November 18th, 2012 – Penang Bridge Marathon – Half Marathon (Malaysia)

I already booked my “Asean Tour” a couple of months ago. Unfortunately, things went downwards from then due to several circumstances (injuries). I only had about 6 workouts in 3 months, and could not do anything in the last three weeks. But the trip was already booked and paid for, so let’s give it a try.
The plan was 6 half-marathons, one every weekend. Starting early this morning (3 am) in Malaysia. Due to the high temperatures 5 out of 6 races are held at night. The Penang Bridge Marathon is a big event with about 30.000 runners. With all due respect for the enthousiastic volunteers the organisation was bad. It was a mess. The only positive thing were the many drinking posts (and they were needed!!), but if you have them at the beginning every 3 kms and at the difficult part you have to wait for 8km, you should see a doctor you were not clearly thinking. Also no km-marks until the last 4kms. And there the marks were evidently not at the right place. It gave you the wrong impression again and again. And I can name numerous other organizational problems.
Anyway, back to the running part, that’s were it’s all about. I think I can best describe my performance in three words, bad, bad, bad! Today we don’t talk about times, but let’s put it this way: if I was in good shape, I would expect to run at least half an hour faster…
But I wasn’t. Also the heat struck me. Although it was night, temperatures were still very high, and it felt like 30 degrees. This race was meant for me as a trainings-race, but I think I never went so deep as I did today. Well, at least I got the medal and the race-shirt.
Not my favourite race due to the organization, the not-so-nice scenery at probably most important of all, my bad performance. Let’s see what next week will bring me, a trail-run in the Philippines. Sounds exciting!
Update: To my surprise I see I finished 131 of almost 6000 runners in the half marathon. That means that I walked with the fastest 25 in the beginning, (unclear due to different distance-runners running at the same time&place). It also means that there were a lot of untrained or under-trained people running. A big difference with Europe.