I know this might sound odd from a soldier's mouth but the truth is, I suck at running.
Everytime I come in at the finishing point I find my friend already there.
"I was already here five minutes," Weisong would say cooly while our good friend , Derek would break into a song that had words like we all hate Daniel, slow as a snail and ( I am going to say a rude four-letter word here) fail.
And so almost every run would end like that: with me trying to catch up with them.
It wasn't always like this though. When I was in Primary School, I won a 20m sprint and ran all the way home to show the shining trophy to my grandmother who immediately whipped up a sumptuous meal to celebrate my victory. I polished the trophy everyday until it shone like the sun.
Sadly enough, that was the first and the last sports accolade I got. That is unless you count the medal my team got in telematch when I was like secondary three which was a rather soppy affair of transferring water via wet sponges attached to our forehheads into pails 50m away. I had a distinct feeling of being made a fool of when I lowered my head for the principal to lop the medal over our drenched heads.
It came as a surprise when I learnt that someone had died in our camp while running.
I was at the padang then preparing for NDP.
One week later I read of another case of another SAF personnel dying in Tekong. That night I booked in to the sight of my two friends running.
" Better not run ah, three cases liao," I called out to them as they jogged in near darkness.
" I know," one of them asnwered.
" one of them was my friend in BMT"
I could only muster a stunned silence as they ran into the void.
******
War of the Worlds
It was without a doubt the worst 2 hours of my life.
I went with my friend and five minutes into the movie he nudged me.
" Dakota fanning cute hor?" looking all doed-eyed.
It would have been a great film if not for the other 437 nudges and 247 finger prods he bombarded me with during the rest of the film all the while exclaiming how lovely fanning was. I very nearly threw the paedophilic bugger down the aisle.
