Singapore Half-Marathon 2019

Last week I had the pleasure to run a half-marathon in Singapore part of Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon event. Singapore is definitely one interesting country and visiting it during this period of the year was nice – especially with such a large difference between the weather back home in Romania (where the temperatures were below freezing zero) and the 30+ degrees Celsius in Singapore. That difference created also some issues, since my training during the previous weeks were done at 4 to 12 degrees Celsius and I couldn’t accommodate to the new environment – 30-32 degrees Celsius and high humidity (80%+).

Regarding the race, it was well organized, considering that more than 50.000 people participated in the event and it was different even more because it started at 6 pm instead of the usual morning start. Till last year, they scheduled the start of the marathon at 4:30 am, which is also unusual.

I started the race without any hope to have a PR – it’s hard to do that in high heat and humidity if you didn’t practiced that before, but keep my running time under 2 hours. It didn’t happen .. I had to accept that I won’t be able to finish under 2 hours, after reaching the 11th km mark – it was a combination between the mental breakdown and the heat. The final result 2 hours 10 minutes was a bit disappointing, but just a bit … I was ranked 263 in my age category and 981 overall, I’d say that’s not that bad considering that more than 9.500 runners finished the half-marathon race.

Considering the weather, I congratulated myself for not registering in the marathon event, which kind of made sense initially since I prepared myself previously for the Budapest marathon in September.

Now, my strategy was mostly to use my Stryd power value to guide me through the race .. it didn’t help too much, after the first half of the race – I gave up on holding the 270-280 W interval .. and ended up with an average of 253 W.

Even though I couldn’t use the power too much (but that’s just me), Stryd was very useful in measuring the distance and giving me the pace (not that I watched that pace too much). The final distance measured by Stryd connected to my Garmin Forerunner 945 was 21.28 km, which is not bad – actually it’s excellent, less than 1% difference.

If I would have used only the Garmin watch, looking at the GPS track, I would have had a higher deviation.

On the other hand, with GPS+Glonass active, the 945 performed not that bad, when looking at my wife’s track with 245

My wife’s 245 measured 21.57 km, with a higher difference in elevation gain (an insane 476m :)) but that’s understandable since the 245 doesn’t have a barometric altimeter.

Overall, Singapore was a nice experience – I encourage you to discover Singapore and run there, it’s different feel for sure.

After this race, which ends up my 2019 season, I’ll switch for a while to my Vantage V waiting for the December 5.0 update, since the FitSpark seems like a nice feature to have during the winter off-season. I like Garmin’s reliability and features (especially since they released a new beta update today 3.77 comes with advanced swim features and some respiration features – https://forums.garmin.com/sports-fitness/running-multisport/f/forerunner-945/208652/forerunner-945-public-beta-3-77-is-now-available), but I also enjoy wearing the Vantage and the sleep-recovery metrics.