Kilometer 888: Eng’gfinity: The Engineering Centennial Run

Posted July 18th, 2010 by wilson

Success

With or without “fight” problems, I would have joined this race because of my ties to the College. Not only was I a student there for 7 years, I am also now a part of the faculty. And years ago, I was also tangentially involved with the College’s Student Council, which is the entity behind the event.

It is also true however, that I came into this race with the goal of re-learning how to go all-out - to push the boundaries, exceed limits, and simply “hang on” till the finishline is crossed. After 44 minutes of hard, consistent effort, I could say that there is still some “fight” left in me after all. I could still “pull the trigger” and “live on the red line”, so to speak. True, it was still not a PB(the distance is short of 300 meters), and a full is way different from a 10K, but it is still a big relief for me.

Anyway, enough about me. Let’s talk about the race.

Fail

As satisfied as I was with my performance, and as much as I love the institution, I would not say that it was a “dream race” or that it was “close to perfect”. Because the truth is, it’s not. Far from it.

It has the typical shortcomings of a small event missing the leadership of an experienced race director.

The race started off late.

When I first came across the water stations, volunteers and Council people were simply standing there, doing nothing. I had to tell them to get more involved by handing out cups to runners.

And the race marshals - well, well. Sad to say, they were the weakest link this morning. A lot of runners got lost this morning, although it was not as disastrous as the PID. The worst that happened was a change in the “coverage sequence”.

(To give you a rough idea, it was supposed to be something like Loop - Oval - Loop - Oval. Some ended up doing Loop - Loop - Oval - Oval. Go figure.)

And I already mentioned the distance being short by 300m.

The race was not entirely without merit though. There is, after all, Itemhound.

What’s really exciting

Okay, it is still RFID technology, no different from the ChampionChip(there is a difference when it comes to the frequency range, but I won’t get into that). Accuracy-wise, there is no difference. Truth be told, I won’t be surprised if it is still somewhat “buggy” at the moment.

(Itemhound actually first tested its technology in the Sun Cellular Event months ago)

What excites me though are the possibilities that Itemhound represents. I no longer have any hope for the registration fees going back to their old levels, but I am hopeful that our 300-500 would eventually do more for us. I mean, just look at this race - it’s a usual 300-350 race, there is no Runrio or RACE behind it, yet it has chiptiming(”striptiming” actually). That could only be possible with a local alternative to ChampionChip or DTAG(the technology that would be used in CAMSUR) - the best of which at the moment is Itemhound.

My dream is that in the future, almost all of our races, even those with just 300 pesos registration fees would have chip or striptiming technology. It would be so normal in races it’d eventually “phase out” barcode based timing. That’d also remove the excuse of the bigger races for being expensive - “It’s because of the timing chip!”. That won’t eliminate the “expensive” races, but chiptiming in low-end races would force them to clean their acts up, improve, and provided even more added value.

What about the bugs? Well, I know the people behind Itemhound personally, and believe me, things could only get better from here on out. There are pretty talented guys working on this thing, and it IS going to work. Brace for change, people, because it is coming.

If that’s not worth getting excited about, then I don’t know what is.

Oh, and did I already mention that Itemhound is a startup company from the College? Simply fitting for the event, right?

Nice number!

***RACE SUMMARY***
Event: Eng’gfinity: The Engineering Centennial Run
Date/Time: July 18, 2010, 5:30am
Venue: UP Diliman
Length: 10 kilometers
Time: 44:00(unofficial)
Racer/Bib Number: 385

Tags: 10K, ChampionChip, Eng'gfinity: The Engineering Centennial Run, Itemhound, Philippine Independence Day Half Marathon