Hock (who liked to go by the name Tay) used to go to bed at 7pm every night after spending most of his evening reading financial news magazines. He would wake up at 2-3am and run every day, rain or shine, cold or hot. Then he would come into work at 5:30am and start banging out excel spreadsheet financial models. I had it in my head that Hock Meng Tay must run like the wind and in his small office he hung medals he had 'won' for running marathons around the world.
And then, in the summer of 2008, I registered to WALK in a couple of half marathons. I quit Touchstone in April of 2008 and took a few months off before working again, so it gave me ample time to train for the Helvetia Half Marathon in June. Only, I wasn't going to run it. I was going to speed walk like a 55 year old white woman...butt tight in the air, arms tightly at the side, femme wiggle to the heel-toe speed walk. Gay doesn't begin to describe how awful I looked doing this.
When the race day approached, I told myelf I'd walk half of it and then when I got to the half-way marker, I'd start running and go as far as I could go. After hitting the port-a-let and smoke-bombing the place, I hit the half way point and began to run. It was a bright summer day and the tokes were making me feel great, as was the music on my iPod. As I began running, I started passing several slow moving people. I began to feel better and better as the miles clicked away and soon, I was on a nice flat straight-away, passing runners to my right in the center of the closed off farm-road.
Up ahead, I spotted a very slim runner with a build that looked identical to our buddy, Hock Meng Tay. And though it had been a few months since I had seen him, I knew his build and I knew there was a good chance he was in this race. But Hock Meng Tay wakes up at 2am to run every morning. He runs Marathons. No way that's him. He's probably finished by now. And yet he grew closer and closer to me as I ran and I just HAD to pass whomever it was to find out. Finally, I was right by his side, I turned to face him and sure enough, it WAS Hock Meng Tay! So I screamed out "TAY!" over my blaring iBuds and startled the ever loving crap out of the poor guy. He nearly fell over into a ditch. Then he recognized it was me, was horrified that the fat man who never left his chair was passing him in a half-marathon. I wished him well and then blew past him and several other women, children and small Asian men, en route to a 2 Hour, 30 minute finish.
It was, and still is, one of my greatest athletic achievements.
Proof
Sorry, you were probably up in Caribou when it was posted.HMT was some ******** GM worked with. He was described as "a kitten that was good with Excel". GM stated that he would walk up the TV tuned into CNN and stare at it like his life depended upon it several times a day.
She's a brick...house
