With much excitement, I entered the Energizer Night Race 2011with HB this year, paid
RM70 for the Half Marathon category. In their website, they cited that they would close once it reached 10,000 runners, so we know that there were at least 10,000 runners last night (if not MUCH MUCH more). If you knew that you have so many participants, why not have equivalent amount of marshalls?
I've never experienced a
worse run than this one. First of all, why would any normal person give out a black vest for a NIGHT run? No one would be able to see us in the dark especially when we were running the outer circle! I decided to boycott the vest but HB still wore it.
We arrived at least 1 and a half hour early before our flag-off at 8pm and the traffic was not well managed at all. Did they think that people would appear from thin air? We obviously had to drive to there! All the parking was full, and we drove into a muddy field with palm trees. I noticed people pissing into the trees. hmmmm. Was wondering why..
With no further direction, we just followed the general sea of people to the starting line. I saw the longest line of using the toilet, and no mobile toilets to be seen anywhere. The first signs of poor management showed. We then walked on and saw an enormous amount of people trying to squeeze into the Paddock tunnel. We were like.. NO WAY, so we walked further down to the second tunnel which was slightly better. However, this is what i heard it was like in the first tunnel also termed the "Tunnel of Death" by Facebookers.
Because we had come from the other tunnel, we TOTALLY missed the collection of the headlamp, and had to ask other participants where to get it. However, since parking and finding our way there took so long, it was already 7:45pm so we didn't even bother to try (considering the utter chaos)
Why would anyone time the Marathon, Half Marathon, 11K, and Fun Run to start within 15 minutes of each other????? Do they know a marathon takes an average person around 5 hours? Where was the planning?
We started our run accordingly and the first thing to note is the lack of marshalls that seem to surround the area. There was
no clear direction where to run, and there was an EXTREMELY long sector when coming into the inside track that we had
NO WATER. They asked us to use a LARGE bucket of ice to compensate. OK...
In the next stop, the person who was manning the Gatarode threw a whole set of Gatarode in putrid dark water (FOR WHAT reason i have no idea, there was ice in there, but its all black now... you can't see???), which made the can absolutely disgusting. To make matters worse, he was smoking.. Come onla, we all running here, do you really need to make it harder?
We did the first inside lap, and i nearly ran into 10 people who were finishing (they were 11k runners), but really I cant blame them. There was no clear demarcation of where the runners should exit, nor was there anybody to tell us to run the 2nd lap around the circuit. We ploughed through people and continued on. By this time, no surprise that there was NO water left in the water stations. Only thing left on the circuit was empty cans, half drunk 1.5 litre of water (which I actually saw a guy take from the wall, and drink out of sheer desperation... Hepatitis B dude...)
The HIGHLIGHT was at the finish line. We arrived with NOTHING! No food, no medal, no goodie bag, NO DRINKS. We left unhappy, and trust me, we were not the only one. Discussions of runners around us clearly displayed that they didn't get anything either. Upon leaving, we got a stupid parking attendant insisting that we pay for
RM10 parking. To avoid conflict, we paid the man, but it gave me an even worse feeling in my mouth.
When we came home that night, the amount of twitter & facebook messages were OVERWHELMING!. There were responses every 30 seconds, and ALL negative. I'm boycotting this race next year.
Energizer Night Run Facebook Page
