ATM 500 - Day 3 Report: Borneo Day as 2 island teams reach finish
After the grand excitement of the first two days of the ATM 500 - Run Asia, Run Virtual team challenge, day 3 turned out to be a little more relaxed. Three teams managed to complete the 500k distance, while another 23 teams brought themselves to the 300km mark. The three successful teams today included Bocor Runners Balikpapan from Kalimantan, the often overlooked Indonesian part of Borneo island. It’s a great introduction to their running community, as previously Kalimantan runners had not really featured anywhere on the Asia Trail Master circuit. A sign of more to come?
Day 3 could be called Borneo Day, in fact, because a second finishing team also resides on the third largest island in the world: Team Darussalam from Brunei! Both teams also maintained a decent pace over the 500km with an AVS of over 7,5 km/h. Great work! To put the cherry on the pie, another Borneo athlete, but this time from Sabah in Malaysia, Milton Amat, made sure to get noticed in our ATM 500 as well. Milton chose for a family squad to take part in our running challenge without any competitive ambitions. However, the number 3 of last year’s ATM Championship and multiple ATM race winner, brought his personal mileage of the past three days to 245 km! So, if anyone had any doubts about his current state-of-form, Milton has just provided the answer.
A third team completed the 500k challenge today: team Pinikpikan TR from Philippines. Unfortunately, it is one of those teams of whom we have very little to no information, but the team includes Jenni-Vi Fontanilla who won the women’s Pilipinas Akyathlon last year in the Cordillera mountains close to Baguio. We will further update tomorrow on this great team.
Other regular elite runners in the Asia Trail Master series with daily office jobs seem to have started a competition between themselves for the so-called ‘Speedster Ranking’, which lists the teams in terms of their average running speed. In this list, Sherpa’s Angels - with John Ellis, Alessandro Sherpa, David Longo and Chong Mei Tze - was toppled yesterday by Team Uglow Asia 1 - with a strong Elsa Jean de Dieu, Paul Fournier, Guillaume Perrot and Bryan Crane. Also Cambodia’s Team Kok was mixing with the best in this game. After Day 3, we now suddenly have the Tokyo Nomad Team from Tomohiro Mizukoshi setting the fastest pace. The Japanese team that also includes Yuichiro Shimatai, Yuri Norimatsu and Satoru Yanoma was very productive on Wednesday and upped its pace to 11.25km/h. Sherpa’s Angels were short and sweet, too, and now show an AVS of 11.22 km/h - only marginally slower than Tokyo Nomad. Team Uglow Asia 1 focused more on distance today and ended with 487 km in the bank. Tomorrow it’s a splash & dash to the line for them. Their average speed is currently 11.10 km/h. If anyone in Hong Kong wants to see trail runners sprinting over just 2km tomorrow - contact Team Uglow Asia 1 for details :-) .
Team Heal As One from Philippines was a finisher yesterday
Tomohiro Mizukoshi’s Tokyo Nomad Team has upped the pace significantly and is now engaging leading the “Speedsters Ranking” ahead of “Sherpa’s Angels” and “Team Uglow Asia 1”
Sabah’s ATM protagonist Milton Amat has brought his family team to the 400km mark by running 250K by himself in the past three days! Now it’s up to the others to ensure they have each team member’s minimum requirement of 75km.