Jane at the start of the 25 K / 50 K combined Run on 22nd May 2010
Jane Peng is a young friend of mine from our Karate class at Tanglin CC. A Cornell University (New York) Alumni in Hotel Management, she has recently returned to Singapore to work with Pan Pacific Hotels as a business analyst. Her study experience has taken her from China (home country) to Singapore (secondary and pre-university at Raffles Girls and Hwa Chong JC) to England (Oxford) and USA (Cornell University).
Most interesting is her "joie de vrie" (passion for life), whereby she has undertaken a 1,000 km bicycle ride along the Nile River in 2006 with Uni friends and also a photographic trip to the southernmost tip of the Earth, the Antartica in 2009 via Argentina. As a photographer,she has been selected as a finalist for the International Photographic competition organised by National Geographic in Australia last year. This year she trained and completed for her Shitoryu Karate Black Belt Shodan (Dan 1) from our Karate dojo (school) And (get this), she is only 24 YEARS OLD.
Recently she had expressed interest in running marathons and ultramarathons and I have been training with her in the past 3 -4 months in preparation for the Passion Card combined 50km duo run which took place on May 22nd May 2010.The last few weekends before the race were running up to 20 km and moderating our run strides,pacing and taking in electrolytes, power gels and Gatorade drinks. The running routes were mainly at Macritchie Reervoir (many), Nassim Road (once) and finally the East Coast Park (many times).
One thing I was impressed was by her goal setting, mental toughness and 'never say die' attitude, something which I wish my own children could adopt as a life focus.
The run itself on 22nd May was quite uninspiring, and she finished with a time of 2 hours 49 mins compared with my slower time of 3 hours 1 minute. However,she had then signed on for the next week 29th May for the Sundown Ultramarathon for
84 km. Yes 84 km without any serious training !She completed that in 12 hours 35 minutes or so and I am very impressed by her determination to finish this without any major physical damage to her system.
On her blogpost, see http://desertrace.weebly.com, she highlighted the usage of tempo (long,slow) runs and mental preparation of going through the route in her mind. Also, she mentioned correctly that there were cases of endurance athletes who trained less and visualised more, and achieved their run goals without ever running the full distance. A 25% training distance, with 75% mental visualisation of completion is highlighted.
In October, she will be attempting a 250 km 7 day footrun (read as 42km for 7 days or 7 marathon over 7 days) in the Sahara desert, with 40 - 50 deg weather and runing on SAND. Her blog (at the top left corner of mine) covers the details of her endeavour as well as what she is doing to prepare for it. It will be a fantastic achievement for her to conquer it as it shows that a person who dares to dream big will ultimately achieve it, no matter what. She has gotten in-principle funding (majority) of her US$ 9,000 run from her employer Pan Pacific Hotel and with the run itself she hopes to raise funds of US$ 40,000 for the World Vision Microfinance scheme,called Vision Fund to help small businesses in the 3rd world to operate.I am sure that she will achieve this objective which is a huge undertaking but she is up to the task I am sure.
I am very inspired to attempt this soon (next year ??). But in concluding this post to a very amazing lady,I have this to say "GO JANE GO !!"
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