COAST to COAST 2014

COAST to COAST 503/2014

25-28 December 2014

sitiawan,perak to kuala terengganu

Photo with some participants and my support crew of c2c

2014 Coast to Coast 503- A land So Far!!

The Pioneering edition of Coast to Coast 503 started at the West Coast in Setiawan on 25th Dec 2014, and finished at the East Coast Pantai Batu Buruk in Kuala Terengganu on 27th Dec 2014.

Started at one coast and ended at the other coast. But it's not exactly a Coast to Coast, and it's not 503km either. It's shorter.

Although I have successfully completed the recce of the whole route of 10 sectors on 20-21 Dec without much problem, as every Malaysian should know by now, the worst flood disaster in Malaysia was just waiting to happen and got worst as the days went by…

Khoo Kay Hao put in a solid run for Sector 1 from the bridge crossing at Marina Island, Lumut, to Seri Iskandar 50km away . It was not overly sunny with mostly overcast weather, but the humidity and the heat of the day got to him. Supported by his brother, he drank 4 litres of water to get to the finish in about 6h30m…Then he rushed to the start of the 4th sector to check out the road conditions over the other side of the mountain range of Titiwangsa…

Yew Khuay was a man on mission right from the word go just before 3pm. The target was to outrun the rain apparently which was about to pour. Sure enough, it poured within the first two hours, then it stopped, and the sun came out and stayed dry until the end. Supported by two cars and probably about 5 crews, Yew Khuay powered himself through the course, through Ipoh city, passed Simpang Pulai, to finish at the start of the climb of Titiwangsa Mountain range on its way to Cameron Highland. He took only slightly over 5hrs to pass on the baton at about 8pm to Fakhrul Rambo, who was to take on the toughest sector of C2C.

It's almost like 50km climb all the way from start to finish of this sector, but doing this all in the dark seems to have helped. Fakhrul delivered an extraordinary performance to cover his sector of 50km uphill in about 6h51m. Up until this point, the Run is about 2 hrs ahead of schedule..

Kay Hao has rested well enough to carry on his sector 4, which happened to be all downhill for the next 50km. Except that he was stopped by a landslide at 49km point after about 6h40m. Indeed a fine effort to have run 2x 50km within 26hrs….

As we have feared before, Gua Musang continued to be flooded since 24th Dec…all possible routes to Gua Musang were closed..Sector 5 could not continue…could we have just let C2C ended here in this way?

Of course not.

Plan B was activated immediately at 9:30am on 26th Dec, but it was at just before 10am that Choo Meh Wah and Ooi Heng Aik (both are from Dungun, Terengganu) took off from Pantai Batu Buruk to run in the reverse direction. The idea is for sector 10 to be run in the reverse direction towards Gua Musang, so that we could run as much as its possible, while waiting for the floods to ease in the next two days.

The two barefoot guys took nearly 8.5hrs to cover a longer sector of over 53km, and their progress was not helped by the confusing signs at certain smaller roads at the oil palm plantation, which was very scenic though…

Strong Din Tawang and skinny Boon joined force at about 6:40pm to run Sector 9 towards the direction of Tasik Kenyir. It got dark soon after that as they ran mostly towards the Kota Bahru direction along the east coast before they started to run inwards to Tasik Kenyir…

Both started the run strongly, but slowed down as it started to get dark and rainy. Then they took it easy and aimed to use up the allocated 7 hours. This took them over 6h50m to get to the entrance to Taman Tasik Kenyir.

With now 303km worth of sectors 1,2,3,4, 10 and 9, Seow Kong and Mahendra took over the baton, both thinking of running the whole 100km of Sector 8 and then Sector 7 around the Lake Kenyir.

No further than 5km from the start, we came across a low lying bridge which was inaccessible to cars due to the knee high flood covering the road. Our support crew has to drive via another way to go around the flood to get to the other side of the flood.

This sector was mostly undulating, some hills to walk up, and some to run down, Rain kept raining and stopping irregularly but we were hoping just to get to as far as we can…

At 20km point, we came to a landslide which covered the road with thick muds. We could probably walked through, but our non-4 wheel support car could not pass beyond this point to support us…

There was no Plan C, but one has to be created there and then. We could not proceed further anymore through Lake Kenyir and then Gua Musang…

But we still have more than 24 hours to continue running before the scheduled finish time of C2C of 7:00am on 28th Dec 2014.

Since running back to Kuala Terengganu from there is about 80k, together with the first 20k before the landslide, I could actually do this 100k.

So, I turned back to run away from Lake Kenyir. Mahendra has to abort his run since he would not have any support from that point onwards…

After another 13+hrs of rain and sun, and joined at 80k point by Mahendra, and a group of young runners from Kuala Terengganu's Turtle Runners Club, Seow Kong made his way all the way back to the original planned finish point at Pantai Batu Buruk.

All in all, the runners have covered a total distance of 403km, a 100km short of 503k. We have no doubt that having come this far, nothing short of a natural disaster could stop us from completing Coast to Coast 503.

But we did have a natural disaster of floods and landslides in so many states in Peninsula Malaysia. In fact, one of the worst in Malaysia's history, which displaced many of our fellow countrymen homeless and caused huge amount of losses….

In times like this, our misfortune in missing out the sectors in Lake Kenyir and Gua Musang areas could hardly be worth mentioning about…

Gua Musang and Lake Kenyir will always be there…

We will get there sooner or later.

It may not be now, but it'll be later.

When C2C is back in its next edition!!

(This article copy from facebook of tour de malaysia run)

https://m.facebook.com/profile.php?id=289361637867228&_rdr...