Run for Home - A Worthy Cause

It was indeed a good day to run last Sunday. Good weather, good friends, new acquaintances, new PR, new experience, and a chance to support a worthy cause. It's always good to be part of something that will help other people. This time we ran to help reconstruct 800 houses in Calauan Laguna, which was a project of Globe and Ayala land Inc. I trust that all funds generated from this event will all go to the project and that the houses are built as promised. Good job to Globe, ALI, and Finishline for a successful event.

It was a good race, I believe overall it was well planned and organized except with one incident where I felt bad prior to the start of the race. A friend of mine (Marvin) was not able to claim his race kit on the scheduled dates given, it was a bad weather during those days, and for one reason or another, He was not able to get the chance to claim it on the said dates. This was his first race and he was pretty much excited to participate in this prestigious event. Come race day, he went to the organizers booth and tried to claim his kit since there were a number of race kits available at that time. Unfortunately, to his surprise he was told by this lady staff that.. ”deadline is deadline, we don’t have available kits for you”. So he went back to the car and told me that he was not able to get it. So we went back to the booth and politely asked this other girl to give us a race kit since they have available stock anyway. But then, the first staff saw us talking to her colleague and immediately rushed to us and said, what is it? I told you already, you can’t get race kits anymore because deadline was set already. As politely as I can, I tried to rationalize and ask her to be considerate so that we can all enjoy the event, but to no avail she was very firm but arrogant, and I must say rude. But I don’t see the logic, another guy came in and request for a race kit and said, “naubusan kami kahapon” (we ran out of stock yesterday) and the girl immediately said, “oh yes, you can claim” and she immediately get one race kit without really validating that they were not able to claim the previous day. Huh? Wait a minute, something’s wrong here. I can argue all day, but it’s not worth the stress and waste of energy, I just felt that whatever their decision was, it doesn’t make sense. Anyway, to cut the story short, we ended up getting the race kits by having another friend get the race kit and said, “naubusan ako kahapon”, and just like that she gave the race kit. Funny huh? Anyways, enough of that and off we go to enjoy the day.

It was supposed to be my first 21k run, but I had to downgrade since I was just recovering from my knee injury, and instead opt for the 10k. It was a good decision, otherwise I would end up walking at the finish line if I did the 21km. I had a pretty good run in my first 5k, I felt strong and breathing was good, I was tempted to get a PR for this run but when I started to increase my pace, I felt the pain so I had to slowdown and maintain a comfortable pace. Surprisingly, my garmin logged in my best time so far at 1:05, but will have to wait for the official time.

My friends and I all wore our Gone Running singlet, distances ran with unofficial time were:

21Km – Jay (2:10:58), Val (2:09), Allan (2:17), and Gerry (2:40)

10Km – Me (1:05), Cherry (1:08), Marvin (1:20), and Jojo (1:34)

5km – Noemi (37 min) and Vince (32 min)

PRs at this point were not important to the group as we are all newbies. But each one vowed to improve in every run. The important part is that we are running. But worth to mention the improvement in PR for Jay and Val who have maintained a good pace running the 21k, Cherry who was strong in her run, obviously she will hit sub 60 in the next event. To marvin who has recorded his first official race at 1:20 (unofficial time) for the 10k, I’ll definitely monitor his progress moving forward. Jojo has been steady finishing 10k, great achievement so far for him is losing weight by 11.5 lbs ( from 285 lbs down to 273.5 lbs) for a period of 2 months! Great Job Jojo! Noemi has a new PR for the 5k which was at 37 min, we expect her to join the 10k runs soon, and to Vince, (Val’s son), who also finishes strong for his first official race. Good job guys!

We all ran to to help build houses and we also ran against corruption. Total run against corruption for this event – 134 km.

Some photos after the race.

This photo was featured in Globe's race day photos



Somebody has to take our picture.. hehe..

With globe representative, forgot her name..

With Daniel and partner, he noticed our group and our shirt.
Group picture