So I did! My first and probably last 42 KM full marathon!

I can’t believe I actually did this considering that I really started training for this like 3 months ago, I followed a strict running schedule of running 4 times a week and many long distance practice runs but even then I had never done 42km before. Just the day before I was still wondering whether I could actually finish it.

Here’s now it all felt though:

1-10KM

Alright here we go. Take it slow as they say so lets not run so fast here. Okay… so I’m running a little faster than I expected but I can’t help it I’m just so full of energy. Must be all that carb loading.

11-15KM

Uh oh.. the sun looks like it’s rising. Time to pick up a little bit of speed here.

16-17KM

WTF?!?! How did the sun just come up all of a sudden? Isn’t it suppose to rise gradually?

18-21KM

Alright almost at half marathon distance. Keep going keep going! Push push push.

22-25KM

Okay I’m beginning to feel a little tired now. Maybe I’ll take a bit of a walk. Just a little.

26KM-30KM

Hey where is everybody? Did we all like disperse? Hmm my toes are beginning to hurt. Never had this feeling before.

31KM-35KM

Ahh my knees hurt and so do my toes… and my neck.. and… fuck I hurt everywhere! It’s okay I’m almost there. Lets do the run for 5 minutes walk for 5 minutes routine. Okay lets go lets go! Stay strong finish strong!

36KM

OMG WHY DID I DECIDE TO DO THIS !?!?

37KM

WHAT?!?!? JUST 1 KM? AFTER ALL THAT WALKING?!?!

38KM

WTF?!?! MY FITBIT SAYS I HAVE NO HEART BEAT. DID I DIE ALREADY?

39KM

COME ON 3 FUCKING KM MORE!!! PUSH PUSH PUSH. Weird… why is everyone around me walking?

39.5KM

WHAT THE HELL HOW IS THAT ONLY 500 METRES?!?!?

40KM

Damn people going past me in cars. They’re so lucky!

41KM

Wow I’m reaching the end. I must be. People I’m walking past are giving me the thumbs up. It’s like I’m almost there.

41.5KM

I can hear the loud speaker! Okay okay they say finish strong so lets start running again. I don’t want to have my picture taken to look like I just walked across the finish line. Come on!

41.95KM

Wait… where is the crowd? Why is there no cheerleading group to cheer us on at the end of this run? What’s going on?

42KM

I DID IT! I DID IT!!!!! Ok I need to sit the fuck down now.

—–

Overall I gotta say that the most memorable part of this marathon wasn’t really running it but the journey in training for it. I ran about 500KM since March just for this… and in those 500KMs I’ve had great conversations with my friends that I run with or learned many things from the audio books that I listened to.

Crossing the finish line was actually quite anti-climatic from what I expected though. That being said I don’t think I’m going to ever again do a full marathon. Half-marathon alright but full… ah man that’s just tough.

I ask myself why I do things like that. Like this full marathon and the 160KM century ride when I was cycling. I guess I like how it forces me to be discipline during the training. And how it tests your mental strength during the actual race. To be able to have the mind override the exhaustion and pain that your body is feeling to assure myself that as long as I put my mind to it, I can do it.

Either ways it’s another achievement that I’m glad to have done once in my life.

I’ve been reading a lot of books in the past 6 months that have really changed my outlook on life. I know some of you guys have been asking for a list, so here they are:

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie – This is one of my favourite books. It really opened up the way I treated people. My biggest takeaway from this is that we should never ever criticize. Nothing good ever comes from criticism.
2. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight – This book the autobiography of the Founder of Nike. I thought it was written in a very honest and sometimes funny way. It really showed the many hurdles and struggles this one company had to go through to get to the multi-billion dollar behemoth it is today.
3. Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance – This is a book about Elon Musk and his life. I loved how Elon became a master of his art because of pure perseverance and an intense ability and drive to learn about everything from alternative energy to rockets. I mean here’s a guy who learned to build a rocket just from reading books.
4. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey – My biggest takeaway here really isn’t about the 7 habits because I thought the book got kinda theoretical at some point. What I loved instead was the concept of a paradigm shift. How sometimes we are too quick to judge a person without realizing that person’s true reality.
5. 48 Laws of power by Robert Greene – I loved how this book is like a guide to life. Telling us what we should do and not do. The part I loved in particular was one part when it told us how we shouldn’t get angry about things. That how we often get angry because we take things personally but very very rarely things aren’t about us at all. People do things for a variety of reasons that can go too far back and are too complicated for us to understand. That was a huge mind shift for me. Once I realized that things weren’t about me, I got angry or emotional a lot less.
6. Extreme Ownership by Joko Willink and Leif Babin – This book taught me the concept of how to run an efficient team based on how Navy Seals function. On the basic principle of extreme ownership meaning we own the results of our mission entirely. Regardless of factors that fall out of our control.
7. King of Capital by David Carey – I found this book really interesting because it taught me a lot about how the world of leverage buyouts worked. It gave me an idea of how these huge funds value companies and how it’s all about positive cash flows. That if a bank won’t lend money to your company, chances are your company isn’t that valuable.

