Genting Trailblazer 2010

Place : Awana Genting Resort
Time : 0830
Course : Running/Walking/Climbing/Crawling!!
Weather : Cool and lovely

With somebody to sign up with in August, I was happy to take on this event as it had a trail running through the hill forests.

I'm more to walking forest trails than running them when I was younger, but I remember how tough the terrain could be. Hooking up with the Zarinator was probably a great idea as he had done the KK climbathon the week before.

It was definitely a testing experience. We arrived there pretty early at 7am, but hit our first hiccup with our registration numbers going missing. After some whining with the organizers, they gave us a replacement number written in ball pen!! Arrggh! Pay RM168, yet have to deal with this....??? Anyway, they finally located our numbers after the person who was issued our numbers turned up and swapped the correct numbers back to them. Organizer error.

We hardly had time to warm up when the horn went off. The trail started with a 3km run down the road to the Awana golf course. The Zarinator took off like it was a sprint event and we finished the first 3km in less than 15min... Once we hit the jungle trail, things started to slow down pretty quick.

After the 6km mark, things started getting really tough, with sharp ascents and descent marking the next 2km, with 2 river crossings. Even for the front runners, you could hear them blowing their lungs from meters away. Rough, tough and downright dirty....you have to love it!!

My legs was close to Jell-O by the time I was hitting 7km, and had to take many stops in between for my legs to recover and catch my breath. Luckily, with the Zarinator, he towed me for some parts of it and it really helped as there seemed to be less effort in tackling the steep slopes.

On the last sharp ascent, I slipped down the hill a few times, before finally making it up there. With the final 2 km, the trail started to ease, but not without finishing the staircase to heaven and down the final descent to the obstacle course.

This part...you have to love!! Jumping over several ditches, tackling the wooden barriers and crawling under the netting was a nice touch. Took me back to my school days....

We finished the race with a sprint at about 1:55, which was quite credible. We placed 30th and was pretty hyped at the end.

Looking back at the event, lots of time of the stairclimber, upper body work by wall climbing and some trail running, would definitely help in preparing better for this event.

It was all great fun, and we had a blast of a time.

With only 3 weeks to PBIM, I'll probably need to do 1 more long run, hopefully about 33km for the final prep for this event. Until then...