Unilab Run United 2 (11.20.10)

Nearly a month after that very challenging trail run in Legazpi City, I was back ready to conquer my first half-marathon on the road. This time in the big city!

Takbo.PH, "the largest running community and website in the Philippines," gave me a wider perspective about running as a sport. Here, I have also known about the upcoming races in the country including the RunRio Trilogy Unilab Run United 2. This particular leg of the trilogy was one of the most talked about runs of 2010. With about 40,000 participants, it was one of the biggest in the country! Runners had high expectations about the race. Almost half of the expected participants were early registrants.

Knowing about the world class standard of the runs organized by RunRio Inc. whose founder is coach Rio de la Cruz, a Bicolano from Bato, CamSur, I thought I must run in here. I have known Coach Rio in Summit CamSur Marathon in September 2010. I did not know a thing about him but judging the way he looked, how he supervised the race and was crowded by runners, he must be somebody or a "dakulang tao" in Bikol.

The process of getting our race packets here was not easy. We could not register online so we needed others' help. My college friend Ely who is now based in Manila was so kind and patient to register us. She went back twice to ROX in Bonifacio Global City just to pick up the freebies and our singlet of the right size. My sibling who happened to be on an official travel there met her and picked up our kits. But we were lucky compared to the early registrants. They received their kits later than us while others received theirs even after the race day! This was due to the change of supplier of the singlets.

Simon and I initially planned to just run 10km here and to join another 10km run in Ateneo the following day. However, after considering our budget, we decided to skip the run in Katipunan Avenue and upgrade to half-marathon in Unilab run. We wanted to have the beautiful 21km finisher's medal!

Running in a place we were not familiar with was thrilling. Ryan, my elementary batchmate, picked us up early Friday morning. We stayed in his condo in Ortigas. Saturday, anxious on how we could get to BGC, we saw a guy wearing Run United singlet. We were thankful we could join him in the taxi. We arrived at the venue so early. Ralph who I met in MTR also did the same distance with his Team Solomon.

With tens of thousands of runners participating, we knew it would be very difficult to find each other after the race. So, we decided to just pace during the race.



My official time was 2 hours and 32 minutes.