Like they say in tennis, Game, Set and Match.

today we had a race at macritchie, the last race before slim submits the team list for cross nats on wednesday. as such, this race would more or less decide who goes in and who doesn't.

positions: shikai 2nd, yeongyang 7th, araunah 9th, cho-han 14th, guan lin 15th, ornan 16th, samuel 23th, varun 26th, mchia 28th or 29th. fastfoward to myself who finished in 90+ place.

for cross nats, the rules are simple. 8 in a team, 6 to run, 4 to count. today i lost to everyone in the team save one. as such, based on today i would definitely not get into the team.

i prepared for the race well enough. i slept at 11.30pm last night, woke up at 8.30am. ate porridge cooked by my mum for lunch at 11.30am, reached there at 2.35pm. race was at 3.50pm. i was feeling nervous, so i closed my eyes and controlled my breathing. it relieved stress to a large extent.

i started quite well, not as quickly as the race at bedok, but at least i wasn't boxed in. the pace was quite fast, but based on experience i knew it would slow down to a more comfortable pace.

obviously i wasn't experienced enough, because before long i found myself getting overtaken without consciously slowing down. i told myself to just relax and focus on the race, there is still time to catch up.

but subconsciously i began to slow down as i was feeling tired. the pace was too fast for me. before long i was getting overtaken. first mchia, then samuel, followed by varun, all the way to zhujie. by then i was reduced to a slow jog.

the rest of the race was, shall we say, repeititive. basically it consisted of me getting overtaken time and time again.

i felt very sad after the race, and i took the time to reflect what this season had been for me. it had been so promising then, so full of hope. thus i think you will be able to understand why i cannot understand how it turned out to be the shambolic fiasco that it is now.

at the end of track nationals last year, buoyed at how much i had improved earlier the year in sec 3, i resolved to train hard and run this year. i went for tranings religiously, save for the eoy period, afterwards i even made the effort to go for gym sessions once a week during holidays.

by december all was going well. we did a fast run a week at pandan reservoir during the december holidays. with cho-han stll in taiwan, i was losing to only zhiming shikai and sometimes araunah. yes, i was beating guanlin yeongyang mchia samuel ornan and the whole lot of them.

my most memorable run in pandan was the last run we had there. i went into the training with a strategy. follow mchia until 2km, where i start to pull, and start whacking with a km left. it worked like a charm. over the course of the race, i overtook mchia and yiyan together with yeongyang at 2km, i overtook araunah at 3km, caught guanlin at 3.5km, and whacked at 4km leaving guan lin and yeong yang behind. damn imba.

another memorable run happened at macritchie. i remember on that day i wasn't feeling too fresh so i decided to adopt a conserve-and-whack tactic. so for the whole forest trail i was trailing behind everybody, but when i went out to lornie road i just lengthened my strides and i overtook almost everyone save for zhiming shikai and cho-han.

the point was i was damn fast for the fast runs during at the start of the year. as in, i can decide to go slow then speed up and still win. i was doing very well, and on course to make the team.

everything was going very well till february. i had decided to not participate in any long distance inter house track events to focus on training. every year without fail our training would be disrupted by inter house track and field. i thought that by continuing with training i would be able to continue my progress while my teammates waste precious training time at interhouse.

in theory it was fine. the problem is, i fell sick. for 3 weeks. during the entire course of interhouse. i couldn't train properly while everyone was running interhouse. i wasted the entire period like them. worse, my fitness dropped. and on hindsight, never returned.

from then on i was sick on and off, failing to consistently train. even now, i'm down with runny nose and a little phlegm. i got demoted in training from trainig with zhiming, shikai, guanlin, yeongyang, araunah, cho-han and ornan to with samuel, varun, derek, yiyan, mchia. my race pace became 400m@88secs from 400m@84secs.

the race at bedok served to show me just how much of my fitness has dropped. i thought if i got down to training properly again after recovering maybe it will return. but other than 1 or 2 good training sessions the rest've been disappointing. the last one at botanic gardens was particularly disappointing. i lost to everybody in my training group even when the pace wasn't very fast.

today's race was supposed to the race in which i announce my return to fitness, the race which rubberstamps my entry to the team. instead, anything but that happened.

i thought of shoujian and compared my situation to his, the conclusion is that i'm worse off. though i'm not captain, but i was up there at the top of team before a stupid 3-week illness owned me upside down. shoujian isn't up there to start with, so in a way he cannot miss what he never had. this analogy may sound cruel but as you can tell i'm a bit spitefull at the moment.

i've heard we're doing a time trial at botanic gardens on monday and it may yet prove to be my last last chance to make the team. but because it isn't a race, the significance to it is lesser. with my absolutely dismal performance today, i would have to own all those fighting for a spot convincingly, as a 5-sec win doesn't count very much. i'm looking at a 30-sec and above win here, a trouncing. if the time trial was in december i would have said no kick, just bring it on.

but no, its on monday, 2 days after my worst race in over a year. in the worst form of the season, after fighting a pretty powerful flu, but still fighting over its reluctance to go away completely. i'm looking at a close finish behind the first pack, if i'm going to've any chance of beating samuel by half a minute or more.

like they say, it ain't over till the fat lady sings. but in this case what i need is nothing short of the great escape, or istanbul as is commonly known as.