River Jungle Marathon Race Report

THE DAY is finally arrived. I woke up around 3am, done the usual chores and left for the starting point at 3:45am. Told myself that I had done all the preparation, now is the time to enjoy it. Reached the starting point around 4:30am and the briefing started when I was still in the car park opposite the school. So I rushed a bit on putting on the shoes and some sun block.

I missed the notes that Organizer put on the Distance Marker.
This is a good one at 20KM. By Tey.

Met Chan at the starting point, but I was too occupied and we didn’t chat much. Then the race flagged off on 5am. I set my GF405CX to 9min/km pace with some hope that I will do better then 7 hours. Anyway, I stayed on the 7 min/km pace until I reached the 17km waterstation right before the climb. I only managed to run on the climb for about 1+km at snail pace then I walked the rest of the climb plus the down hill until it is rather flat at around 23km. The knees are not really in good shape to take the down hill. Lots of runners passed me on this stretch. Then it was the Semenyih reservoir at 23km, which is a 1.5km stretch to heading to Semenyih then u-turn. The scene is magnificent, and some one flying parachute fan in the sky. The sun are now on and off came out from the cloud and temperature starting to rise.

Towards the peak @ 20km, still fresh look.

After the u-turn and the 25km marker, I really had nothing much left in the tank to push. The balanced 17km are purely stretched me to my limit. I am on my foot for 4hours now and the every single step is an extra effort from my limited endurance. The ITB is almost numbed and toes in the shoes are hurting like hell. I started to run 1km, then walked few hundred meters. The cloud was finally thickening enough, and turns into a rain when I reached 32km. More walking now. The demon of DNF & drop out started to appear on and off. But there were not many runners in front and behind me, I felt a bit less stress and managed to keep the demon and mindset at ease. The walk-run-walk-run strategy kept me going.

At the last KM with Khoo
Courtesy of CP Tan

Then, I ran into Khoo. He is friendly and kind enough to offer me some pacing and encouragement. His 3 minutes run, 1 minute walk strategy drilled me into the reserved tank that hidden in my inner soul, some place that I didn’t aware of. With his company, I completed the balance 7km, and ran the whole last km (or may be 2km) to the finish line in 6hours 31minutes.

Overall, this is definitely a very good running event. I don’t felt the stress in term of competitiveness, finishing timing or pace. Anyway, I guess I should keep this ease mode for all other marathons that I registered for this year. I am obviously not very well prepared for marathon distance. The ease mode will definitely helped in the way to prepare myself to be a better runner for future races.

Side track, my Garmin Forerunner 405CX decided to give out earlier than me. It’s idle at 41.01km and now, the screen is blank and not able to charge (I guess). May be some rain water get into the unit or it’s just the battery issue. Will wait for another few days to see if it really needs to be send in for repair. On battery wise, it’s last all there way to about 6hours 15minutes. So if you plan to finish your marathon longer than 6 hours, you may want to consider use a normal stopwatch or in my case Polar FT4. If you experienced the out of battery state for GF405CX (it will just continuously restart-off-restart-off until the battery is totally flatten), you don’t want to have that during your race.