The Tuna Run has lots of fan fare but has less substance

For my 1st 5Km. run, I clocked in at 41 minutes with a nagging injury to my right patella i got from playing in our usual Sunday church basketball in Dasmarinas Village. Arguably the most popular running events, the Century Tuna Superbods run has been heavily promoted and as it turned out, it generated over 10,000 runners, from what I've gathered, that's far less than the number of participants of the Milo Marathon event.

The Tuna Run, aptly my shortened name for this running event, in my view is really not an event for the serious runner. With models posing as water stations staff, hoping that their presence and beautiful looks will matter to give you that 2nd or 3rd wind in the race, not to mention the fact that they are using plastic cups as a substitute for the environmentally accepted paper kind, the event has a party atmosphere to showcase more of your good looks and nice outfits than how you run the race. It is actually a running event if you "want to be seen".

I registered on-line on February 12, 2010, paid the fees with a site notice that the package will be given to me before the February 19, 2010. Still no package 24 hours till Gun time. Good thing I was able to find on run day the persons responsible for the bib and time chip and they gave me back the Php 100.00 delivery charge on the package. But that was still close. We have the tools to communicate to our customers directly and the organizers didn't use them. I didn't receive any SMS notice or bulletin about how I am going to proceed if ever I do not have my package.

To maximize media promotion of the product, the marathon has 4 running events, which included a confidence builder 3k event. You can just imagine the sheer volume of runners if you combine both participants from the lesser distance events. Normal practice dictates that you start the longer distance first, which was scheduled to begin at 5:20am (kinda late isn't it?), then the next at 5:35am and so forth. The schedule caused a lot of confusion to a lot of runners. Some 5k runners accidentally went to the 10k run, while some 10k participants invaded the 21k space. The organizers packed a lot of bodies in a limited usable road cover.

After the race, and with a handful still running the 21k at around 6:30am, the runners were sent to a large area to receive your goodies, giveaways, and ego shirts from the sponsors. But the limited sight of the claiming booths lessened the throughput time for the event staff to fulfill the claim thus creating a such a long line with an average standing period of 30, 45 minutes close to an hour, but I gotta hand it to Century Tuna and its sponsors, there was bottomless snacks and loot bags for all.

With all the glamor and publicity put into "The Run of the Century", the organizers has a lot of work to do to gain form and fulfill its event promise. Still, a lot of people benefited from the event. Century Tuna is becoming a great contributor in the awareness of a fit and healthy lifestyle.