Presenting to you another overdue blogpost… the Putrajaya Night Marathon 2016.
Last year, a lot of the runs were cancelled due to the haze. This year, we have been blessed as the haze did not make its annual visit a semi-permanent one. We were relatively haze-free this year, except for a few days around the Hungry Ghost festival, although personally I believe that the haze was mainly due to the burning of prayer items during that month (tongue in cheek).
Anyway, so last year I had signed up for a few major events but could not run in them. This year, I was determined to join the BSN Putrajaya Night Marathon – except that this time, BSN was no longer a sponsor. The irony!
I was still not ready for a full marathon, so I signed up for the half-marathon only. I had requested for my race bib be delivered to me, and the kit was delivered well ahead of time – 3 weeks, in fact.
RUN DAY 12 NOVEMBER 2016
The runners were to be flagged off from Dataran Putrajaya in Precinct 3, which was a nice place to congregate. A lot of the runs in Putrajaya usually flag off from here, because they have a huge flat area in front of the Perbadanan Putrajaya buildings, which were great for setting up a stage, tents, and just general flat space for runners to chill.
It had been raining cats and dogs that evening though. I was a little worried that the rainstorm would continue through the night (as it had occasionally done in the past few days), but fortunately it lightened up a little by 7pm, although it was still drizzling.
I arrived at Dataran Putrajaya just before 7:30pm, where it started to rain again. But it stopped before our flag-off time.
Running in Putrajaya is relatively smooth – there were not many slopes, except for the occasional overpasses that we were to run up. Otherwise it could get a little boring though, because quite frankly, there was nothing much to see. We didn’t run around the beautifully lit buildings during the route; we tend to run along the empty stretches of road, which were mostly well-lit.
And along the way, there were quite a number of interesting characters to cheer us on as we ran…
I didn’t manage to improve my PB, but I managed to maintain my sub-3! I completed 21.1km in 2h44m!
Of all the major runs I had joined this year, I must say that based on my experience, this is the best organised one. There were plenty of water stations, with plenty of water and 100 Plus isotonic drinks; plenty of road signs (including directional and distance markers) with marshals monitoring the runners; and at the 12km station, there were enough bananas and energy gels (well, for me at least when I arrived there, unlike the Standard Chartered Kuala Lumpur Marathon which allowed all the earlier runners to take so many bananas each that there were none left for the slightly slower runners); and there was a sponging station at about 15km.
Thanks to the organising team of Putrajaya Night Marathon! It was a good run, and really well-planned. Will definitely come back if I can!
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