Anyway, back to the race, A supposed 2.50am reveille became a heart pumping, blood-rushing jolt up from bed at 3.50am. I was late and an hour away from the start point. Luckily, I had prepared my race vest and breakfast consisting of 2 hard boiled eggs and a loaf of bread to be brought and eaten along the way.
Started alone, since I was about 20-30 minutes late and the race had already flagged off. Thankfully the race personnel were along the main road and drove me a minute to the start point.
I saw no one for the first 30-40 minutes of the race and made a right choice from 1 of 3 split roads until I finally saw the first race participant, a walker. After speaking to him and ascertained that I was on the right path and had to follow pink ribbons, I got confused and followed some orangy pinkish ribbon. After 5-10 minutes of going what seemed like a loop, the walker caught up and directed me to the right path where pink ribbons were. I was supposed to follow the pink ribbons for at least another 3-5km before I would see yellow or orange ribbons from another race that had almost the same route.
I finally caught up with 2 elderly runners in their 60s and found out that they did not sign up for the race, but were running it anyway. They also knew the trail very well since they ran there often and had participated in previous installments of the race. They gave me a map of the Munda Biddi Trail which they just found. We chatted and I ended up running with them up to 20km point of the marathon. They were amazing runners and revving up the pace even though one was injured.
We parted when they reached the 20k mark that they intended to do that day. Subsequently, I saw them at the 40km mark at a U-turn route. It was about here that I met another Singaporean called Terence that was doing this race for the first time. We chatted and run-walk the rest of the way to the finish.
This race I completed using a chillax net time of about 5.5hours and realised that the route was increased by about another 2-3km to 48km from Terence.
This was a nice easy race even though I heard that many struggled due to the warmer weather at this time of the year, but to me, the temperature was just right and much more comfortable than our Singapore weather.
Nice trail making up of mainly compact mud and some sections of chipwood. There were only 2 slopes that we about 300m in length. It was also at this race that I realised that 2 hard-boiled eggs and 1-2 slice of bread provided me enough energy to about 35km. I am quite sure I did not use any gel and probably ended up with 10 gel packs instead of the initial 3-4 that I brought.