Okay guys that’s my reading list. Hope that helps!

I’ve never known the meaning of unconditional love. To me love was always conditional. Like I would love my close ones as long as they treated me well and loved me back. Or I would love my wife as long as she was faithful to me.

But unconditional love by definition means loving someone irregardless of how that someone treats you or how that someone feels about you.  Then came my two kids.

I spend a lot of time with the kids and I love them to bits. However that doesn’t always mean that my love is returned. My kids are closer to my wife than they are to me and for some reason they think that love has to be exclusive. So if they love Mommy they must only love Mommy and not Daddy or anyone else.

While they often tell me how they love me and miss me when I’m not around, at times they can say hurtful things like “I don’t love you Daddy.. go away!”.

Still… I love them all the same. I smile at them when they say words like that meant to pierce. That’s how I finally knew the meaning of “unconditional love”.

Then I thought about my wife and the very conditional love we have for each other. We sat down the other day and had a deep conversation about this. The conclusion was that if I loved her unconditionally, I would want her to do things that made her happy. At the same time I’d allow her without any restrictions to pursue happiness.

No restrictions you might ask? What if she falls in love with another man and has an affair or wants to leave me? I said I hoped I would never find out about it if something like that happened but if it did… then I would have to condition myself to love her the same and let her go. Unconditional love means nothing else is more important to me than her happiness and her wellbeing.

It’s a difficult paradigm shift. All our lives we are brought up to believe that we must stand up for ourselves. That if people disrespect us we should not react positively to it. That if someone cheats on you or cheats you… you react negatively. That’s how we’re all brought up to act.

So does it make sense that in spite of all our natural self-defences, there is this small group of people in our lives that we have no defence for. That whatever they do to us we would love them the same and treat them just as well?

I don’t know. This is a new paradigm shift for Shorts and me. One thing though is that we walked away from our deep conversation with a commitment that we would have unconditional love for each other… and would be committed to each others’ pursuit of happiness.

I don’t think we’re a perfect couple … but I do think we’re perfect for one another,  The best part though is that our suspecting kids were the ones who taught us this.

I spent some time over the weekend doing some drone flying. I have this drone (well it’s my second one after I expensively crashed my first one) that I use every now and then.

I don’t really use it as often as I like to because I don’t really know where to fly it sometimes. But when I do have ideas of where to go I bring it and take some nice videos.

What attracted me to drone flying at first was just to toy of the drone. The technology, the stuff it could do, I would wow and wow at each feature. That novelty wears off quite quickly though and what hooked me after that instead was creating videos.

I’m not very good at creating drone videos yet. I’ve watched a lot of tutorials online and good drone videos really take a lot of creativity and patience, and stable flying. I’ve worked on some of those things, but overall still pretty shaky.

My favourite thing to do is the drone selfie. Which is like what Gin and I did here in this video.

The other thing I really like about drone flying is seeing how things look like from the sky. Very often things look very very different from the sky.

Like this video here I took of the KLGCC golf course. A few years ago when I used to play golf I used to go there a lot. But still seeing it from the sky is a whole different sight. A really beautiful one.

I don’t really know where else to fly my drone in KL. Does anyone have any ideas or any videos that they want to see?

I was about to get dressed for Iqbal’s wedding when my wife said “The dress code is festive right?”.

“Festive?” I said… while putting my suit back in the closet.

I quickly looked at the invite again and I realized what I had ahead of me. The wedding invite looked more like a flyer for a gig than the typical white invitation cards we would get for the wedding. Proudly listed in the flyer were the acts that night, the food (all the restaurants at APW from Proof to Kaiju) and drinks like Heineken.

