Last Sunday, I joined Takbo.ph/Reinier Pacific International Aid Station with two goals in mind. First, to cheer marathoners/half marathoners as they crossed our station, to provide fruits, liniment and petroleum jelly, with the latter becoming my main task that day. I must admit my task was very unusual, on the first few hours of the race, I was the only person from the team holding that piece of plastic with Petroleum Jelly on it. There were only a few runners who would passed by to get some slab and apply PJelly on their body. I find it funny as I observed some of them used it. Some runners would apply it in their hands like as if its some kind of hand lotion, some would apply it in their arms and the worst when I heard somebody shouted “nye petroleum jelly pla to! yuck!”. I guess the runner thought it was some kind of energy gel. Although my task was boring, however I did enjoy it and find it very amusing. I had a blast that day as we worked in tandem. Personally I was happy to give back the support I got from them when I joined my first marathon. As part of the support team, I realize that there are things that need to be improved next time:

• We should have some sort of dividing line so we don’t end up occupying a huge portion of the road. Many times a marshal from Milo would be reminding us to back-off a little bit as we’re almost blocking runner’s way.
• When providing fruits, stick to your location and let them decide if they should get it or not. There’s an instance wherein some of us would run after the runner when he/she missed the fruit.
• Provide a location (at least 2 meters away from the main road) where runners can go to have liniment sprayed on their legs. What we did last Sunday was we sprayed liniment on the same road where they ran. We realized later that it made the road very slippery as some liquid from the ointment found its way to the road’s surface. We did a simple “fix” by putting cartons over the slippery section of the road.

I observed as part of the support team was that whenever runners would see us, they would smile back and acknowledged our presence; or raised their arms as if they already crossed the finish line; and from what I’ve noticed they seemed to run faster after they crossed our station! I asked Milo Marathon 42km champ Cris Sabal and asked him if cheering really did help runner and his reply was “Pare laking tulong yun, nakakaboost tlaga ng morale. Dapat ganyan lagi gawin nten sa mga marathon run para tumaas standard nten katulad sa ibang bansa”. From all the runners blog I read, it seems that they love what we’ve done. I hope this will become regular fixtures in our road races.

Another important thing I was able to observe was the marathoner’s form. They are all very lean (especially the first batch of  runners) and muscled! Not a single soul I saw with extra fat layer of skin in their abs. Their calves and quads were screaming mad! Their facial expression as I saw them from afar was relaxed and so with their breathing. Some ran “tall” (e.g straight body) with very quick leg turn-over while majority were leaning forward from their ankle up while running (Pinoy marathoners here are Chi/Pose practitioners?) with a higher back-kick. One thing they have in common, they all seemed to run effortlessly.

I must admit I have this “inggit” factor when I saw them. I promise myself to do good on next year’s Milo elimination round so I can join finals and be part of the very few Milo finalist here in our country. I mean c’mon this is our version of Boston Marathon yeah? So come Milo Elimination next year, I will do all my best to go sub 4…I must be there!

I would like to thank Sir Amado and Reiner Pacific team for the breakfast and delicious lunch that day. Kudos to fellow takbo.ph support people for the help, we did great! I hope we can do this more often!

Pictures by Emil Ancheta: