An all-women affair with 10 and 5 km categories, Shape Run is one of three unique events that have drawn a large following in recent years. 8,000 participants signed up within 9 days for this year's race. Perhaps word of mouth has gotten around about the fabulous goodie bag and/or more women are taking up running. What is significant is that 8 ladies in our life group (LG) have signed up this year. With LJ, our veteran lady runner leading the way, our ladies have gamely joined in, trained and showed up on this pleasant morning.
Compared to the Passion Run, the crowd is smaller, but the atmosphere at the Esplanade/Padang on race day is always electric and somewhat intoxicating. Especially when the entire place is filled with a sea of light green (courtesy of Nike), music and the excited chatter of runners and their supporters. We met up outside SRC for the mandatory picture taking. This is the BEFORE picture:
Notice our beautiful ladies (and the beautiful backdrop). Pink bib is for 10k participants, while blue bib is for 5k runners. But one of our ladies was not wearing the correct color bib... well that is another story for another time.
Fast forward to 9 am. Our ladies have safely returned (much to my relief). This is picture AFTER the race:
We (the husbands) all agree that the ladies look (present tense) fabulous. Glowing indeed! Such is the power of exercise (and love)!
Now for the grouses.
Organization could be better. Well, it started from collection day when MBH rushed down from work at 7:30 pm only to find that the collection team had gone off-duty even when other staff were there and the email/sms stated otherwise. [note to interested readers: this grouse went on and on for about 2 hours at our last LG meeting]
Next case in point: long queues for the goodie bag. Can't they bring the goodie bags out to hand them out to the participants who were agonizing under the hot sun? Then there were queue cutters (F, however, is to be pardoned for he did a good deed)!
Next, lack of supporters along the route. Actually, I have to agree with this. I was surprised that there were so few of us husbands/boyfriends at the Padang. I could even get a premium position in front of the finish line!
Next, crowded drink stations. Also no isotonic drinks for the 10 k runners!
I shall stop here in case our ladies get backlisted next year. :) And we don't want that to happen coz we are really really proud of our ladies and how well they ran!
Great job!
PS: Extracted from post by spidergal69:
"There was this very sweet man who's there to support his
wife/girlfriend...he held up a card with the bib number and shouted" if u have
this number, wave at me...or if your number is closed to thuis number, u can
also wave at me"....hahhaha very very sweet man!"
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