First night Marathon

It all started out quite innocently. One day Mei Foong sent us an email asking if we were interested in joining a 7.7km night marathon. There we mixed responses and no one was really serious. Then on the 8th of January 2010, Mei Foong sent another reminded saying that today is the last day to sign up for the marathon to get the early bird discount. Lo and behold....

 

The surprising thing is that almost everyone of the mangkuk-itis group signed up for the run. There were people who were signed up unintentionally. So from that week on the bunch of us started training and running the Subang Jaya lake every Saturday morning at 7.30am. The group made great progress as week on week we would be able to run longer.

Then came the night of the 6th of February 2010, unfortunately 2 people from the mangkuk-itis group (Steph and Amy) could not make it to the run. Steph had a crazy work schedule and had to work the next day and Amy was in PD for her company's team building. So the 8 of us (wah very good number. Somemore so close to chinese new year somemore) donned our jogging shoes and drove to Putrajaya.

This was all of us looking still fresh and ready for the nights challenge. All of us registered ourselves at the starting line and then Saw Wen and Sharon decided to head to the toilet. We throught we will never see them again as more and more people began to pile into the starting line. Just before the race, Sharon and Saw Wen actually managed to squeeze their way back to our group.

At the start of the race, i tell you i think almost a couple of thousand people ran pass me. Never in my life i see so many people rushing pass me. However i kept to my own pace and i had Simon to accompany me for the first kilometer or so. After about 5 mins of running, Simon asked me "Have we ran 1km yet?". Sad to say i think we haven't. I managed to only run consistently for about 2km and then basically i died. I stop running at the hill going up to the Putrajaya International Convention Center. From that point on i would run and stop and run and stop.

Almost all of us saw a guy running with a baby pram and he was actually doing a pretty good time. Towards the end around 2km left in the race De Way managed to catch up with me and we ran together almost to the finishing line. He was ahead of me and i thought it was because he was fitter then me. However i found out later he actually "kap si". We finished the race and all the guys gathered in the middle of the 2 finishing lines.

My congragulations go out to Chin Teik because he actually finished within the top 400 in a time of around 45 minutes and he got a medal. He was the only one in the whole group to get a medal. The rest of us just got a certificate.

 I can say i am quite proud of everyone since everyone got a cert which means everyone finished within the qualifying time of 80 min. Now here comes the funny part. At the start of the race, i told everyone that if we all get seperated we would meet back at Maybank at the end of the race. The guys were waiting in between both the finishing line and swapping stories about the run that we totally forgot we were suppose to meet at Maybank. After say around 15-20 minutes, John ask "Eh where are the girls". Mark replied "I think they are still running up the hill". Lucky John was gracious enough to go to Maybank to take a look.

Things got ugly from there as the girls were actually waiting at Maybank and i got one hell of a scolding. The funny thing is all the guys made it to the same place and all the girls made it to the actual meeting point.

I think everyone in the group actually enjoyed the run and i really enjoyed the run. It was a totally different experience and it was my first marathon as well. Now we are all talking about the next Energizer Marathon which is going to be 10km. We will see how things go.

I big shout out goes to Jac for taking all the awesome pictures for us. Without you, we would not have such great pictures to take back and remember the first ever night marathon in Malaysia.