The dress code? Festive. Exactly like what my wife pointed out. I googled Festive to find what people wore to Coachella and well the more recently infamous Fyre Festival and it was lots of shorts and simple casual wear. I thought really hard. Really really hard. It’s like after going for so many formal weddings, it’s like against our nature to go for one so casual. I decided to throw caution to the wind and do it anyway.

When I arrived at the wedding this is what I saw.

The bride and groom had booked out APW and turned it into a festival. The whole scene looked more like an expensive media event than a wedding. There was a food truck and lots of food stores,

a DJ console and a live band.

Throughout the venue people were standing around casually catching up with each other. I went expecting that I might not know anyone there but I bumped into a lot of common friends we had. In the warehouse though the party continued.

It was like a club with an open bar.

I was going for a 36 KM run the next morning so I turned down the booze for a Milo. Shorty went for a Kickapoo.

Inside the warehouse they played a looping wedding video of the beautiful wedding they had in New Zealand before. Now how would anyone watch the video with EDM blasting away in the background?  Well they had these cool headphones for you to block out all the music and focus on the video if you wanted to.

The best weddings are the ones that best represent the bride and groom. This wedding I thought really represented Iqbal because well.. he’s the guy behind Livescape, who organizes events like Future Music Festival Asia and more recently It’s the Ship.

So it’s a really apt wedding but more importantly a really awesome one.. for an awesome couple.

I actually can’t believe that it’s only been like two months since I started training for this marathon we signed up to. At first I was really reluctant and lazy. Convinced that I didn’t want to do it and that I would just go and run as much as I could then take the bus home.

But then my friends seemed enthusiastic about it so I decided to keep to my commitment and give it my best. I’ve been following a running schedule which involves running 3-4 times a week and my weekend runs are getting longer and longer.

2 weeks ago I ran 22.5 KM. Last week it was 26.5 KM and this weekend I’m supposed to do 29KM. Next week 32KM or so.

The marathon? Well that’s 42KM.

I’ve learned there are a lot of things I need to practice too and it’s not just running. I need to practice eating all the power gel and bars and chews while running that will replenish my body with the energy to push myself the distance. If you don’t do it during training, your stomach can feel iffy the first time you do it.

So I went out shopping and bought a lot of these things and boy they’re all not cheap. Whoever said running was free?

I’ve also spent money on 2XU compression tights that is supposed to help with performance and reduce injuries and I initially thought it was just all marketing talk and a placebo but it seems to have helped me. Okay okay maybe that’s placebo effect.

One exciting feeling for me though is for the first time in my life I feel I can run really long distances without stopping. I used to be able to run like… I don’t know.. 800 metres then I would have to stop for a walk. Now I can go on for a long long time.

I’ve also learned that running is better with friends because your friends somehow pressure you to keep going whenever you feel like stopping for a walk.

All in all I have 3 weeks left to the actual marathon. in Phuket. I don’t know how I’m going to cope. I am fully prepared to not finish…. but I find myself now wanting to finish because I’ve put in so much training into it.

The only thing I can’t stand about running or marathons though is waking up early. My marathon starts at 4.30AM. That means I have to wake up at 3AM to prepare everything and then only go for it. I mean who does that? Who wakes up at 3AM? That’s like not sleeping at all.

I’ve also read a lot about how marathons are actually bad for your body and all that. So I think I’m going to stick to doing one marathon and that’s it. I’m not sure if I’ll keep running. I mean I do enjoy listening to my audio books while running because I feel like I’m learning something and exercising at the same time… but well I also do enjoy doing other stuff more like playing badminton.

So okay… 3 weeks to go. Hope I’m all fit and ready for it then. Completing it would be another life achievement unlocked!

When I left Netccentric last year, Shorty and I had a discussion in planning our finances in the coming years. I was going to be leaving a position that gave me a good income. The new venture we were going to start was unlikely to be able to replace that income entirely at least for the first few years. So we decided that we had to prioritize (in what we both refer to as our “austerity drive”). We won’t take a cut in lifestyle for the things that we really valued like the kids education, having helpers and a driver and a nice van to send the kids around in.

But we will take a cut in the non-essential things.

