JB City Eco Challenge – Behind the Scene

Roughly after one full month of serious planning and preparation by the event management team for the first ever Eco Challenge race in a big city , it now came to the final preparation day – race registration day.

Saturday, May 30th, 2009. Dataran Bandaraya Johor Bahru.

The Race Registration

I began the morning with a full load breakfast of nasi lemak and teh tarik at a mamak nearby my house. It was raining heavily nearby Skudai, but fortunately not that much pouring at Dataran Bandaraya JB where the race registration should take place.

With only four crew members (not including Race Director) helping to set up the registration booth, we began our duty at 1015hrs. Among what we had to do that morning may be best represented by the pictures I took (easy excuse for not writing too much and bore you to death)

These are the bike race number for the elite participants (men’s and mixed), totaling 25 teams altogether. The elite participants will also be wearing a waterproof bib number for easy recognition

One crew member was helping to attach the safety pins to the race numbers (I was actually trying the macro mode on my digital camera)

Crew members at work

Lastly, we need to make sure the goodie bags prepared by MBJB (Majlis Bandaraya Johor Bahru) are sufficient for everybody.

PowerBar has sponsored each participants with one Powerbar Performance Bar and one PowerBar Gel. The most generous goodie bag so far (because it did make me regret not participating the race, sigh). If I were participating and getting one of this goodie bag, I would already taken out all the contents, lay them on the bed or floor, and took a picture of it and display it on my blog. I tell you, these goodie bags look like they almost explode – over capacity. I call them the GEMUK (fat) goodie bag. Hehehe.

One of the contents of the GEMUK goodie bag.

While waiting for participants to arrive and register, I looked through the registration list and these surely made my day.

Ada yang poyo.

Peminat Rahlah Ram pun ada!

”Bye-bye, I balik kampung dulu ye!”

While I was busy at the registration desk, some other crew members were helping to put up the banners. These are not just average Joe guys we grabbed besides the road. They are among top triathletes in JB, and they are very friendly, helpful and amazingly fun to be with. Just look at how more-than-willing they were to help.

How could you ever feel tired when working with them? You’ll be more tired of laughing.

The famous tower clock at Dataran Bandaraya.

At one point, we had to move our registration desk from the astaka to inside the hall because it was getting hotter to stay outside.

XTERRA Malaysia also opened a booth for anyone who wishes to register their participation for the event at Kuantan, next week. Seen here Julie a.k.a missjewelz as the representative from XTERRA.

”Hmm, I wonder what she was wondering about…”

My favorite number – 7

Me at work.

Race Director (Mahdhir Dale) giving some brief explanation to some of the elites about the course of the race

Race Briefing & Carboloading Dinner

Race briefing started at about 1745hrs. In total, about 120 athletes from running and triathlon backgrounds took part for this first ever eco challenge in JB. But not everybody managed to come for the race briefing, which might punished them by going to the wrong route or not collecting enough race ribbons on the race day. Now I know why it is important for participants to always attend race briefing, whether you are first timers or not.

Participants were shown the race course map, the basic rules, the penalties, and all these are guided with real pictures of the places they need to go like the mountain bike off road track, the kayaking start and u-turn point, the obstacle run course and even the starting point.

The carboloading went smooth all the way as well. Well, I cannot comment much about the quality and quantity of food as I did not managed to eat anything until everybody has left.

Final Preparation

After all participants finished with their carboloading, we went outside to make sure everything needed for the race day morning is in good order. And we still have some extra energy to have fun. It’s easy to forget how tired we were after a very long day when being around friends like this.

You can see the clock tower was showing almost 2100hrs. But I only get to sleep 6 hours later. After finishing our job at Dataran Bandaraya, we went for some quick supper, then I headed to the Race Director’s house to help out with some other tiny bits of this and thats. 0300hrs, I went to bed and was superbly glad to put and stretch my back on it. It was such a relief after those long hours standing and walking. It was a great but tiring long day.

Ok, report for race day will come out soon. How soon? Don’t bother to guess. Just come and re-visit this blog as soon as you have some ‘ngular time’ at work.