December 9, 2012 – Milo Marathon finals (half marathon) – Manila (Philippines)

Shame on you Runrio, organisers of the Milo Marathon. If you don’t want foreigners in your race, fine, but don’t let them register and pay for the race.
I already did the registration a few months ago. I paid an extra fee for shipping costs of the race-kit. You could not start without it. Okay, may be a small mistake by the organisation, but I can understand they don’t ship to Holland. But nowhere information on where to get the race-kit. So, during several days, I tried to contact Runrio on every possible way, phone-calls to different numbers, emails to several addresses and more. No response! With less then 24 hours to go I went to a sports-shop which was also a place of registration. A nice lady made several phone-calls to several people. An Australian guy came to me, and asked me if I had problems with Runrio. He and his daughter also wanted to compete, but same problem, no race-kit.He was already trying to reach Runrio for 11 months! Well, after almost 2 hours of talking to unwilling people, suddenly we got a message to go to the start at 1:00 am to get the race-kit. That was 3 1/2 hours before the race. (all of the races here are in the middle of the night)
This worked out okay, but all of this meant that I did not have the opportunity to sleep in the 24 hours before the race.
Well, enough about that, the race. After last week I thought that I recovered a bit, and I would get stronger by the week. I couldn’t be more wrong. May be it was the 24 hours without sleep, may be it were bad legs, I don’t know. I wanted to go for a slow pace and finish in may be 1:45:00, just a training. Well, the result was 1:58 and I was totally wasted. I already had problems with my calf muscles in the first kilometer. The smog was terrible, it was warm. And for the first time in my running-carreer I had to go to the toilet, twice. A special word of thanks goes out to my stomach, who was in great shape today… Not! Better do my next carbo-loading-meal at good old, reliable McDonalds 🙂
Anyway, enough excuses today. Next week half an hour quicker would be nice…