Adidas King of The Road 2011

I'm back! I hope so lol so what better way than to start it off with a short run. The last time I did Adidas KOTR (King of The Road) was in 2009. It was absent in 2010 and then back again in 2011. When I ran this in 2009, it was done in Shah Alam, signed up for the 12km. That was my early days of running and I was shocked the cut off time for 12km stands at 50mins! There I was thinking only a superman can do 12 clicks under 50mins!

So zooming back to 2011, Adidas KOTR came back with a big bang and hand the same run in 5 other countries besides Malaysia (Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and Phillipines) with an option of 16.8km or 10km. I opted for the 16.8km being the kiasu kind. When the race kit collection came, I was frantically looking for my registration email and couldn't find it! There I was thinking I may have not signed up for this! Luckily I could retrieve the registration slip on their official website.

Here's the good stuff of this event, and I have to give my 2 thumbs up to Adidas and the organizer for job well done!

• Route was NPE, and heavily elevated. If you know and frequent NPE, you know what I am talking about. Loved the run up the elevated highway that was breezy and cooling! Weather that day was cloudy, perfect.
• Sufficient water stations to me spaced out ever 3km or so
• Best thing was the whole NPE route was blocked off! It was very rare (specially in Malaysia) to have the whole run route blocked off. And I am talking about this NPE highway and having both sides of the road blocked! Means no annoying and impatient motorists honking nor having to breathe in their stinky exhaust fumes. Perfect!
• Baggage was good, no qualms about that even after the event. Went very smoothly.
• And the amount of participants that turned out was HUGE!

I'll let the pictures below tell the story of that day :)

Before the event where we were flagged off in front of Sunway Pyramid. I liked their running vest that comes in 3 colour combos. Attractive colours indeed. Picture courtesy of Weng.

Frolicking around with Jeff Ooi at the start. He's dressed in some bunny pajamas with a yellow feather duster in hand. And me clad in my usual sarong. Yes, fun was the objective in our minds.

 Yeah baby, suck it up and get though all the hard and big inclines. Those in the 16.8km category had to contend with many inclines on the NPE. Those doing 10km had none to deal with! Along the run, as usual I had lots of cheers and stares because I was running with a sarong. We headed towards the direction of Subang Jaya and made a u-turn later. On the way back, we passed Sunway Pyramid again and I saw the 10km participants in the pen waiting to be flagged off. Plenty of cheers and claps for me and I managed to high 5 many of them. Good fun!

Heading towards PJ now and it was fun running through the toll gates. You've driven many times through this toll gate but it's a rare occasion having to run through one ... for free!

Coming back to the finishing line and thanks to Tey for this happy picture of me. It was tough work getting through the many inclines but once you do, you feel absolutely stonking for a job well done. Means - do more hillwork!!! :)

And done at the finishing line with a time of 1:26:53 which I thought wasn't that shabby for me. I've lost track of my PBs and such and it doesn't matter that much to me nowadays. More importantly for me to enjoy the event and savior the moment accomplishing it.

And a picture of me running with my sarong that came out in the Sin Chew Jit Po newspaper! :D

The finishing medal which wasn't that shabby either. Simple yet elegant.

Overall, this was a superb event as well as a challenging route. But I liked the route cause it's different from the usual ones that most run event would use. I do hope there's a repeat next year and for sure you'd see me there again in my sarong!