National Geographic Earth Day Run 2019

This was National Geographic Earth Day Run's 2nd edition in Malaysia, if I'm not mistaken. We were lucky to be able to join the first one held last year.

Both editions were held at Gamuda Walk Mall in Kota Kemuning, and there were plenty of sponsors' booth set up at race village.

The run supports a theme that promotes environmental efforts, so one of the initiative is to reduce single use plastics.

So in our race pack, we were provided with a water bottle and we could fill it with water from refillable  pumps at water stations along the route.

Our event t-shirt also wasn't packed in plastic bags unlike race t-shirts at other running events.

Effectively reducing the amount of rubbish at the run.

There are also compost bin located at the race village where we could throw our banana peels.

Despite the 15K being flagged-off at 6:30am and 5K at 7:20am, we were there very early at 4:00am.

Hubby also helped out at the race kit collection counter that morning and I helped out a bit until a few student volunteers arrived to assist him.

Race kit collection line at 5:15am and it got significantly longer 30 minutes later.

There were only two counters opened that morning so I guess runners had to be patient in getting their race kits.

Surprisingly, there were still soooooo many runners who didn't collect their race kit the week before and pretty soon, a long line formed at the counter.

Despite the counter being opened as early as 4:30am, the queue wasn't cleared when the 15K category was flagged-off.

A few 15K runners were grumbling because they said they didn't have enough time to warm up and one runner blamed the "slow" race kit because it had cost him a podium finish.

All I can say,  we could either collect it on normal race kit collection days (which was held for two days the week before) or arrive early to collect it to avoid a late start for our run. You know, plan and prepare our own race...

While waiting for flag-off, I went around the race village to check out the booths there. Which was a good thing because after the run, the place was already crowded with runners who had finished.

I even managed to redeem a free breakfast.
Thanks Gamuda Land!

The queue for ice-cream was sooooo long after the run so I decided to skip the ice cream queue. *sob*

The weather was good that morning and with a a flat route, the NatGeo Run is a good run to get a PB. For me, I spent more time taking photos and sprinting after fast friends to take their photos too.

It was a fun albeit busy morning for us but we enjoyed it.

Photos taken during National Geographic Earth Day Run 2019 are all uploaded at our Facebook page, Cik Arnab & En Kura-Kura.

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