TETRA PAK RFR RUN: 2ND Leg of My Back-to-Back Half Marathons

Late Saturday morning, I was attending a servant leader seminar organized by our parish church in Paranaque City when the husband of my fellow lector approached me and inquired if I would be interested to run a 21-km fun run the following day (Sunday, November  18). He said he had a race kit  but because of some conflict in schedule, he would not be able to use it.

Of course, the running addict that I am, my answer was an affirmative. Literally and figuratively, this running is free.

So this is how I unexpectedly got to do  back-to-back half marathons this weekend. The first 21-km run was the TBR Dream Team Run on Saturday morning at Nuvali in Sta. Rosa, Laguna.  The 2^nd leg is the Tetra Pak RFR Run on Sunday morning at Bonifacio Global City in Taguig City.

Tetra Pak is the world’s leading food processing and packaging solutions company and the RFR stands for Recycle, Feed and Run. Participants were encouraged to bring at least 2 empty Tetra Pak cartoons for recycling when they register and for every Tetra Pak carton received for recycling during the registration, one ready-to-drink milk in Tetra carton (in 200 ml or 250 ml package size) will be donated to a chosen children’s foundation under the Tetra Pak Feed-a-Child program.  

I ran solo the Tetra Pak 21km run as my fellow 83neans were going on that Sunday for a 12-hour run (6am to 6pm) around Camp Aguinaldo as part of the training for the Bataan Death March 160km ultra. Running solo poses some challenges, foremost of which is how not to be bored.  I had to find some motivation and this came in the form of trying to improve on my  finish time of 2 hrs & 52 minutes at the TBR Dream Team Run.  

Smiling at a back-to-back experience

My muscles were still a bit sore from the Saturday running, but I had to focus on the positive and a helpful technique I learned from the book "The Non-Runner’s Marathon Trainer" in developing a positive attitude is to use a particular phrase whenever I catch myself thinking something negative. And that phrase is  "...but it doesn’t matter."

On that  Sunday morning, my muscles were still aching but it didn’t matter because I would  run anyway and I knew that I would feel better when I’d  finish  the run. True enough, when I crossed the finish line, with all those cameras clicking, I had a big smile. And my smile got wider when I looked at my Timex, showing that my finish time at the Tetra Pak RFR Run was 2 hrs & 35 minutes.  Not only was it better than the 21-km run the day before, but this time is my best for the year in the half marathon distance.

With a friendly face from Meralco

Father and son runners

At the finish area, while watching the awarding, I bumped into a familiar friendly face from the Meralco marathoners. The Meralco guy  was with his son and he proudly shared that his kid finished the 10-km run.  This too brought a smile to my face as I was envisioning already my time together with my son at the Red Crab Run this coming weekend.