To run or not to run. That was the question that faced runners two weekends ago. It wasn’t just a drizzle, it was a driving rain. So why get up when it was cold and dark and wet outside, while it was dry and warm inside?
Yes, the race was going to push through, said the organizers — rain or shine, come hell or high water.
The rains came and so did 21,000 runners for the 32nd Milo Marathon Finals in Manila on Aug. 3, which was held simultaneously in three other cities — Cebu (with a turnout of 24,270 runners), Davao(12,005), and Tarlac (12,000). All in all, 69,207 runners participated in the Milo Marathon.
To think that 32 years ago, in 1974, there were only 767 runners.
“The staging of the simultaneous races highlights the health impact of the National Milo Marathon to as many people as possible,” says Nestle AVP and Milo sports events executive Pat Groc-ong. “We hope to encourage more people to get into this healthy lifestyle.”
In the past years it’s become a ritual for elite and weekend runners, corporate executives, families, politicians and students to run the various events of Milo, ranging from 3K for kids to 5K, 10K, 21k and 42k. Every year, they converge on Roxas Boulevard for the national finals and high schools participate in the cheerleading contests.
For those of us who ran the Manila finals, it was a race to remember. To say the weather was bad for a marathon is an understatement — yet it was also the most fun many people have had in a long time. It was as if everybody was a kid again and given permission to go out and play in the rain.
Students who were required to participate in Milo came ready with their umbrellas. Most of them did the 5K, which meant that if you were in this starting coral, you had to watch out for three things before the gun even went off — a poke in the eye, getting sideswiped by their backpacks, and teenagers screaming at each other: “Stampede! Stampede!”
Whether in the 5 or 10K, students were walking/running hand in hand across the southbound lane which was, if you were trying to beat your own time, very irritating. As one member in our group Happy Feet said, you had to be following one big dude to part the crowds.
The kids’ energy amazed me. They would sprint and scream at each other without getting winded. As for me, I ran only 5K and under the pouring rain, I didn’t know which was making a louder noise: my smoker’s lungs or my soaked, squishing shoes.
Dr. Roderick Poblete, a member of the Letran College track team in the 1980s, ran his fifth full marathon at Milo. “I went back to running only in January 2006, a midlife kind of thing,” he says. The rain during the Milo Marathon, he says, was a welcome development. “But I was careful not to get my shoes wet right away because the moment shoes and socks get soggy, it becomes a task to complete a marathon.”
All over Metro Manila these days, there is at least one race being held on a Sunday. Last Aug. 3, along with Milo, the Davies Paint Race was held at The Fort; the day before, Aug. 2, was the ITU Asian Long Distance Triathlon in Subic, both of which other Happy Feet members ran (and biked and swam in the case of Subic 03). As Mon Domingo, Happy Feet head and everybody’s favorite Jedi master, put it, “The group was running as one even though in separate venues and in different events.” And in different time zones, too, as our American member Wayne ran the San Francisco Marathon also on Aug. 3, and Chai ran the City to Surf in Sydney on Aug. 10.
Last Sunday, two races of note were held: the Feati Blue & Gold Fun Run on Roxas Boulevard (with 3, 5 and 10K events) and the Mommy Milkshake Marathon at The Fort.
Feati had a good turnout and a good starting line (in front of Malate Church) — on account of the restrooms at Aristocrat which you could use before the race. Most Happy Feet members ran the 10K and all our times were good — on account of the 10K actually being just an 8.9K, according to friend Mikey Macainag’s Garmin. A similar thing happened in last month’s Tik Takbo at UP, with the 18k actually being just 14k.
A runner thinking he has achieved his personal best is always good for his ego, but not for his training. And I don’t know any runner who wants to delude himself about his time, so I think race organizers should pay more attention to the distances.
After the Feati race, some runners trooped to The Fort for the Mommy Milkshake Marathon, the second such race organizers have held to raise awareness on the benefits of breastfeeding. Families, singles, mommies and daddies ran it with their kids.
The reason behind the “Mommy Milkshake” name? Jaymie Pizarro, who’s behind the very popular blog thebullrunner.com and sister of one of the organizers, Janice Villanueva, says it’s because “When mommies run, milk shakes.”
Running mommies do have a sense of humor about their own bodies.
