Monitor Lizards, Monkeys and a Squirrel

After my snake experience last week, I was on hyper-alert mode throughout my walk yesterday. I guess it didn't help that I had gone for lunch with my (so-called) friends who decided to tell me about flying snakes which freaked me out immensely. Then of course every other mammal, reptile and rodent in the wilderness decided to surface and all the sudden movements of these little creatures darting here and there made me uber jumpy. I've never seen a monitor lizard in all the time I've done my walks, but this time I saw two massive ones and heard another scuttling away. Then a monkey decided to drop something from the trees and another decided to zip across the path. And when my nerves were worn thin, I spotted a squirrel at the end of my walk...which did nothing, but by then I was so paranoid that I half expected it to jump on my head and attack me. It really felt as if the whole forest had come together and conspired to drive me nuts. Which incidentally is something squirrels like.

Needless to say I did the walk pretty quickly. I only managed to run for 2 minutes tops, but somehow still managed to complete the whole thing a good 5 minutes faster than last week when I ran for a longer stretch. I suppose it's partly the fact that I did this after a full meal in the afternoon (the full meal also gave me a stitch running, hence the lack of running).

Last week I did the trail in the morning, with nothing in my belly and just water to tide me through. Gina and I used to talk about this whole eating vs not eating before a run and she's of the 'cannot eat before running' category, whereas I need something inside me otherwise I get all grumpy and run out of steam really quickly. Which is why I prefer running in the evenings and walking in the afternoons. I generally get up in the morning feeling dehydrated (and mostly sleepy) and within 15 minutes I get hungry. I'm not the kind of person that can ride out hunger. Hell, I'm not the kind of person that can ride out anything. I can't ride out pain, I can't ride out hunger, I can't ride out fatigue....etc etc etc.

Bottom line is, I don't think my optimum performance is in the morning. I am trying to train myself to work well in the mornings though, since it gets so hot in Singapore by 9am that most races start stupidly early which means I either do a crappy race or I just stop doing any of them races here. Not entirely sure if there is any point in trying to condition my body - you know, the adage of trying to teach an old dog new tricks.