Lousy Mizuno Wave Run

From our limited event experience, the Mizuno Wave Run 2007 at Bedok Reservoir has got to be the worst of the worst event so far. Seriously, I can’t imagine an event being worse than this. Well… actually, it’s pretty easy to make an event worse than this, but this type of professionally organized event from a famous name in the sporting world certainly dun get any worse.

First of all it rained heavily last night, right up to 6+am this morning. With this in mind, we know that it’s going to be a wet wet wet run. But since we’re west side dwellers and have never ran in Bedok before, we didn’t expect the ground to muddy. Yes, muddy! Ok, so this is not the event organisers’ fault, but from now on, everything else is.

When we arrived, we were busy looking for the bags deposit area to deposit our bags. So we approached an event staff, which pointed us in the wrong direction. Becos of this, we wasted a lot of time in searching for the baggage van and couldn’t do our warm up properly and couldn’t start the event on time other runners.

Next, there are 2 serious choke points right about 200 metres from the starting point. This was certainly something unexpected. This caused a huge human traffic jam that lasted around 10mins before we could get out.

At around the 3.5-4km mark, we passed the finishing line. Apparently, the runners will mark a circuit elsewhere and eventually completing the race using the same 3-4km part of the track. Hmm… definitely a source of confusion. I really didn’t expect such a ‘track reuse’ scenario to occur. And the thing is, there is a lack of ushers at the fork road after this and we took a wrong turn that led us to some Aljunied GRC morning event! Who would have thought that they had decided to organise 2 events at the same location? Save on tentage rental perhaps? Confusion confusion confusion.

Wet and confused and frustrated, we decided to stop running and head back to the end point to collect our goodie bags and take a sip of water. There is 1 goodie bag queue, which was good and well organised. Until we discovered that there was 2 queues, one for competitive runners and one for non-competitive. Frustrated again, we joined the competitive runners queue which we had registered for and managed to get our goodie bags in less than a minute. But I suppose the real confusion started after this. In the 30 mins after we collected our goodie bags, queues started forming everywhere, and everywhere, and everywhere. From that 1 queue in the beginning to about 6 queues starting from everywhere. Some queues even split into 2 only to remerge further down. Can u imagine the confusion? Absolute lack of queue control. Luckily, we’ve already collected ours.

The final straw came from the baggage collection. The bags were collected in 2 or 3 lorrys at the starting point and ferried to the ending point. In the time that the runners were running, I seriously don’t know what the event organisers are doing. Only when the runners are back and going to collect their bags did they start unloading the lorry. And mind you, it’s a lorry, totally unorganised. How are u going to find 1 single bag in the heap of bags now. So they started unloading the bag one by one. By this time, runners are all frustrated. Some runners even went up on the lorry to help with the unloading. I think this is a serious breach of security. Where’s the crowd control? What is someone just take any bag and run? The staff didn’t even check the bib number of the runner? Anyway, we were there during the agonizingly slow and unsecured bag retrieval process and took around 30-45min before our bag emerge. Even then, we have to shout out our numbers: “1234 here! Pass that bag here!” It’s like a mini stock exchange market with people shouting all over the place, raised hands, bib papers in the air, bags being passed around overhead. It’s was amusing on hindsight, but definitely irritating on the actual ground.

That sums it up. Lousy run. Will we join again next year? Chances are pretty low.

-Dear1