You know, I suddenly remembered this, the Singapore Poly 50 Campus Relay. It brought back so many memories. I ran in this relay in 2005 with my secondary 4 class. Well, lemme describe to you what Poly 50 is. For starters, its a 30 km relay race with 10 people in the team. 7 guys and 3 girls in the team, if I remembered correctly. What we do is this, the relay consists of a 600 metre circuit. So to complete the entire 30 kilometres, all you had to do is to complete 50 rounds around the circuit. That being said, each round has 3 stop points, so you only run 200 metres on average. What happens is this, when the race starts, someone collects a number tag which starts from 50. The person then runs, or rather, sprints, to the next stop point and passes this tag on to another guy. Following, this guy takes the tag and runs to the second stop point, and then a 3rd guy will take the tag back to the start point and collect a 49 tag for another person to run. This continues all the way until the race completes. Of course, for every tenth round, the girls have to run one round of the race.

The chaos of the run is what made it run. Apart from the relatively small space, the many people running and the fast-paced music being played, you hardly have time to rest. And you were thinking, it's another 9 guys before I sprint another 200 metres. But after the 3rd or 4th 200 metre sprint, you'll be desperately wishing for more rest time. Talk about doing intervals. Well, I suppose the gruelling struggle to sprint 200 metre really tests your mental endurance. And although we were far from winning anything, I'm proud to say I participated in this. Completion of that run was just utterly sweet, I think I'd run it again if I had the chance. Haha.

Labels: Musings

|| posted by Kuan Hui