投名状

Another typical Saturday characterised by a late start to an almost evaporating morning. After my engines had warmed up, I headed down to the National Taiwan University (台灣國立大學) school track to join the Nike "Tea Time" run. This week, it's supposed to be a 6-km run. I decided to run the outer-most lane, and by the time I was in my 10th round (about 25 minutes into the training run), the fastest runners had already completed their 15 inner-lane rounds. :P I did another 2 more rounds, then called it a day... not that anyone was really keeping track of how many rounds each participant did. Including my two warm-up inner-lane rounds before the training began, I probably covered: 2 x 400 m + 12 x 450 m = 6.2 km. Dismally, it took me almost 35 minutes to cover the 12 rounds. But I guess that's okay, considering my lack of sleep for the past few days...

Met up with a few new friends for dinner, followed by the movie "Warlords" (投名状) starring Andy Lau, Jet Li and Takeshi Kaneshiro. It's an exciting story, riveting right to the end, but I am somewhat disappointed by Takeshi's flatter than flat character which doesn't really give the actor a good chance to display his acting skills. But overall, I would rate this movie as a "must see". :)

p.s. I went for a Fartlek training with the Nike gang earlier in the week on Tuesday. Before it began, I already had a bad feeling about doing fartlek training in the middle of town with a group of runners comprised of more amateurs and leisure runners than hardcore running enthusiasts. And I was proven right. Just imagine a whole crowd of about forty people running down the pedestrian walks at the same time, all thinking that they need to overtake someone but not really sure what Fartlek is all about, whom they should do overtake and when they should do so. It turned out to be a huge mess, but at least everyone completed the circuit and got back to the starting point in one piece.