Under the rain, we ran

Lesson of the day: when you think that doing something in certain way is unusual but it’s actually doable, maybe you should give it a try and you will be amazed with your whole new experience.

Yellow Ribbon 2010 Run

Last Sunday I was joining a 6km charity run under the company I work for. There was 2 different type of run, 6km fun run and 10km competitive run. And, all of my colleagues and I who joined decided to go for 6km fun run. (We silently admit that we’re not the fittest person on our age).

Here is the whole experience story..

The 10km run scheduled to start earlier than the 6km run at 715 am, while the 6km one started at 815 am. My friend who organize it set two meeting points, we have preferences which meeting point we’d like to go. We need to reach one of the meeting points either 630 am at point A, and 7 am at point B. Those meeting points are somewhat quite a distance to the place I live now, and to my friends’ houses.

Since it’s on Sunday, public transport will be less frequent. We will be late if we decided to use public transport. So, one of my friends asked her dad to drive us there, otherwise we’ll be late for sure.

I woke up about 515 am in the morning, and it was raining, drizzling. The heavy rain had passed, the thunder and flashes of lighting kind of woke me up earlier. My friend called and asked me, “Do you think the event will still be started in this kind of weather?”. I said I’m not sure about it, because I never joined this kind of event. I told my friend, who knows that the rain will stop near to the race started.

We still left our houses, my friend dad drove us, everything was still following our plan.

By the time we reached the race place, the rain didn’t seem to stop and somehow was heavier than before. The organizers were distributing ponchos for runners. I saw some of the runners walked back from the start point, some of them walked with their umbrellas, some of them keep running, with or without ponchos.

Our company representatives were split into two groups by accident. It was a lot of people, so my group lost the first group whom just in front of us before. My group was looking for a place to put our bag, since it would be odd to run with a bag (though it’s not if you are in national service or army). We were thinking that the bag deposit post would be somewhere near the start point.

We almost reached the start point and the bag deposit was nowhere to see. We decided to ask someone with official costume nearby. And came to our surprise, we passed the deposit point. We needed to walk to where we came from to deposit our bag. We decided to bring our bag and walked. To run with a poncho, under the rain, and bring our bag is a new concept to us. It’s just too extraordinary.

Walked about 200 meters after the start point, feeling people ran passed us, and seeing people running while you’re walking, made us reevaluate our decision. Ok, let’s try to run.. We run to our best, at least we tried doing it. And so we ran.

Some of us stopped after some distances, one of my friend and I ran the whole 6 km with my bag on one of my shoulder. It hurts on the next day. Maybe to some people, what we did was stupid, but that day, we proved to ourselves that when you think you can do it, then you can do it.