16th Marathon done!

This year had been a different training year, in which I signed up for a 16-week marathon preparatory training by Coached and Under Armour, where we did a progressive programme that started off with techniques and aerobic heart-rate running, to anaerobic heart-rate running. It had been quite beneficial in my opinion, and I was looking to better my PB this year.

My training this year had also been focused on heart rate based running. I had read up on it, and had followed the advice from Ben Pulham, the head coach from Coached. I got myself a Garmin Forerunner 935 in September, and had religiously used it to keep track of all my runs. I could somewhat see an improvement in my fitness (based on the Garmin analytics), as well as my pace.

And so I was pretty excited about this year's SCSM.

Race Expo

The race pack collection expo was pretty well-organised too, with plenty of counters available. I was also pleasantly surprised to find my name among the "300km club", which recognised my loyalty in this race event, and we had an extra souvenir coin and a running tee with a slightly different design.

Then comes race day.

Race Day Pre-Run

I bought a seat on the 3am bus shuttle from Eunos Interchange. Like last year, it did leave punctually at 3am, but the arrangement was that it would head eastwards to pick up runners at Kembangan MRT, and then further eastwards to pick up the late-comers at Bedok MRT, before heading to the starting point. We only reached Orchard Road, where the start point is, at 3:40am.

The flag off time is 4:30am, so the time seemed alright to me. But as the bus passed by the bag deposit area at Scape, I was shocked. There was a snaking queue that went all the way from Scape to Cineleisure, then back to Scape, then back and forth, even going onto the (closed) road. Thousands. Of. People! After alighting from the bus, I hurried to the queue, but finding the end of the queue took me 10 minutes -- it was endless! When I finally found the end of the queue, it was already 4:10am.

And there I was, stuck in the slow-moving queue. 4:30am came, and I heard the hosts counting down excitedly with the runners inside the pens. 4:35am came, another wave was flagged off. 4:50am came, Pen D (which I was assigned) was flagged off. From 5am onwards, the race route sounded much quieter. 5:10am came, I was already queueing for an hour, but I was nowhere near Scape yet. Then 5:20am, 5:30am. Can you imagine the frustration?? The reason why it was so inefficient, was that there were only 4 trucks on site. Which means, at any one time, only 4 to 8 runners could be served. Why the cut in the number of trucks from last year? Did they not expect the turnout, having known that all categories were sold out for the first time ever?

By the time I finally deposited my bag at 5:45am, I had already queued for almost 1 hr 40 mins, and read this: The winner of the Half-marathon (21km) had already been crowned!!! I haven't even started!

Race Day Run

The start line was virtually empty at 5:50am, with the bulk of the runners long started more than an hour ago. But there was still a long stream of individuals who kept joining in, as they emerged from the baggage deposit madness. 

What it meant to start at 5:50am instead of 4:30am:

1. A miserable start to the race. The start line was totally quiet and deserted. No hypes, no build-up, and no more race-day adrenaline to count on. My legs were already penalised 1 hr 40 mins in the queue.

2. No more pacers, they're more than 10km away.

3. An empty road to run, which is good, until someone with a loud hailer warning us that the cut-off timing at the 3.9km mark was 6:10am. Worried that if I had missed the cut-off, then I'd not get an official timing, I picked up my speed to rush to the 3.9km mark RIGHT ON TIME. Later I realised, they delayed that cut-off time. But I had wasted some energy doing that.

You would expect I was pretty pissed by now. I really was! The mood was affected and I didn't feel the adrenaline inside me. Worse, I was beginning to catch up with the stragglers, who were mostly hogging up the lanes.

KM after KM, I overtook the stragglers and slower-runners. According to the results, I started at the 9,085th position and managed to overtake a bulk of the people and completed at 3,226th overall! 

Nevertheless, apart from the bag deposit nightmare, it was still a relatively well-organised run. Among them, these were the good areas in my opinion:

The Good:

1. Hydration stations were long in length, which gave runners ample space to get their aid. I also liked that they indicated the distance to the next hydration station, so I could decide if I wanted to skip it.

2. Road closures. A lot of road closures, so much that the complaints by the public were huge. But as a runner, I was thankful for it, of course. In my run (which started late), there weren't serious bottlenecks, though there were points where there were some congestion. I had to weave through the runners, in order to move ahead of them.

3. Less of ECP. Previous editions involved running some 20km or more at east coast park alone. The revised route this year cut that to just 10km. 

4. Route-side entertainment got even more interesting, with an orchestra, a band performance, dances, among others. 

5. The cold towel at the Finish line was great! There were also bananas and apples, which I didn't take.

6. The baggage collection was finally at Padang itself, not situated far away! I'm really grateful for that.

Race day analytics in the next post.