Cebu City Marathon

January 10, 2010 will be a red letter day for Cebu City.

The biggest marathon (this term should not be misused for shorter distance unless you speak of a 21K half marathon) will be held in the streets of Cebu City on this day.

It is still a shade over four months away, but the organizing Cebu Executive Runners Club launched the event the other day at the Mooon Café (yes that is how it’s spelled with three Os) in Guadalupe.

The race is a full 42K event that will start and finish at the Asiatown IT Park. The City of Cebu has already agreed to shoulder the prize money, which totals P300,000.

The CERC members led by their president Jessie Taborada are very excited about the race, which shall take runners to as far as the South Road Properties in the south and Talamban in the north.

I hope that the traffic authorities and volunteers will do a good job in controlling the flow of vehicles and ensuring the safety of the runners. I am putting emphasis on this, because the traffic authorities seem to be doing a very lousy job in the Talamban area.

A full marathon is something that any serious runner hopes to complete. The organizers said that they hope that those who regularly run in the 10 and 21K events would push themselves to try the 42K.

There is also a half marathon on the same day for those 5 and 10K runners, who would like to test the new limits of their running endurance.

More details of the event will be announced soon and the organizers are hoping that local and foreign tourists would join the race as it happens a week before the Sinulog parade.

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One of the topics discussed before and after the launching of the Cebu City Marathon was the growing number of races.

Raffy Uytiepo, The Freeman’s certified marathon man and running coach, said that now there are as many as two races per week.

He also noted that in Metro Manila there are even more.

While the number of events is good for the sport, what worries many is that time will come when the top caliber runners would be too tired to race or when big races will be held side by side each other affecting participation.

This goes the same for other sports where we usually have an overload during certain times of the year.

We even have an overload of so-called sports development programs initiated by politicians hoping to use it as a vehicle for their success in the elections.

The problem with many of them is that they are very similar and often put people in very uncomfortable situations. In the end the programs don’t achieve anything for the athletes and the sport that they were supposedly intended to benefit.

Sports can be good for politics, but let us also remember that politics is very bad for sports.

Let me use a line that became popular during the Senate probe of the controversial NBN ZTE deal. I’d like to say this to those who are using sports the wrong way – “Back off!”

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MILESTONES: Belated birthday greetings to Rev. Fr. Manuel ‘Manny’ Uy, S.J., president of Sacred Heart School-Jesuit, who turned a year older yesterday. 

Advance greetings go to my bestfriend and fellow columnist Christopher Rey M. Tio, whose business column One Step Up comes out in The Freeman every Friday. The same goes to my old friend Eulani Ocampo-Agloro, who also turns a year older on Sunday.

More power to you!   (FREEMAN NEWS)