it didn't really hit me until i got there that it was a huge event, with a million runners in 25 cities, 11,000 of us here in Singapore.
a total of 10 million kilometres would have been run in aid of the UN Refugee Agency, World Wildlife Foundation and the Lance Armstrong Live Strong Foundation.
it was raining very heavily a few hours before the race was due to start, and some of us were wondering if we should bother making the trip down.
in the end, we all did, but my trip down was not without drama.
because of the rain, i felt it expedient to rest for a while before the run, and so i lay on my bed.
the next thing i knew, it was 3pm, and i was meant to meet my classmates at 3pm at city hall.
in a matter of seconds, i was out of the house in a sprint, which would be all the warm up i'd be getting.
thankfully, i met the rest of the runners from my class at the Bag Deposit, and we stretched, waited and took a pre-race photo before joining the Pen 2 runners.
for the first 2.5 km, i comfortably kept pace with Ted Kin and Gerald. thereafter, i found myself lacking the will to push myself any further, and just dropped back.
a kilometre later, i found Elliot and John Chris, and i kept pace with them up to the half-way point.
during my run with them, i kicked a fallen road sign, though i managed to regain my balance with little loss of dignity. however, that slight mishap ruined my right ankle, and for the rest of the race, my walking was more due to the pain when i put pressure on it than anything else.
nonetheless, i finished the race just as the race clock showed 1:35 and a few seconds (so subtracting 15 minutes 'cos we were in Pen 2, that means i finished the 10km in 80 minutes), and after checking with the rest (well at least jim, elliot and jc; tedkin and gerald were, expectedly, a full 5 minutes in front of me), it seems i crossed the finishing line around the same time as most of them, so i wasn't as disastrously slow as i had thought.
after a post-race photo, we headed for dinner at Raffles City, and then back to the Padang for the concert.
The Great Spy Experiment was pretty good for a local band, and i think they're the second best local act i've heard next to Electrico.
undoubtedly though, the main attraction was Boys Like Girls, and they did not disappoint, despite only playing a 20-minute set. the brevity of it was partially due to a 3-song medley they opened with involving Hero/Heroine, Five Minutes to Midnight and Dance Hall Drug.
they then played Broken Man, Heels Over Head, and ended with Thunder.
the encore performance was, expectedly, The Great Escape, and in the absence of songs i'd hoped would be played like On Top Of The World and Holiday, the last 2 songs were my favourite of the night.
i then went to meet Mel and Nic at the Nokia Arena, where i caught the last song performed by Hong Kong's My Little Airport.
we then made our way to the Chillout Stage (the Esplanade concourse; i think they used this same venue label during Mosaic earlier this year), where we listened to performances by 4 Imaginary Boys (A DJ set) and Nicholas from diseased music.
these alternative artistes were quite new to me, and my first experience of BayBeats was pretty cool.
