Run (or Walk) for a Reason
The HBF Fun Run or HBF “Run for a Reason” event started in 2010. HBF, originally the Metropolitan Hospital Benefit Fund, began in 1941 to help Western Australians cover the cost of hospital treatment.
In 1945 coverage extended to all WA hospitals, so the word ‘Metropolitan’ was removed, and the organisation became the Hospital Benefit Fund.
Members of HBF such as myself can access free fitness classes and lower prices for going in the annual HBF Run for a reason.
In 2000 the name of the organisation was officially abridged to become simply HBF.
Since its inaugural event, the HBF Run for a Reason has raised 9 million dollars for charity, and in 2019, number 32923 in the 4 kilometer walk raised funds for her chosen organisation, “Recovery Rocks”.
I was number 32923 and while not very fit I have been wanting to go in the Run for a while now, but made excuses like “Why do they have it in May, just before our Winter, it will probably rain, I can’t walk in the rain.”
Well, this year, I made it to the Walk! I went in the 4 km walk (yellow wave D).
For those interested in the cost of this Event, which covers a tremendous logistics of organising thousands of walkers and runners through Perth city, here are the 2019 fees.
21km — Half marathon
General $78 HBF member $62 60years+ $66 HBF member, 60years+ $53
12km for Runners, joggers, walkers and those with prams
General $44 HBF member $35 60years+ $38 HBF member, 60years+ $30
4km for Runners, joggers, walkers and those with prams
General $35 HBF member $28 60years+ $30 HBF member, 60years+ $24 CHILD PRICING (15 YEARS OR YOUNGER ON EVENT DAY)
12km
General (Child 15 years or under on event day) $26 HBF member (Child 15 years or under on event day) $21
4km
General (Child 15 years or under on event day) $22 HBF member (Child 15 years or under on event day) $17
The “half marathon” sponsored by Snap was said to take between 1 hour and 2.5 hours to complete, with runners starting at the early time of 6.45 am.
You can see from the Stats page below, that the fastest finish time was 45 minutes!
It pays to have a thorough look at the HBF Run for a Reason website before turning up at the events, e.g. look at the map which shows where each Event will start from.
The 4 kilometer walk took us along a road with a view of the Swan river to Gloucester Park, the finishing point. There were staggered starts for different “waves” in the 12 and 4 km categories with 5 waves, as shown below.
I was impressed with the color coding system, whereby every participant received a “bib” of a colour for her or his “wave”, in my case orange for Wave D, Walkers in the 4 km walk.
You can see from the chart for the 4 km that 45 to 55 minutes was averaged for completion of the walk. Well, my walk went for longer, actually taking 1 hour. Not to worry.
My Finisher’s Certificate shows 1 hour and 5 minutes, but factor in that my sister and I stopped a few times, to take photos and once for my sister to get a drink of bottled water, where we got separated.
I went ahead and found several people holding out water bottles, proffering them to walkers going past, just like I had seen in the news and on tv programmes for marathon or olympic walkers. I was pretty “chuffed” at this but got separated from my sister and someone came along and forcibly pushed me along.
I felt like a fish going downstream or wherever it goes, then hopped onto the grass to hopefully be discovered by my sister, among the huge throng. Luckily she found me and I explained that someone had rudely hurried me along, even though I thought that walkers could just go around me and that it wasn’t like I was 10 foot Nessie blocking the path of most people!
On we trudged and at the 3 km mark I had had enough but I soldiered on.
As we plodded along a walk-way after the Finish line to another barrier, some staff kindly offered fruit and bottled water to us. I gratefully accepted a small bottle of water and a banana, and we both took a huge apple each.
Then to another finish line where people were standing to place the Medal over your head, hat and all.
We had taken hats, though not many wore hats. I initially had turquoise jeans and a red cardigan and a soft yellow Cricket Australia hat and my sister wore grey tracksuit pants and her lovely teal blue HBF t-shirt plus a grey cardigan and a red CPSU-CSA cap.
“Let’s swap” I suggested as we were waiting and waiting to begin our walk, and thus our colors were much better matched, with my red cardy and red cap of course, and the buttercup yellow matched her soft colors.
Lucky we had these hats on as we hadn’t read the instructions on the backs of the envelopes which the bibs had come in, or used the safety pins in the envelope, to pin on our bibs!
Before crossing the Finish line we took our bibs out of my bag and held them up and it was thus that the cameras snapped a few photos of us moving toward the end.
We could identify us from the photos put up on the “Marathon Photos” website, by our hats!
Official photos are expensive to buy, either hard-copy or physical, and you can purchase a 1 to 2 minute video of you crossing the Finishing line for around $10 AUD.
In our video though, we are a bit obscured by others ahead of us, though I’m not sure if the fact that we were just clutching our “bibs” (rather than had them pinned on our fronts) factored into this or not.
Then we flopped onto the grass of Gloucester Park for a rest and I ate my banana and asked at an Information store where the shuttle buses were. The lady pointed to some large palm trees and said “Just walk over that way” so we did, and luckily we did early on.
Of course there were seething masses of people wanting to get on a free shuttle to the Bus-port. It seemed to me that we had to walk 1 kilometer to get to the shuttle buses!
At the location, a vexed man shouted at people “Don’t just all stop and get on the last bus, walk to the front, there are 3 buses there.”
Problem was that those 3 buses were just leaving and another 3 coming. My sister craftily surged forward to the last bus to the back doors, me following her for dear Life so as not to get separated, and we managed to board that bus.
But there were no seats for us and the bus took what seemed half an hour to get to our destination.
Luckily it was only a minute or two away to the train station. If you are wearing your “bib” or show it to the transport officials that will give you free train or bus fare. Only thing is we weren’t wearing ours.
Turns out this didn’t mean matter, as we were wearing our HBF t-shirts!
I heard along our walk that there were 13000 walkers and someone said the Bib number indicated the registrant number for the person.
If you go to the HBF Facebook page you will see that there was a total of 33,323 participants in the 2019 Run for a Reason tournament!
https://www.facebook.com/hbfrun
I thought that the lanyards were color coded, but got confused about this point. On the train home, a few had yellow bibs and teal lanyards like us, but some had navy lanyards and navy bibs.
Looking at the chart I thought wouldn’t I have an orange lanyard to match my orange bib for the orange wave?
Doesn’t matter anyway. I saw a lady with a nice white lanyard but she wasn’t wearing her bib.
At home I said to my partner that probably before we walkers had got home, the marathon runners had not only finished their run but had also hopped onto their bikes and cycled home!
I love my special Finishers Medal, and wasn’t aware when I went in the event that this one marked the 10th “Run”. Here is my Finisher’s Certificate which I am very proud of.
Having looked at the Stats page (click on the tab for the Commonwealth Bank 4 km) I see that for my age range, that the average finishing time was 49 minutes (across all waves) and I think that my time taken of 60 minutes was good, given that I’m not as fit as I could be!
86% of people in my gendered age bracket (female, 50–59) who started the 4km Event, completed it.
Whatever you walk for, and there is a huge number of worthy charities that you can select from when registering (or you can choose one not in the list, as I did), you can also purchase a HBF Run for a Reason t-shirt if you like.
The 2019 t-shirt is glorious — in lovely dark teal with a sprinkling of footsteps.
Recovery rocks. Life rocks, and the HBF Run for a Reason definitely rocks!
