Seremban Half Marathon Race Report

As planned, woke up by 4:30am and left the house around 5:10am. Took 50 minutes to arrive in Seremban. The starting point at Seremban City Hall in the middle of the town. No issue on the parking but the police started to block the road after I passed :P

Put on NB905, slowly walked to the starting line. Do a few rounds of slow running to warm up and set the target timing to 6:45 minutes pace. Lined at starting line 6:35am, and start to wonder how come so many participants for 21km. There are many other races in KL/Klang/PD and this race announced very late (it’s actually opened only after the Klang Centro race fully registered). I will expect some hardcore runners already have other plan. I estimated about 600~1000 of us lined on the 21km starting line! I immediately drop the hope on getting my hand on the limited finisher medal. One uncle looked at my “B1” number bib and joked to me, it really make me felt ease. We flagged off right on time (6:45am).

The weather is brilliant (cloudy with wind), I managed to keep about 6 minutes pace for the first 10km and finished it right on 1hour time. Then the balance 10+km was down to 7 minutes pace. But with the effort on the first half, I managed to bet my own target timing for 7 minutes and finished by 2:10 hours. To my surprise, I finished at 97 or 98th (I can’t recall) place in category B, and had my hand on the limited finisher medal!

Overall, this is a much well organized event compare to the similar Ipoh International Run. Lots of school kids took part in shorter route (heard from some way, there is a new requirement for all school kids to have a sport as their curriculum, and this race event is qualified). The last 3km are joined with the rest of the categories, so we had a jammed ending. But I just cruised and took over (at the time I met the “traffic”, almost all of them from other categories are walking). The finish line setup on the City Hall’s padang are also well organized with clear marking on each categories.

For the event:

Good:

1. Small running event, the competition is not really an issue.

2. Cheap registration fee (RM15 for half marathon) but with plenty of goodie and very nice finisher medal (from Royal Selangor).

3. Starting line and finish line setup are clear.

4. Served plenty of Gatorade even on the 1st water station.

5. Very challenging route with plenty of hill.

Poor:

1. Traffic control especially when we running on the Jalan Sikamat (N38) towards the town.

2. Only take manual registration (online registration not available).

 

My ankle started to give some complaint around 12km, and my toes gave problem around the same time too. But I pushed on without much thought on them. Both actually didn’t caused serious problem, and they behaved much lighter now compared to the two previous half marathon. I think running in VFF is really help to strengthen the ankle and ease the toes problem. I will race in VFF in the coming Shape & Men’s Health run in Putrajaya next Saturday. It’s just a short 12km run so I have less worry on the overuse of my leg in VFF. I also planned to do my training from now onwards in VFF, and hope I will be ready to run the marathon distance in them by end of September.