If 2011 had been a ski run, I would have traversed across the slope to make a big, wide turn to end up traversing in the opposite direction again. Not much ground gained in the direction of the fall line.

This year end, I tumbled down and picked myself up over and over again, amidst fatigue and frustration.

2012, I want my turns to be short and rapid, with swift executions right down to the base of the hill.

I have moved to France two and a half weeks ago, after living for close to 5 years in Atlanta. In other words,  I ran in Atlanta for close to 5 years.

I ran along the stretch of Peachtree Road at Buckhead that has been widened for both pedestrian and vehicular traffic. I saw the construction area at my “no man’s land” in Brookhaven morph into a new residential district. I witnessed a Starbucks store go into business near Lenox Mall, only to close its doors shortly after. I watched the blue-green-and-white signs at what used to be Wachovia Bank outlets being replaced by the red-and-gold Wells Fargo logo. I got all excited over a “Clearance sale” poster at a Borders store on one of its last days of business only to find that all the good stuff were gone by the time I returned after washing up from my run.

I have stopped counting the number of races that I have participated in. It is true that after running in the same place for some time, a race feels like “just another race” and the routine business takes away the excitement in running.

To my relief, this is changing.

As I settle into a new city, trying to re-establish my running routine signifies the attempt to seek some regularity in my everyday life. While doing that, there are new things that I need to learn and experiment. I have to relearn to count in kilometres instead of miles. I have to find new running routes and calibrate them. I have to think of a hydration solution for my long runs. I have to test new fuel. I want to tune in to the local running calendar and I want to check out the running stores where I can get all my supplies.

I am doing this all over again. A new city is bringing a fresh breath of life to my runs.

This post should have been written a lot earlier. The Georgia Half Marathon took place in March. Then, there was work to wrap up. After that, there were South America, followed by Singapore, and now Paris.

Almost five months have passed, but I really want to write this post to summarise the things I did differently for my race preparation because what I ran for the Georgia Half Marathon this year was about the best I can do. I was close to my limit.

After running the same races for a few times, it was easy to treat the next race as just another race. Since this would have been the last time I would run the Georgia Half Marathon, I wanted it to be something different.

I resumed my Sunday long runs in January. Due to travel plans for work, I could not do much more in January and only started to properly train from February onwards. My longest run was 14 miles and I worked in three speed training sessions.

During the training period, I continued practicing pilates once a week, something which probably helped me avoid back pains during the race. Besides that, I went to see my massage therapist once a month. I do not know if the sessions by themselves were helpful, but they were definitely painful. The pain made me feel that the therapist was doing her job and I love the sense of satisfaction after subjecting myself to the pain. The “feel-good” effect of the massage sessions made me feel that they were already worth the while.

This time, I also added lunges to my programme. Exercises like this can be time consuming. To save time, I covered part of my walk home from the gym by doing lunges, sometimes with a bag of groceries in each hand if I do grocery shopping after gym. I usually ended up doing around 70 lunges in one session, something that left my gluts sore the following day, without fail. Again, I do not know if the lunges by themselves were effective. I record them as one of the ingredients of a regime that resulted in a successful race.

The weather was nice on race day – cool, but not too cold. I ran the race in tank and shorts, with the Supernova Sequence 3 that were 345 miles old. I did a proper warm up, which I think was very important in preparing my body to start the race in a proper condition. I started the race at the end of the field and I do not remember anything remarkable happened during the race. I just kept running, running and running and I caught up with the 2:30 pace team at the last mile.

Unlike during some past races, my lower back did not hurt during the last mile. I was probably a little tired by then, but I could still run. There was an improvement of more than 4 minutes over my previous best timing when I finished. This was my fifth time running the Georgia Half Marathon since its inauguration in 2007. For yet another time, this race was where my effort paid off where it concerned personal bests. I had my runner’s happy ending before saying goodbye to Atlanta.