See me in there???I am happy to report that we made it! The race was quite an extravaganza, as the above picture suggests. After the race, they posted up the number of participants, and to my surprise, there were over 20 000 people there hustling around. Here is how it unfolded:
We got there pretty early because we had missed the delivery of our race shirt/number and shoe tag to keep track of our times during the race, so we had to pick it up at the info booth. That was smooth, so we had some time to hang out, sip some water, do some stretches and watch Yeouido park fill up with eager runners.
At about 5:30 we started to get herded into the starting chute. We were well back into the pack, which I thought would be fine...more on that in a second...
The official start was at 6pm, and the race got underway as scheduled. Because of our spot in the queue to start, we arrived at the starting line at about 6:07 and for the next 3-400 meters, the pace was just above a walk as there wasn't much room to get into stride. Some people were already walking, finding out that they had had enough of jogging for one day. There was no general walk/run etiquette (ie. walking along the side rather than 5 abreast in the middle of the pack while snapping self pics), so it was more of an obstacle course out there, especially at the start. We managed to get into a bit of a rhythm though and crossed the 2.5k mark at about 20 minutes - not bad considering that as we turned to get on the Seogang bridge, the path narrowed and we came basically to a stand still for a few seconds. Rounding Seogang bridge, an ambulance and medical staff were tending to a few leg cramps and severe cases of athletes foot and at that point, the route opened up a bit wider and we were able to spread out a little bit. We wrapped back around to Mapo bridge and as we reached the 5k point, there was a hell of a clog where the water stations were. They were running out of cups, so we just grabbed a bottle of sun heated water and sipped and splashed ourselves as we kept rolling. LVJ and I ran together steadily until about the 8k point and then she needed a bit of a breather so we agreed to meet at the finish line. I just chugged along and was happy when I finally saw the finish line dangling like a carrot in front of me. I crossed with a total time of 1:11, and then LVJ dashed in about a minute after I did.
After not jogging much in the last couple of weeks, she did a hell of a job to get through it, although she is paying the price a bit today - walking around pretty gingerly. Anyway, we were both happy to accomplish something like that and celebrated by taking some muscle relaxants and going to bed.