…And Then There Were The Pesky Women Runners
In an ill-advised move, the Takbo Bayani race in Marikina, scheduled today, originally excluded women in the 21K division because they couldn’t guarantee protection as the road race was going to take place on, er, roads (what a shock), and because they didn’t think women would be signing up for the 21K. The organizers’ two reasons actually contradict each other, if you think about it.
One can only assume that the Marikina Sports Commission is composed of anatomically challenged men — and I’m not talking about their height — or misogynists who are too lazy to throw a few extra pylons on the streets to create a lane for runners.
Then I realized…this is a city run by a woman. It doesn’t make much sense for Marikina Mayor Marides Fernando to run for office again. God forbid that anybody should think women can run a city or a country when they can’t even run a half marathon! Oh, wait….we do have a woman president — and another one back in 1986. For sure thousands of Filipino women have already completed marathons here and abroad throughout the years — and have not dropped dead en masse.
That the race banned women and she, the mayor, let it happen — I thought it was an affront to all women around the world, not just runners. Makes you feel like you were in Pakistan where, only two years ago, women there defied the government ban on mixed races and ran the Lahore Marathon.
Running blogs and groups with pesky, thinking women for members reacted violently on the Internet about the exclusion; there were talks about running renegade (without a race bib); e-mails were sent to the organizers. With a growing fallout becoming inevitable and talks of a boycott, the Marikina Sports Council announced that they had decided to open the 21K to both genders. By this time, of course, a lot of runners (including me) had already decided to run the other races today, Run for Your Health at UP Campus, or Miracle Run at The Fort. Like most of the girls, I had no intention of running 21K but wanted to sign up for the shorter distance.
I will have to disagree with runners who say that gender politics and running shouldn’t be mixed. It would be like saying animal rights activists don’t have a right to protest at fashion shows which use animal fur, or that Greenpeace shouldn’t demonstrate at sea against oil spills.
Gender issues are inherently political. If Kathrine Switzer didn’t register under “K. Switzer” for the Boston Marathon 36 years ago in the hope of misleading officials about her gender, women might still be banned today from running marathons with an official number. When a race official screamed at Switzer to get out of his race and physically tried to take her out of it, the world got angry — and a whole lot better for seeing that image.
Any platform to advance a right or right a wrong is worth exploring. When someone is suppressed, we should feel just a little bit uncomfortable. Didn’t you feel disgusted that the Chinese government revoked the visa of Olympic gold medallist Joey Cheek simply because he was a peace activist for Darfur?
Sorry, boys, women just don’t suck it up anymore and go back to the kitchen when they’re told they can’t — and they shouldn’t. They do really well what they’re told they can’t do, or they boycott, or they make a lot of noise. In this case, Takbo Bayani imposed an OMFG-that’s-so-ridiculous rule and they should have foreseen the dissent it would elicit.
Some friends are understandably still doing the Bayani Run despite everything, not because they particularly want to, but because few races in Metro Manila include a half marathon. One such runner is a female neurosurgeon who did really well at Feati. She just wants to run, period. I know she will overtake a lot of runners — men and women — this morning and we’re all rooting for her.
That settled, there was the issue of the Takbo Bayani promo materials and singlet which, unfortunately this time, highlight the Mayor’s husband, MMDA chairman Bayani Fernando. The materials have the image of a lean and tall runner in a white singlet and blue shorts — with the head of Bayani Fernando Photoshopped into it.
Think of the Incredible Hulk’s head screwed onto a Ken doll’s body. It’s very funny actually, if you don’t pay attention to the apparent need of Fernando to have his face plastered not just on infrastructure billboards around Metro Manila, but also on runners’ singlets.
You wonder, who makes these incredibly bad decisions? While they’re on a roll, they should also be giving away shorts with the back of his head imprinted in the crotch area. I mean, you know, nothing beats this kind of publicity.
I would have wanted to witness those meetings where they decided to ban the women and Photoshop Bayani’s head in, just to know which dimwit to congratulate for this tremendously entertaining affair.
And if Bayani Fernando is running this race (naturally, it had to be named after him), I hope to God that he trained. You can bet that on the way to the finish line there will be women runners flying past him.
It’s just a question of how many.
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E-mail the author at tanyalara@yahoo.com.
