My Bubble: My Marathon Experience ...

It's been a week since I'm back from Singapore and it's only now that I felt inspired to write about our enjoyable trip down south. I guess the laziness is just due to the break of routine and the prevailing holiday season before the year 2010 comes to a close.

There were 5 of us travelling together to the Lion City ... Uncle Chew, his wife Elaine, their nephew Bernard, Lo Kong & myself. The top priority of our trip was for the Standard Chartered Marathon where Uncle Chew, Bernard and Lo Kong are all geared up to run the full 42km race. After the event, Uncle Chew & Elaine had planned to bring us all around town for a gastronomic experience. Of course, shopping was not forgotten either.

Actually Lo Kong had participated twice before in the Singapore Marathon but this time round seemed to be more fun with the company of like-minded friends. We were joined by 3 other runners from our KK Pacers club (Roy, Lim & Keith) who had traveled there separately. All completed their respective categories while there were new personal best achievements for Bernard, Lim and Lo Kong. They can be seen in action here.

CONGRATULATIONS to all of them on their successful completion of their respective races!

The event was indeed HUGE ... there were over 60000 participants from all over the world taking part in the various categories of 10km, 21km (half-marathon) and 42km (full marathon). We met many familiar faces from our local running communities there too! My excitement was taking camera shots of our team members in action, preferably with some landmark as backdrop. It wasn't easy though since we had our members in all 3 categories running on 3 different routes. It was unfortunate that I could not snap the start for the 10km and 21km as they started at different venues and at different time. After capturing the flag-off for the 42km at Orchard Road, I walked about 1.2km to the MRT station to catch the earliest ride to Marina Bay. I had studied the routes the night before and decided to station myself between The Singapore Flyer, the world's largest observation wheel and Singapore's Formula One Pitstop Building. It was the 8km mark for the 10km event, 19km mark for the half-marathon and the 40km mark for the full marathon.

Surprisingly, I did not move around alone as expected. I met a Filipino lady, Jo-Ann whose hubby was running the full marathon. She was kinda following me silently, smiling when I turned to look at her. I broke into a conversation with her and she decided to follow me on my routes since she was not sure where to go. We took the MRT ride together, help each with the directions and taking snapshots here and there but too bad ... we never took any shots of each other .... ADOI!!! Regretfully, we lost each other when I was busy snapping my teammates.

It was indeed tiring running up and down several spots to capture my teammates in actions but DEFINITELY SATISFYING!!! All the photos turned out good.

When Uncle Chew arrived after 5-and-half hours, I walked about 2km to the finish line to meet up with the whole gang. Unfortunately I followed the wrong crowd and ended up on the wrong side of the finish line. When I finally reached the meeting point, the ground was muddy from yesterday's rain, the sun was blazing hot and there was a human-traffic-jam!

As there were a many road closures, we could not grab a cab back to our hotel. No choice, with aching legs and drained out bodies, we all walked to the nearest MRT station for a ride back.