December 15th, 2013
As I was not sure whether the registration for the Guangzhou Marathon would be successful, I asked Chinese running colleagues to register me for the Zhuhai Half Marathon, which was scheduled for December 15th, 2013. (hier die offizielle Webseite)
Together with a colleague from our company and a Spanish running colleague, we went to Zhuhai on Saturday afternoon. It was about a 2-hour drive from Guangzhou. By many Chinese Zhuhai is considered to be a city with a high recreational value. Probably because of the neighboring city - Macao, the big gambling paradise.
Located directly at the South China Sea makes it additionally attractive for many people. Until 5 pm on Saturday we had to pick up our starting documents, which went smoothly. In Zhuhai we met another colleague from our company and a running colleague from Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, the weather forecast for Sunday was not great. Continuous rain was forecasted, which was unusual for this time of the year. And that was exactly how it was on Sunday morning. It rained, not heavily, but it was wet and humid. The temperature was 16 degrees, which at least made short running clothes possible. For all three running events (5Km, 10Km, 21Km) combined, the announced number of participants was about 10,000..
The race started at 8am. The three starting blocks for the three running courses were separated by about 20m. As usual at Chinese running events, there were a lot of runners who were carrying some kind of flags with them during the run. The course was flat and ran partly along the sea.
Three weeks earlier at the Guangzhou Marathon (for which I luckily got a seat) I have passed the half marathon mark in 2 hours 20 minutes. Considering this a finishing time of 2 hours 8 minutes was realistic for me at this race. Although still raining, I needed 58 minutes for the first 10 km, which didn't look bad at all. The second half went better and better and soon I realized that even a finish time of around 2 hours was possible.
And that's how it was. Tthe last two kilometers I was running at an average pace of 5 minutes per kilometer and finally the official finishing time was 1 hour 59 minutes 34 seconds. But like in Guangzhou, only gross times were measured. My own net time was about a minute faster. All in all a nice result ...