Second Link Half Marathon

This morning, I woke up at 3am and start to prepare myself for the Second Link Marathon. This is my first time joining the Second Link Marathon and I have signed up for a Half Marathon. I started driving at 3:45am, picked up three runners from Singapore on the way. After filling up the tank and through the Singapore and Malaysia immigration, I arrive at the Gelang Patah R&R at 4:45am. I have no problem in finding a parking space at one of the petrol station. Seems that most of the Malaysian runner comes by bus.

First, I need to register the attendance at the counter for Category C (Men's Open Half Marathon). There are about 100+ runners with a few from Africa. Most runners are local Malaysian with up to 16 Singapore runners joining the Half Marathon. Interesting is that because there are too few women signing up the half marathon, they cancelled the Women's Open. Two women actually come and join the Men's Open and run together with the men. The run did not use Champion chip. Instead, runners collects a black bracelet at the start and a pink ribbon at U-turn point to prove that they finish the race. Time is also manually clocked as well.

The start is at the Tanjung Kupang Toll plaza and first goes towards Singapore, then U-turn and head towards Malaysia. At the 8.5km mark, there is another U-turn and finally finish just after the Toll plaza.


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The route has alternating uphill and downhill with no shade at all. Luckily, it starts at 6:15am and the sun was very mild after sunrise, only getting strong at starting at 8am+. The authority hold off traffic for us to cross to the inner lane and we mostly run on the inner lane of the road except when we are cross the immigration complex. The authority did a good job in temporarily blocking the traffic and allow us to get into the inner lane.

There is no distance mark until the last 5km. But since it is on a highway, there are highway distance mark every 100m to keep runner informed. The biggest complaint of the run is the water stations. Throughout the half marathon, there are basically only 3 water points (actually 2, but one of it you can get the water before and after the U-turn) and 2 wet sponge points. The water point only provide plain water and the bottle size is only 300ml. The first 3 water points are at 6km, 13km, and 17km marks. I almost run into dehydration since my fluid lost rate is 1 liter per hour. I lost about 2% body weight of fluid by the end of the race.

Having a women runner also make it interesting. It just happened that one of the women runner runs at about my pace. She has kept a very constant pace throughout the 21km while I adopt a run-and-walk strategy (running in downhill/flat, walking in uphill/flat). Whenever, I am in running phase, I open up a gap. Then, when I switch to walking phase, she slowly closed the gap and passed me. At the end, after 2 hr 27 mins, our finishing time is less than 30 second difference.

The end result is 2:27:08, a personal best for me though the distance is only 20.88km as recording on my forerunner. This is significantly faster than my AHM time of 2:44:00. I finished at position 56 among the Men's Half Marathon. I am happy with the result. And I have a much higher run-to-walk ratio (I think about 40:60 ratio) than my AHM (roughly 10:90 ratio).

The Goodie Bag for it also not very good. The event t-shirt is a simple t-shirt.


Only the top 130 finisher in each category can get the finisher medal. The Quality also not good. I have stain on the medal when I got it. I have to clean it up with alcohol before taking the picture.