a short note about a long run

I'm really looking forward to tonight's half marathon. Especially after the madness of this work week in which things happened or didn't happen or fell through or got arranged or rearranged and came at all of us from every which direction at once. A week in which, for three days, I saw my own husband awake for a sum total of ten minutes. A week in which I didn't get remotely enough sleep until last night. All that accumulated stress is waiting in my legs to be pounded out, the heavy fuzziness in my head to be dissipated, the monkey on my back shaken loose and sent floating off into the sky over Marina Bay. I'm looking forward to a nice quiet long run tonight, in the darkness of the gardens at night, just me and the wind and my watch.

Once, in JC, I was on a school trip to climb Mount Kinabalu in East Malaysia. The way most people do it is you spend one day climbing halfway up, overnight from about 4pm to 3am at a lodge midway, and summit and come down the next day so you can see the sunrise at the summit. In the wee chilly hours of the morning, as we were trudging blearily in silence up the path towards the summit, I turned around and saw a long line of headlamps and torches twinkling in the darkness all the way back to the lodge. And in the magic of that single moment I forgot how cold and out of breath and weary I was. Just me, and the wind, and my watch.