An old article...
Poly 50
Singapore Polytechnic's annual campus relay race
Times really flies, last semester was my second year in Polytechnic and also my second time taking part in Poly 50. Tension, heat, the memories of people running in bright and multi-colour singlets and T-shirts, painted faces and loud cheering from supporters around Workshop 5 were still fresh in my mind. This year 2 teams from Rovers took part, namely "B1" led by David and "B2" led by Junxiong.
Before the race, we trained hard during the PT sessions every Tuesday and Thursday, which were specially set aside for this event. Morale and team spirit were high up in the air through out all the trainings; needless to say there were pain and sweat too!
We were even told not to have spicy food a few days before the race and to drink more water to replace the loss of fluid in our body.
On 13th March 2002, a Wednesday afternoon, all of us had to rush down to Den and get changed immediately after lessons. Eagerly, we put on our newly bought poly 50 “asics” running kit that comes in black and bright orange for this particular event. However, we were shocked to see there were 2 other teams that wore the same design as us! Determined to be different from the others, we came up with other ridiculous ideas to distinguish ourselves from other teams. We had tattoos on our arms, green coloured hair for team 1 and pink coloured hair for team 2. “Nicely decorated”, we proceeded to the car park near Workshop 5 for some serious warm up. The atmosphere was tense, teams doing their last minute warm up and taking photographs, preparing to put on their best performance for this coming "Battle".
Jane and I were the first runners for the teams. Standing in front of the starting line, the anxiety and pressure was more than I had expected. When the guest-of-honour was about to siren the start of the race, there were some jostling and pushing among the girls. Once the siren went off, everyone speeded up to the next runner of her team stationed at the end of the car park. I ran as fast as I could, amidst the loud cheering of encouragements and screaming heard along the route. It could be my imagination, but somehow I heard my team of rovers shouting and cheering, which spurred me on to run even faster. The minute I saw Guoyong waving to me ahead, I sped towards him and passed him the card. Even though I had stopped running, my heart kept on beating hard against my chest “Thud! Thud!…” non stop. It only calmed down after a few minutes. Then I felt my calf muscles starting to stiffen; I guessed my muscles felt the tension of the race too. The run continued…
The good weather held on without inconvenient of rain right to the very end.
We finished the "battle", and even though in the midst of the "battle" there were feelings of exhaustion, we never did surrendered to the heat and tiredness. We were ranked 13th and 15th in our category. We did our best, so everybody was contented with the end result. The guest of honour was giving away the prizes to the winning team, and seated down at the concrete ground, we were waiting eagerly for our turn to go up to the stage. At last, when our team was called, our troop flag was waving back and forth enthusiastically, whilst our traditional SP Rovers "adiji yeli" echoed in the atmosphere.
Months of training merely for this memorable day, it was worthwhile in spite of everything. Let our Rovering spirit continue to burn everlastingly…
Rovers, let's do it again!
