Lake Marathon on 28 October 2018, and that was my 9th Marathon. I was looking around for a Marathon that I can clock my 10th when COVID-19 hit.
On 27 October 2018, I took a night flight on TR898 to Taipei. Reaching the following day and continue my journey from Taipei to Sun Moon Lake. Getting there was relatively uneventful as the flight to high-speed rail and the bus service to Sun Moon Lake was well connected. I managed to reach my place of lodging just before noon.
I will usually plan for a 5D4N trip for all my overseas Marathon, giving me a day of rest before the event and 2 days to visit some places of interest. The run takes me around the lake to “visit” those places but not the time to see them. Thus, I have a day to visit those places and to get sufficient rest to wake up early for the race. On this day, I need to plan and think about how I can reach the starting point the next day.
There’s a shutter bus from where I am staying to the starting point on the race day. I bumped into a fellow Singaporean there, an elderly couple, and they spend their time running Marathon in different cities. Germany, Japan, and others are where they have been. They have also shared with me that there’s a few Marathon Clubs in Taiwan, and many aimed to achieve the title of “百馬 “. That means that an individual had completed the hundredth Marathon.
Wow! Hundredth Marathon, and it does seems like a very distant target for me. While it’s distant, it is not impossible to achieve. The challenge is to have the time to train and the budget to travel and cover different Marathons. Both are limited to me currently. This pandemic forces me to focus on my current situation and work on it before aiming for the next.
After the Marathon, I visited one of Taipei’s landmarks, the Taipei 101 Observatory. When I was there for a business trip a few years back, I did not visit the place, except seeing the tower from a distance. At that time, I was with my boss, and we only spend 30-minutes at the famous Shilin Night Market for dinner and back to the hotel.
One of the lessons that I have learnt from this Marathon is to study the route in detail and not to get too overwhelmed by the early success. The first 32km of the course was a mixture of ascent and descent. The last 5km was mainly descending, and it took me 3 hours 45 minutes to cover the 32km. However, the final 10km mostly was ascending, and it took me 1 hour 50 minutes to cover the remaining 10km. Early success doesn’t mean that one can reach the goal faster if the final dash is full of hurdles. One needs to keep the pace, keep the momentum and proceed according to plan and not taking shortcuts. If we don’t plan the execution, knowing the situation, then we are likely planning to fail.
I wonder when I can hit my 10th Marathon, given that the pandemic is still ongoing and we are not out of the woods yet.
