Running with the force

What an interesting experience I had while running at the garden yesterday evening.

The main server at my company went down yesterday since lunch time, up till the end of the working day. No internet, no email, no SAP – which means not much work can be done without those things.

So, at 5pm sharp, I left the office (I should have done that an hour earlier) and drove myself to the garden – to run.

I get to start running just slightly after 5.30pm, and I went on my own way with the target to run at least 45 minutes, or 1 hour. Few minutes into the run, I bumped into some friends, and detoured my way and follow the group.

After making one loop, I saw a platoon of the elite force from the Johor Military Force (JMF) running in the opposite direction. My rough guestimate says that there was about 30 strong men altogether. They were singing while running, you know, the army way of singing. When they passed my running group, I heard they were saying (or singing), something that goes like this;

”… Serahkan nyawamu pada Tuhan…
Serahkan awekmu pada kawan…”

I laughed. And upon hearing that interesting lyric coming out from the platoon, I decided to detour and run with them, following the platoon closely at the back.

It was fun, but it was tough too. Fun because while running I was actually enjoying the songs they were singing, and the noises they made while running. They shouted something like, ”Uh.. ah… uh… ah...” with every two steps of their runs. Tough because they were running at a faster pace than I normally do. I was the only runner (or civilian in this case?) in that group running in my red sleeveless t-shirt. The others were in black.

There was one guy leading that platoon, running at the front most, wearing the army jacket (the others were just wearing black round neck t-shirts with writings like “Elite Force”, and shorts), to which when I asked one guy at the back, he replied by telling me that that guy in front is no other than Raja Muda Johor (RMJ) himself.

I was shocked as I never saw or met RMJ before, other than from one episode of Majalah 3 long long time ago. I was also afraid if he would scold me for following his strong team of elite force. So, I slowed down a bit and continued following them slightly further behind, but still able to hear their singings.

At the end, they stopped running and began their physical exercise at the marching field opposite the Istana, and I continued my journey until I reached my 50th minutes of running.

What an experience. It would be better if I was running with my camera phone. A video of something like that would be interesting, aye?