Legs in Pain

Went for the AHM yesterday and came back with quite a decent time of 1:56:16 - a few minutes under my goal of running it in 2 hours, so am quite happy about it. Strangely, unlike during my usual runs, my lungs felt pretty comfortable throughout the race, but my legs weren't feeling too good at around the 10km mark, with some tightness in the hamstrings. The distance started playing tricks on my mind at around the 18km mark as last 3km felt like an eternity. Remarkably my body had the reserve to bring itself to the finish line, aided by the cool weather and my resolve to catch up with this female runner who had overtaken me at the 17km mark. Finished the race feeling unusually comfortable, save for the ache in my hamstrings, but I guess as always, the pain takes a while to kick in. For one, my legs are in quite a bit of pain now, though I don't think it'd be any excuse to downgrade. Damn.

Met a bunch of PSC homies for lunch after the run. It's quite amazing how many of my friends are in NS now. Just waiting at the finishing line, I bumped into quite a few people, including a SAFOS friend who commented that we were the only people to scream out his name, rather than prefixing it with a CPT, or adding a "sir" at the end.

I discovered recently on Friday that doing sentry for guard duty is one of the most painful forms of mental torture. Ok, so I'm quite a newbie to real guard duty, having spent the last year of my NS life doing a half-baked guarding of a place that can be considered just a huge carpark. However, times have changed since I moved camps, and now, we're guarding a real camp. And so, Friday was the first time I'd done sentry duty, even though I'd been in NS for over a year.

Sentry duty is really quite tortoruous. It's not so much that your joints start aching a little after standing there for 2 hours, but it's the sheer boredom of having nothing to do but just stand there for such a long time that's really quite annoying. Time passes slightly faster when there's some activity at the gate, but during the graveyard shift, I had to contend with watching lizards catch insects on the wall (which was very interesting, though short-lived), playing back music in my head, and counting the bricks on the ground. As much as I wanted to use the free mental time to do something productive, the fatigue prevented me from concentrating on anything too mentally demanding. I will definitely have to figure a way to pass time in a more pleasurable way the next time I'm on guard - repeated watch-gazing, looking at the seconds ticking by is not the way to go.

Anyway, an interesting link recommended by a friend. Quite an addictive time-waster.