In this post, we provide a pre-race debrief about Ruiyong's chances of getting a medal at these championships and also check out the likely weather conditions for the race.
Temperatures are likely going to be in the vicinity of 10 degrees celsius or lower with terrible rain and wind with the result that one could feel cooler than 10 degrees celsius. In a long road race like the half marathon, weather conditions are heavyweight factors in determining how one would likely perform during a race, and big rain and wind don't normally produce very fast times although there are couple rare instances in the history of distance running where athletes run beyond belief and beyond expectations in such conditions. To save time and space, I will use just one example--Paula Radcliff's 2002 commonwealth games 10000m performance of 30:00, in wind, rain and reasonable cold, while leading from start to finish all by herself. That was an incredible performance to this day, if we considered in addition that if we suppose we could omit the then world record of 29:30 by the just recently self-confessed Chinese doper Wang Junxia, Paula would have produced a 'legitimate' world record of 30:00 under such difficult conditions. (You may assume Paula to be a clean athlete beyond any reasonable doubt despite there being some allegations recently about her 'weird' values in her blood samples from many years back!) A couple other examples, in fact many more, exist of distance athletes who ran incredible times under tough conditions, whether these conditions be too cold, too rainy, too windy, OR, too hot, too humid! And any credible and reasonable distance expert or even beginner would agree to define 'incredible' as something that minimally satisfies the condition of at least matching one's personal best or better yet, breaking it. However being 'better' doesn't always necessarily mean breaking one's pb because there can be other possible outcomes, in view of a myriad other factors like weather conditions, that could foreseeably justify a 'better' nametag.
With that, and after analyzing all of Ruiyong's training in Iten so far, we expect him to still be in solid half marathon shape whether or not there is strong rain or wind. Granted, he is also now a newly minted 'professional' runner, and his existing and surviving are supposed to be intricately related to the sole act of running his best and fastest possible on a RACEDAY, whatever that race may be, just like what a professional runner should do. All his training hitherto in Iten, after intense examination, seems to suggest he is capable, PHYSICALLY, to reproduce the form which saw him ran 67:21 last year in September or faster, something which I haven't explicitly mentioned yet. The only thing I have explicitly suggested in all my previous posts was that Ruiyong's training doesn't at all(read zero) suggest he is PHYSICALLY capable of running in the 2:18 region in London next month. As to whether he is MENTALLY ready to reproduce another 67:21 or faster should not even be a question of debate, because after all, he is a full-time sponsored professional runner, and it is required of him to be able to produce solid performances on demand, just like how you would expect a professional transport service like SMRT to produce 99 percent quality in transport service!(since nothing in the world is 100%) With that said, word has got around to our ears that Ruiyong has seemed to lost his Nike gear sponsorship with Nike Singapore for some reason I would prefer not to mention yet, and is now walking around the team hotel in Cardiff, and for the past few weeks in Iten, in Aasics gear. Everyone knows Aasics is no second rate substitute in terms of gear and apparel for distance runners, and Ryan Hall the holder of America's fastest marathon time to date was an Aasics representative for all his professional career, producing also many other star-studded performances on the roads. The engineers and mechanics at Aasics are not more inferior than those at Nike and addidas, and the same can be said of the quality of their R&D and technological support. There should not be a difference at all, in Ruiyong's ability to give a solid performance whether in Nike or Aasics gear.
With how Ruiyong has been going about social media proclaiming almost throughout the ends of the earth how he is having best workouts, best days, best '_____' and many more bests, we obviously have to take him at his word and similarly expect a 'best' half marathon whatever the conditions, rain, snow, shine or fire! We hope to be stoked for him, and we have evidence to suggest we can be stoked for him because all his training in Iten throughout the past 6 weeks have been uncannily geared towards running a great half marathon than a great marathon. Would we be surprised if he ran 66:30? NOPE, absolutely not, and that's a 100% given that nothing can be 100% in this world! Would he be able to therefore say run 3minutes slower for a half way marathon split next month in say 69:30(assuming he already has ran 66:30 tomorrow), and keep that up for another half marathon in 69:15 so that he breaks 2:19:00 and qualifies for Rio, that is almost a definite NO, a 99.9% NO. It isn't such a simple thing to add 3minutes to your half marathon pb for a half-way split and think that is supposed to work out perfectly. There are many other factors to consider before one can determine how slow of a half-way split one needs to minimally negative split the whole marathon race by 1 second, while assuming best practices for marathon racing must always produce a negative split of at least 1 second, just like how one would also assume that best practices for 800m running must always produce a positive split of nearly 1 second as well, for obvious reasons I would not discuss here.
Do we hope for a new national record tomorrow(current record by Mok Ying Ren in January with 67:08)? As a singaporean, just like all my singaporean friends, we can't wait for a new one, obviously! And we hope Ruiyong is up to the task, especially since we have already provided everybody above with great reason to believe he has, whether consciously or unconsciously, been in a rhythm of training that seems to support half marathon racing! We are not sure if he knows it, or whether he knows it but isn't saying it. Having said that, there is always a small or big chance our analysis could be wrong, given we don't have every single workout or run he did in Iten, and the ones we did analyzed were only those 1,2 or 3 specially documented workouts by Ruiyong on his facebook page, and we assume they could tell a pretty accurate picture of his overall goals and what kind of shape he is rounding into, because he says those were 'best' workouts or runs ever in his life.
As far as I have tried, I have hopefully answered most questions about what to expect from Ruiyong tomorrow in Cardiff, with one question left that is situated right at the top of the post. Is Ruiyong medalling? Absolutely not, this one was obvious.
We wish him all the best :)
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