For the past 12 years there has been a week long light festival in Eindhoven, the Netherlands during the month of November. And for the past 3 years they’ve had a fun run at the end of it. I’ve participated in the first edition in 2015 and now ran the third edition as well.

This year’s route was 6.5 km long and personally I was a bit disappointed with the projections this year. They were few and far between this time and the ones that were there weren’t that spectacular. The organisation which organises the run is not the same organisation that organises the Glow Festival itself. The race organisation doesn’t seem to organise any other races and therefore doesn’t have that much experience with organising races. But they do seem to care a lot about the feedback, since they do try to improve the race each year. Since the first edition they have improved the medal and the finish and start locations. They at least arranged for a roof over our heads during the start (which protected against any rain), but it wasn’t a closed off space, so it was still pretty cold waiting outside at roughly 10.30 pm in November.

It’s a fun run, which means that there is no chip time and in this case also means the roads aren’t really closed off, since there are still non-runners on the course enjoying the festival.The nice thing about the route was that it didn’t only follow the Glow Festival route, they also made sure we could run through the football stadium. Which seemed to excite lots of people, but I really don’t care about football, so I wasn’t that impressed. And they also made sure we could run through a church as a part of the route and only the runners were allowed in. This was definitely the highlight for me: running through the aisles of a church which was lit with colourful lights and someone was playing the organ. How often does one get the chance to do that?