1. We decided that we’ve been for enough overseas holidays in US, Europe or Japan and we could replace those with holidays in Phuket or Bali instead.
2. We cut down on eating out and ate more at home. When we did go out to eat (for our lunches) we went for hawker food or used discount vouchers from Entertainer or the Maxis app or stuff like that.
3. We shopped less. A lot less. Shorty used to go out often to buy things she liked but she read this article about how to turn her wardrobe into a minimal set of pieces that could be used to create a wide variety and combination of outfits. I on the other hand used to shop a lot but I’ve cut down everything. We no longer buy anything designer unless it’s with a discount and most of my clothes now are from Topman, Uniqlo and the likes. Not H&M because H&M stuff really don’t last long to me.
4. We focus our spending instead on experiences or things that could really help us capture our experiences like the drone I bought.
5. Triggered by our moving into a new place we’re renovating, we decided to pack up and sell a lot of our old stuff. So we’ve been selling stuff we no longer need on Carousell or things like that. Wow the amount of money we raised from all these things that would have otherwise been thrown away surprised us.

It’s been almost 6 months since we’ve made these cuts and here’s what I feel about life right now.

1. I don’t seem to have anymore interest in designer things or nice watches or even nice cars unless I can get any one of those for a really really good deal. I’m a sucker for deals that way.
2. I finally know what really makes me happy. Spending time with the kids, badminton on my weeknights, meeting people and working on my new venture. That’s it. Life suddenly feel a lot less complicated. It’s like I used to have to find a stimulus somewhere whenever I was restless. I felt the need to go for a holiday, or to buy something or to just do something. I no longer feel that and it’s liberating. When I have nothing to do, I just enjoy the moment of doing nothing rather than pressure myself to do something.
3. When I see my friends go for luxurious holidays or buy expensive cars or watches I’ve learned to admire them rather than the tinge of envy I used to feel.
4. When good things happen to my friends I genuinely feel very very very happy for them. When bad things happen to them I feel angry for them too.
5. I talked about how meeting new people was one of the things that made me happy earlier. Because of my new venture I’ve been meeting a lot of new people lately and that has brought me so much fulfillment.

Hello Everyone!

Been a while since I’ve done a giveaway so here’s one courtesy of Milestone Productions.

I’m going to cut and paste the press release here that really describes well what this show is about.

KUALA LUMPUR, 29 MARCH 2017 — This April, international show promoter, event and entertainment specialist Milestone Production will bring you on a ride of a lifetime into a galaxy far, far away. Organised to support United Nation’s International Day of Families, Milestone Production is bringing the critically acclaimed Broadway comedy parody “One Man Star Wars Trilogy” to Kuala Lumpur and Penang. The epic journey across the galaxy will be told through one man’s frenetic talents and energy at HGH Convention Centre Kuala Lumpur on 21 April 2017 and The Wembley’s Grand Ballroom @ St. Giles in Penang on 22 April 2017.

Avid fans (both young & old) will get to relive the epic moments of the first original trilogy series (A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi) told through one man’s performing talents. Even if you are not a Star Wars fan, you will be mesmerized by Canadian actor Charles Ross’ talent where he singlehandedly plays all the 40 characters. “Ross makes an impressive Star Wars run in less than 12 parsecs!” quoted Chicago Sun Times and he will wow the audience by singing the music, flying the ships, fighting the light saber battles and condense the Star Wars trilogy plots into just over 75 minutes of live entertainment. Let Ross ; one of the craziest Star Wars fan who have watched all of the series for the 400th time takes you on an epic space journey from mimicking Chewbacca and Jabba The Hutt right down to the battle of Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker to blowing up the Death Star and the revelation of Darth Vader’s true identity.

One Man Star Wars Trilogy has been performed across the globe for the past 16 years. In fact, Ross has even met George Lucas and received endorsement from the Star Wars creator himself for his production. If Lucas Films itself has given its support to Ross’ endeavours, you can be sure it is worth your time.

It is finally the time for fellow Jedis and Padawans to go onboard the Millennium Falcon and let Ross take you on a journey to a galaxy far, far away. Proudly presented by Milestone Production, tickets for One Man Star Wars Trilogy are now open for sale. Tickets for One Man Star Wars trilogy are priced from RM80 onwards with multiple categories available. Ticket prices are not inclusive of 6% GST and RM4 ticketing fee. For more information please log on to www.milestone-entertainment.com or www.ticketpro.com.my directly to purchase your tickets. 

I have 3 pairs VIP tickets (each ticket is worth RM213.90 each) to give away. If you’d like them please send me an email at lengmoublogs@yahoo.com.

No contest no nothing; Just a gift for you guys for following my blog, and for a little support to our arts and theatre scene here in Malaysia. Thank you Milestone Productions for bringing in all these acts.

Update: WOW! Lots of demand for this. Sorry guys all tickets have now been given out.