Bedok Reservoir parkrun
Singapore
A Singaporean friend wished me a Happy New Year a couple of weeks ago, and I was able to reply not just with the obvious, but also to let him know I’d be in Singapore in a few weeks. You could join us at Bedok Reservoir! he said, thus letting me know that this event would be having event #12 when I visited, not quite 5 years after event #11 (7/3/20). You can probably imagine - perhaps with a shudder - what happened to pause the event, and then plenty of construction led to further pauses. But now, here we are - spoiling my plan to run the last event in Singapore I hadn’t done (still Bay East Garden), having a glorious run/walk round a large open body of water, and seeing a residential part of Singapore.
As with pretty much everywhere in Singapore, getting there is easy despite the 7:30 start. I hopped on the MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) from Chinatown for a 20 minute ride to Bedok (pronounced bed-oak) North. Should you get excited and stay on till the more obvious Bedok Reservoir station, you’re a little further from the meeting point, but not massively so. That meeting point is at the finish, up a hill in front of block 742. I didn’t identify the block, but used maps.me (an app that allows map downloads for offline use) and put a pin in it, so it was easy to find. I had plenty of time, so left the station via exit A, walked along Bedok North Road and turned right to get to the start (walk past the car park to ‘HometeamNS’ and it’s the next right, a concrete road to the reservoir. Since I was here last, they’ve added the option to pay for the MRT by just tapping your card, which makes travel even easier (though if you’re travelling a lot you might want a tourist pass). It’s worth knowing that both google maps and, if less so, maps.me see the buildings between the MRT station and meeting point as an impassable barrier, but they’re not - the quickest route would be to leave the metro by exit B and walk through the residential area.
This was a lovely cool day in Singapore. It was still 24°, but with a bit of drizzle and just the occasional burst of sunshine on this fairly exposed course, even my re-visiting, now non-acclimatised self could feel the difference. It helped. I travelled with Etihad, taking advantage of their free two-day stopover in Abu Dhabi (in a very nice hotel, even with an economy ticket, I felt like a VIP), thinking I was ever so clever. A quick stop 4 hours ahead of the UK, then settle into being another 4 hours ahead. Surely that would mean I’d barely notice the time-difference? Um, no. Instead, I slept fabulously the first night, barely at all the second, then got to Singapore tired, conked out and again watched the clock from the early morning. My groggy head appreciated feeling a genuine coolness in the air when I left in the dark just after 6.
The route is fairly fast and flat, with only a few curving bends, slight undulations and the slightly less-than-perfect gravelled path that covers 90+% of the route (the rest is tarmac) to slow you down. There’s also the hill at the end.
I mostly switched off and enjoyed the route, but towards the end it becomes very obvious you’re approaching the end. There’s the large building by which you started, a short section of the course on tarmac to get back to the start, and a section with the view of the reservoir blocked by a fence, all of which prosaic scenery helped prepare me to reach the finish.
And yet it feels quite a way to the finish. There’s 500m from the start, first up, and you run past the finish - obvious because you pass the steps everyone used to walk from meeting point to the start.
Past there, it’s only a couple of hundred metres, but the hill weighed heavy in my mind. A right turn past a smiling marshal and enthusiastic photographer and up I went. It’s fine. The whole course only has 8m or so of elevation. But being both warm and tired, it was definitely a challenging finish.
Afterwards most people went to the local Mr. Prata, for chat, food and drink. I followed everyone else by having a prata - egg and cheese in my case - with was delicious, and a variation on the roti canai (bread and sauce, but better than that) which was the staple breakfast after parkrun in Malaysia. Maybe have two if you’ve had a sleepless night. The team have done brilliantly to set up this event (and keep it quiet, to avoid any chance of being mobbed - I felt very lucky to have heard about it) and it’s a lovely place to run. Before their break, attendance fluctuated, never hitting the 110 from the inaugural, but event 9 had 92 finishers, 11 just 28, so it’ll be interesting to see how it settles in. For now, there will surely be a pile of people, local and not, with unfinished business, aiming for their fifth event in Singapore for a sense of completion.
The run director on the day was very passionate about his local area, and also gave great recommendations over things to see - pointing out a couple of less-touristy sights such as the Singapore City Gallery, a three-storey exhibition of city-state planning that showed how the changed face of Singapore is going to change further. Physically and mentally challenged, I had an inspiring day (before needing a sleep in the afternoon) and recommend the event. Download a map, pop a pin in it and you shouldn’t need any help getting there; go and enjoy the views.
Results from Bedok Reservoir parkrun #12, 18/1/25; 63 finishers