The racing experience

So here I was, sitting by myself on the bus journey into the office on a Monday morning. It takes about 40min to get in and as I board somewhere close to where the bus route starts, I am fortunate enough to get a seat. A few stops down, this person in office attire gets up the bus and seats herself next to me; you would think that anyone working in Raffles Place would observe some form of decorum but she had a nose ring!! Anyway, she starts putting on her make-up on the bus and starts fidgeting, and continually bumping into me – which really irritates me (ie the bumping). Obviously, she wants more space than her seat will allow but I would not give in. To ignore her, I decided to let my mind wonder and started to think of everything appealing about racing.

The experience starts when you register. We mostly participate in Malaysian races and I somehow do not fancy registering (and handing out my credit card number away) on the internet; but this is somehow the way to go now. We did the paper registration for the NST / Subang Jaya run, faithfully cutting out the “official” registration form from the NST, only to have the information re-typed in when we went to register in person. But the excite builds immediately after you register – it happens every time.

The training is not that arduous because we run often, and more so because we run in races that are well within our training threshold. Not much excitement there but we always look for the post run high and the warm glow-y feeling that last 48hrs after the run.

Raceday itself always passes in a blur. We’ll get up at the crack of dawn, drive to the venue and always spend time looking for a place to park the car. Then there’s hardly any time for a warm up and we’re off. The best part of the racing experience is post race where we feel so good we want to buy almost everything. The running shop always gets a visit and this is when resistance is the lowest and we might come away with a new pair of shoes. Logic (and guilt) arrives but no matter – we’re happy and insya-Allah, Jamie is happy too because he would have his medal from the race just completed.

So what has happened to the girl with a nose ring? She got so pissed off with my refusing to relent that she got up and stood the rest of the journey. The person who occupied her seat was much more pleasant.


P/s I have visual evidence! The nose ringed person boarded at the same stop as me and occuppied the middle of a two-seater, effectively taking over 2 seats.