Woke up at 730am today.
Off to the stadium with an easy 10 minutes jog.
Immediately at the stadium, I launch into two intense run loops of 1 min 33 sec per 400m lap; and a a final 200m "all out" sprint to kick start the carbo-loading process. This intense bout of exercise apparently trigger off a carb-boosting enzyme, which forces more glycogen into the muscles than usual (read: you get an extra free fuel tank, maybe two!, for your body on race day. And that is very, very important for endurance events lasting more than 2 hours) .
Well, that's the theory. Please feel free to skip the theory bit in the next paragraph if you want to.
A side nutritional detour here: the one-day carbo loading experiment was actually a ground-breaking Australian study done around 2002. Prior to that, the common wisdom gravitated toward the 7-day regime which requires zero-carbo intake for 3-4 days. You can imagine how cranky when one goes without rice, pasta, ice-cream, sweets, prata, laksa, bak-kut teh, fries...you get the idea. Having used the 7-day regime before in my schooldays, I can attest to its effectiveness but it's a laborious process and a much grumpier route to race day nirvana. I tried the one-day carbo loading a few times before and I think it works just as well(sans the grumpiness -which I think does wonders for inter-personal relationships).
Now back to my story. After a quick warm down at the stadium, I'm off to a nearby McDonalds to load up on hotcakes, hashbrown and green tea. I followed that up with a bunch of bananas (enough to feed a small family of monkeys).
Reaching home, I began to plan for the race day logistics. Packing my stuff into 3 packs as provided by the race organizers -a swim bag, a bike bag and a run bag. Around noon or so, I tucked into a Pasta Mania lunch to further load up my fuel tank. The weight-loss gurus will probably stone me for this line: but I'd say it's good practice to set an alarm every hour or so to remind yourself to eat more carbs throughout the day.
1:30pm I hailed a cab and load the bike and the run bag to T2 (transition 2 at the champs area). Alighting at the T2 stadium, I heard someone shouting my name. It was my good buddy in training -he's also doing the 70.3 race on Sunday. He has a medical condition -with a name as long as your arm- which affects his spine structure. Fortunately his doctors has given him the green light to train as exercise may help to slow down or even improve his condition. Amazing chap, I'm sure there's a lot of unknown heroes doing the race this weekend.
After checking in my bike and run bag, we trotted off to a nearby food court to chow down some fuel(I mean, food). There and then, we witnessed stormy clouds churning into drizzle, as if the weather was telling us that we were previewing tomorrow's race conditions . Indeed, our weather reports were forecasting thunderstorms in the late morning and early afternoon tomorrow. Well, we are keeping our fingers closed.
Well, weather forecasters do have a bad track record, don't they?
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