Singapore and Malaysia 2018, May 05 (The Temperature Strikes Back)

Got the train around to Fort Canning Park, bit of a walk uphill to get to the actual park from the closest train station though. Waited around for the Battlebox tour to start at 9:45am, the staff were a bit late. The tour was a guided underground headquarters bunker tour about World War 2, Singapore being invaded by Japan and surrendered. An interesting story, I don't know a whole lot about Malaysia and Singapore during the wars. The only negative was no photos allowed.

Outside Battlebox.

Walked back down the hill to Orchard Road, aka shopping mall road. Not as hot walking outside today. Just had time for lunch, then went to a pre-booked session at Sandbox VR. For this you get put in a room with a VR headset and motion detection gear, there's a few different games but in each one you have to shoot all of the enemies that are invading your area - a lot like those Call Of Duty zombie survival mode mini-games.

The technology is very cool, the only limitation is you can't move around too much, have to stay within a designated square. I tried looking around a lot at the start to check out all of the entrances, like you would do in a normal FPS game, but you can get dizzy very quickly doing this! You can revive the other players when they die by touching them on the shoulder for a few seconds, but it was a little confusing when you were supposed to do this. I got the game MVP with 56% accuracy, I was trying to be accurate and go for head shots, but I'm not actually sure if that mattered.

Train back to the hotel, fiddled around blindly at the back of the TV, since it was attached to the wall, and managed to get a HDMI cable attached to stream some NBA games. Wouldn't normally be in the hotel during the afternoon but was getting a quick bit of rest and preparing for the Star Wars Run at 5:00pm.

In the race instructions they said you had to get to the start by 4:30pm or you might not be allowed to line up - a complete lie. I got a good spot near the front due to this misinformation, but they were still letting people show up until like 5:10pm and even seemed to delay the start for them. They had two separate lines on the F1 grid for the light side and dark side, but only my section (light side) was in the shade from the pit buildings at the beginning!

I didn't think I'd win this race but thought I could do alright...that was until I saw some Kenyan runners doing their warmup. The prizes weren't huge, but $1000 and a $600 Garmin watch for first is reasonable, still wouldn't provide much profit if you travelled just for this.

Anyway, the half hour prior to the race I spent stretching out my hamstring, since it was feeling pretty bad since yesterday, but getting a little better. Right before the start the stupid 60, 70 and 80 minutes pacers all came right up to the front! I'm here planning to run under 45 minutes, yet a 80 minute pacer with balloons thinks they need to start in front of me, and start taking group selfies, so stupid.

I think I'm just behind the two green balloons.

Finally we were off, I got out of the way of the pacers just before the start, but nearly crashed into slow people in the front few rows, as they were basically at walking speed. I went out way too quick at the start, about 4:00/km for the first two kilometres in the heat. It was such a bad strategy, probably because of the minor injury I didn't have a race plan in mind. I realised I should slow down by the third kilometre but had already done the damage. Drink stations were every 2.5 kilometres but the cups were so tiny they did not help, so I was dead before getting to the 5km 'drink' station.

I was feeling worse in the second half going along Gardens By The Bay, but didn't slow down too much, a few near misses with pedestrians though. The last couple of kilometres back over the bridge was pretty terrible, but managed to make the finish line without stopping. My time was 42:20 but Garmin only registered 9.74 kilometres, maybe it missed a bit somewhere. Official times was 42:15 23rd of 2245 and Jason 49:42 76th. They don't have a results leaderboard, only a manual name search, so I don't know who the winners were.

I grabbed a carton of drink at the end, I thought it was some kind of juice but it was coconut water! Yuck! I must have gone through about eight cups of water instead, got another t-shirt and a finisher medal as well. Overall a fun race, the only issues were the long wait to start and inadequate drink stations.

I walked around and did a lot of stretching of my calf which was starting to cram up, got some dinner and back to the hotel. Rested again, then out to try the Clarke Quay again. Had better timing tonight, getting on a cruise almost immediately. The cruise went out to Marina Bay for a loop and came back, good views at night, lucky to sit on the good side for photos. The Singapore Flyer was red and blue to celebrate the Star Wars Run apparently.

The merlion.

Marina Bay Sands.

Step: 12,000 (2 hours) + 10km run etc.