The 14th Amari Watergate & BMW Thailand Charity Midnight Run in Bangkok, 8th October 2011; Running Night

The 14th Amari Watergate & BMW Thailand Charity Midnight Run in Bangkok, 8th October 2011; Running Night

One of the reasons I came to Bangkok this time around, was besides getting a new passport, the 14th Amari Watergate & BMW Thailand Charity Midnight Run in Bangkok, 8th October 2011.

It was an interesting event, very busy, loads of Thai and international runners gathering together well before midnight at the Amari Watergate in order to run either a 6km or 12 km run.

It could've been easily 4 to 5000 runners, as expected.

The course map

Mostly we ran on Phetchaburi road but we also run up Asoke, took a right at Sukhumvit up till Soi 5 and through the Grace hotel we made it back on Soi 3. This was all good and I enjoyed running along Sukhumvit.

At the start of the run I had some problems with my running watch and couldn't activate it, I have 3 one second 'runs' on it. Not good and not very happy about that! Running in the dark, the movement and darkness don't make it any easier to set the watch neither. I managed to start pretty much in the front row, which made it easy check my time upon returning. The downside of starting in that front row was that pretty much everybody else seemed to pass me by. During the run I had severe muscle problems in my calves, due to the fact that during my last training run I started to practice a different running style, landing more on the front of my feet compared to what I do right now, on the back of my foot.

One more t-shirt and medal to add my ever growing collection

At midnight I was also relatively tired, although I ran a 1.03.37 time, I hoped to be under the 1 hour mark. In general I'm not too sure if I will do a midnight run again, I'm more than happy to start running 'stupid' early in the morning or train late during the afternoon but a midnight start is a different cooky. It needs to be seen if i will do a similar run again.

Registration yesterday morning at the Amari Watergate

What was very interesting is to run around the downtown part of the city and partly weaving your way through traffic. Most of the traffic is diverted but it seems impossible to shut down traffic completely. Makes for some interesting crossroad crossings at times!

When I reached the 3km mark, the two front runners already passed me on the opposite side of the road (achieving a new course record of 23.45, well done!) and they were running between cars as well. They caught the tail end of a traffic jam that couldn't be cleared before they reached that point.

Right now I'm not sure where and when my next run will be but I'm sure that I will keep you updated!

Camille