Running in the Rain

Yesterday, we planned on running in UP in the afternoon until night. We just decided to switch time due to variety of reasons. First is the heat of the sun during summer time. We almost always start running way past 7am for our last two or three runs here and we end up being drained too much by the heat. In the process, we could not get our target mileage for our preparation for the North Face 20k Trail Challenge. Second reason is that we have work the Saturday before and we would need to sleep longer the following day. Third and the last reason is I need to watch the boxing card featuring Viloria and Donaire. I’m glad that we switched time because the boxing match was a blast. Congrats to Bryan Viloria for getting the IBF light-flyweight championship belt and Nonito Donaire for defending his title, the IBF flyweight champion. Truly,  you make us proud to be pinoys.

So after a good treat of boxing match, I had to rest again to prepare for our afternoon long-run. This time, only three of us will be there; me, Cocs and ReVO. Other RBs were unavailable for the whole Sunday. We arrived there around 5:30pm. By that time, the weather seems a little unusual for summer and it seems theres a huge chance that it would rain. The three of us planned a continuous 2 hour of running. We calculated that we should make  8 laps (17.6k) where we had to have a pace of not faster than 15minutes per lap.  Btw, one lap of the UP loop is about 2.2k.

After about 3 laps, we can feel that the pouring of the rain is inevitable and we quickly took-off our singlets so that it would not get wet in the rain. We put it in Coc’s vehicle and we all decided to finish the planned mileage no matter how heavy the rain would be. The good thing about the rain was, it refreshed our legs that it feels almost like starting again where we still have lots of energy. We were all shouting like kids when the rain poured very heavily. It was our first time to experience this and that was a great feeling. While running, we counted few other runners who were unwilling to stop just because of the rain. There were a total of  9 of them, 2 females, 6 males and a dog. These guys are truly hardcore.

When we finished 8 laps, it was already past 8pm. We had a quick food stop at one of the stalls that we frequently go and we ate pancit canton while sipping a cold fruit shake. It was really an awesome experience though the downside of this was our body were itching like crazy because of the insects (higad)  and other objects  that fell on our body during the run.

-pugs