The 2nd edition of the Bangalore Midnight Marathon finally happened on 10th/11th January. It was one of those rare Bangalore events in which I did not run long distance(HM/FM) as I had decided to do 5Km IT City runwith my 14 year old son Rahul. Rahul, to his credit, has run 5.3Km in the 1st edition of the Bangalore Midnight marathon in May 2007 and 5.7Km in the Sunfeast 10K in May 2008. We reached the holding area - the grounds of Ujjwal school in Whitefield, around 8:15PM thinking we were just in the nick of timefor the 8:30PM start. I was pleasantly surprised to see a reasonably good turnout - probably a couple of thousand people. However, the delay in starting the race was quite distessing. The compere made some brave attempts at keeping the crowd engaged while stalling for time in order for the VIPs to arrive. And then there were a couple of speeches which were not received very kindly by the runners.
Eventually around 9:20PM or so the crowds started to move towards the starting point close to the Hope Farm junction. There was fair amount of confusion regarding the start point and we had couple of false starts - running 250 m and then again 50 m before realising the race had not started. Finally, at about 9:31PM we took off. Rahul and I ran the whole race side by side chatting along the way. There were adequate water stops with volunteers. The route was out and back 2.5Km. When we were around the 1.5Km mark we started seeing runners coming back. I recognised several RFL runners and other firends during the run. It was good fun and Rahul and I finished in about 35 minutes 31 seconds which is absolutely great timing for a 14 year old! Rahul was told by some volunteers that he finished 6th among boys and his bib number was taken down. However, nothing really came of that. Leona came first among women in the 5Km run.
It was good to know on Monday that the RFL runners had a good time doing the HM, FM and the Relay with several of them finishing among the first three. Arvind and Nikhil seem to have done a wonderful job of pacing and helping several runners cross the finish line. Kudos to both of you and RFL!And it was even better to learn from Jugy that my absence was noticed by many runners!
