Secondly, the "illustrated" running top looked real cool...I was sold. Unfortunately, the actual product was quite disappointing :( Well, as with all other "illustration" there was a notable footnote that says "final outcome may differ from illustration". So, I shall not dwell on that.
I did have some doubts though ..cos the Salomon site wasn't promoting the event much, almost none to be exact. That reminds me, don't remember seeing any booth from Salomon as described in the event page. That's fishy.
But in the end I signed up..mainly for the top. Wasn't really planning to go until I saw some interesting photos of the venue and ML said she's interested. So, we went.
It was a relatively small crowd. Even the flag off arch was really small. But they had a good MC, so the 'hype' was there, somewhat.
The run was ok, in my opinion. Some complained that there wasn't enough trail. Come to think of it, they have a point. What you see above is about the only trail road we ran. Compared to the previous Salomon X-trail at UPM, this is somewhat mild. Air was fresher though, despite some slight haze.
Scenery at UPM was defitely better.
We were in Taman Alam, Kuala Selangor Nature Park.
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| It could be the haze, otherwise view will be clearer |
Well, we did see monkeys..LOT'S of them! This is the clearest shot I could manage. The others were blur as I was quite apprehensive. I was worried that they may charge at me and snatch away my phone!
The toughest part of the run was the stairs. Glad I managed this without much difficulty despite a mild flu.
And the REWARD for completing the run was this!
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| It was..FUN. |
Oh ya..there was a medal too. Quite a cool one.
Ok..now some serious stuff before I move on to post-run activities.
Firstly, my runkeeper (via iPhone's GPS signal) went out of sync. It detected only 6.6km put of the 11km journey. See map below..half of a loop went missing (re: black markings on the right). In fact, I believe the GPS tracking stopped at 6+ km, where the red line stopped since there were no 7-11km markings in the map.
And secondly, a really serious matter. This is quite a big screw up, there were no clear direction signage throughout the route, there were some helpful volunteers stationed at a few spots..but they missed out the most crucial junction! Still referring to above map, (red circle and arrow at bottom left), many and lot's of runners took a left turn, the faster ones went deeper in and were told later by a crew on a motorcycle to u-turn back. Whoa...were they mad. Some runners are really serious about time keeping ..so this is one big deal for them.
Thirdly, another big boo-boo quite a common in most new runs - the finisher medal & goodies collection process, insufficient medals and/or goodie bags, insufficient post run refreshments, etc. Quite common and yet it keeps happening. It's all about queue and process management and whatever happened to inventory count, we wondered. How can there be short of medals when there are clear indication of participants from the registration data?
Apparently, it's a first time organiser. Noted. To be fair, overall, it was quite well done apart from those hiccups. However, it's been over 24 hours, numerous complaints were posted at the event page but the usually active and chirpy organiser had chosen to remain quiet. Total silence, which is not good at all. And this kind of confirms my earlier suspicion. Where is Salomon's involvement?
All we want is an acknowledgement from either, any party. Anyone?
Alright. Done with the serious stuff.
Now..to the fun stuff.
We were kind of looking forward to a little food adventure after the run, since we've never really explored Kuala Selangor before this.
Despite being sick the night before, I took time-off googling randomly for ideas of places to eat. And I came across this blog (HERE). It says that there's this Kedai Kopi Shin Lok in Jeram that sells really good pau and yam puff etc. The pictures looked really tempting. Jeram is about 20 km from Kuala Selangor.
I proposed to ML in this way..."well..it's 20km away, we've ran 21km Half Marathon, it's ain't that far, right?"
Well, I have nice fun friends. So we went. It took us some time to get there, cos we we got confused with my Waze and ML's Siri's navigation :D
Kedai Kopi Shin Lok, is indeed one of a kind. It's pork free. There's a small roti canai stall. There's mixed rice. There's another stall selling soup/curry noodles. The kitchen also serve made to order rice and noodle dishes.
But the highlight is the pau corner. We spotted a Chinese head 'chef' in the kitchen. The other workers are mainly foreigners. Forget about char siew pau as they don't serve pork. We ordered chicken and peanutm one each and two yam puff. Yam puff is really good. Too bad it's not pork :P
Chicken puff is so-so. Again, prefer char siew :D The peanut filling should be quite good, if not for my bad throat.
While we were there, we saw non stop stream of customers coming in to take away bags and bags of pau. Wow..Jeram is a small town..these paus must be real good! Apparently, the vegetable paus are signature, but it's not our thing to eat vege pau.
I took away some Kaya paus..tasted real good. I'll definitely go back again if I'm in the area.
Right..so that was breakfast. Might as well have seafood lunch since we are in Kuala Selangor. Agree?
Good old smart phone. Good old 3G. A random search says that seafood is at some jetty area or Pasir Penampang. But, strangely..there's no signboard to guide us to Pasir Penampang. We got to the so called town of K. Selangor, but it's so dead. Almost like a ghost town. Ermm...and one of the sponsor of the run was Tourism Selangor.
Phones were running out of battery, so we stopped to ask the locals.."where? Jetty? Pasir Penampang?" Turn out..it's just a short drive over the bridge across the river. And voila..it's a totally different world over there. I felt like I landed in Tai-O village in HK. There are rows of shops selling fishery stuff, biscuits, snacks, etc. And of course there are several seafood restaurants. The local houses are quite interesting too.
So. listen..Mr Tourism, seems like Pasir Penampang is where the economy booms? People buy here. People eat here. People are happy here. Signboards please......
We went to Jeti Restaurant. One of the bigger ones with 'sea view'. View was quite worth it.
We ordered seafood porridge and fried egg with oysters. Porridge was yummy. Egg with oysters ..forgettable. No pics of food cos phone ran out of batt. No worries, I'm planning to go back just for food!
Our adventure didn't end there. We went for a 'stroll' and bought some freshly baked biscuits and freshly cooked stuffed young tau foo and fish cakes. Too bad I ran out of cash :(
I shall be back.
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