The Bahrain Marathon Relay (BMR) recently took place at the Bahrain International Circuit and was well organised by Bahrain Road Runners ... with the GDN team sweeping into 159th place out of 166, better than ‘last but one’ the year before.
As an old ex-Bahrain friend was visiting, and since he and I had been part of the organising committee for the BMR for many years, we took a nostalgic trip down to see how it was been run these days.
What we found was an efficient and well-organised event getting back up to the levels of participation which we achieved before Covid-19 put a temporary pause on proceedings.
Like many events and organisations in Bahrain the relay started out as a conversation in The British Club between a bunch of people who did not have enough to do.
The first event was held in 1980 and started at the Bahrain Stadium and ended at the Diplomat hotel.
The event quickly grew due to its quite unique format, while there are many relay marathons around the world they mainly take the form of split into 2 or 4 legs which means that each leg is still between 10-20 km long and, therefore, only really open to serious runners.
The Bahrain Marathon Relay with its 3km legs is therefore open to almost all who can put one foot in front of another.
While the average time per 3km leg is about 14 minutes there has been many times when we have been quietly encouraging participants to keep moving when 20 minutes in and around halfway.
For a few years we were graced by some of the world’s finest middle distance runners. Each year the Saad running club in Dhahran Saudi Arabia run by Ian Wilson would organise a winter training camp for many county and country class runners.
By way of a distraction Ian would enter them into the BMR and we would have up to six teams from the club all taking part and, of course, generally winning the event.
What was interesting was speaking to some of these runners who told us that running is very much an individual sport and there is not much time to be involved in teams, but the BMR was one such occasion when they could be a team and have some great bonding moments.
As a member of Bahrain Round Table I was part of the organising committee from 2002 until 2017. By that time the Round Table was down to only five members, but it was such a well-oiled machine that we could still organise an event with more than 200 teams and as each team had 16 runners, around 3,000 participants.
It was rightly billed as the biggest participant sporting event in the Middle East.
However, in 2018 when two of our team left the island we reluctantly had to hand the reins over to Rotaract who then organised it until the pandemic.
The purpose of the BMR was to raise money for charity in Bahrain and towards the end of our tenure we were raising more than BD25,000 a year.
Money was donated to a wide range of worthwhile causes in Bahrain, and I am sure, over the years, you have seen many charity minibuses on the road with the BMR logo on them.
We gave playground equipment to schools, specialist computers for blind people, plus lots of assistance in paying power, Internet bills and rent. We donated dialysis machines and other specialist medical equipment, in fact the organising of spending the money was in many cases more exhausting than raising it.
So, I am glad to see that the event is in good hands and hope you all have many more occasions to enter and go for a gentle jog. You might even get to trot past the GDN journalists and friends before the finish line!
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