Race Pros:
- Registration center at Paranaque - After my practice run at Manila Memorial Park, had a 5-minute drive to Nelson Auto Repair Shop in front of Paranaque Medical Center to register. Yes, you read that right - an auto repair shop that accepts race registration.
- Cheap Registration Fee - 300 pesos only with a free singlet! I didn't like the fit though, so I didn't wear it on the race day.
- Manual barcode timing system but guess what? The results were released at the same day! Big wow!
- Ample water stations (and Pocari Sweat stations too).
- Hyper race marshalls cheering racers on. I love hyper race marshalls!
Now on to the cons:
- Race Route map was released 2 days before the actual race day. When we arrived at the venue, we found out that they scrapped the initial released route and just used the usual Runrio map, modified a bit for 16k.
- Late gunstart with no warm-up. Everyone was surprised when the gun fired to signal the race start without any heads-up whatsover.
- The event name is FS marathon - why the hell are they using the word "marathon" for an event with only 16k as the farthest category?
My legs felt very heavy at the start but after a few kilometers, I felt the leg muscles loosening up. I was really grateful Eugene paced with me until the finish line. We did a steady pace of around 6 minutes per kilometer - just the right pace we're aiming for our upcoming SG marathon. We finished in 1 hour, 34 minutes and 46 seconds.
And since we didn't have our usual running photographers with us, we had to settle on only a few shots from my celphone camera. Here's a pic of the start/finish line before the 16k gunstart:
And here's a post-race picture of me and Eugene from the race village stage: