With the recent visit of my balikbayan daughter last April, I have not been on any weekend road race for over a month. Having again found time, I am back to my regular weekend routine. I felt trilled and excited to participate on the Highlands Mizuno Fun-Run Challenge on 15May11 which is a trail and mountain run at the Tagaytay Highlands.
Being a trail run and out of metro Manila I was not expecting a sizeable number of participants, however I was surprised that the emcee mentioned that there are 820+ participants joining the 15K, 10K and 5K categories.
At around 6:14am the 10K participants numbering 350+ were started. I have always enjoyed my weekend road races but any trail run that I have participated has always been something special for me. I just cannot explain the trill and joy in running, walking and even crawling on trails and mountain slopes. The climbs are lung busting and down hills are knee breakers. With the picturesque scene and clean air, the combine chemistry I think makes a trail run rank better than a road run. While normally we do have cool weather at the Highlands as expected being right in the middle of summer temperature was really high and the humidity high even early in the morning.
The route was well marked with directional and distance signs with dangerous cliffs marked with temporary wooden guard rails for the safety of the runners. The hydration supply all throughout the route was more than adequate. I wish to congratulate the organizers and Mizuno for a well organized run. Unlike in previous trail runs in the Highlands on this occasion there were no back tracking on the route instead it was a single loop from Saratoga to Midlands and to the mountain leading to Highlands and down to the Batino entry gate of the Highlands before finishing at the Saratoga.
The distance that registered on my Garmin 310xt was only 9.54 for the 10K but I assume the difference is due to the vertical distance up/down along the trail. Unofficially I completed the course in 01h 25m 07s. It was a lung busting morning, but, again the difficulty was the trill of the day.
