Dear Runners,

When the first National Geographic Earth Day Run was held last year, the running community unselfishly showed an outpouring of support through an overwhelming runner turn-out. Not only did runners enjoy celebrating Earth Day with a good run at the SM Mall of Asia, everyone also made a mark in raising awareness for the need to care for Mother Earth.

With this successful event in mind, The National Geographic Channel decided to bring to the community another edition of this race this 2011. Now, the race will be in a much bigger and better venue and can definitely cater to a growing and improving population of runners. In addition, this year’s edition will also feature the 21km-distance as an additional race category.

True enough, the interest that this year’s edition of the race generated an even greater number of participants. In fact, the National Geographic Earth Day Run 2011 almost had double of last year’s total registrants as it reached a record number 10,300.. And as we closed registration today, we have been continuously receiving requests for registration period extension and reopening of slots for all race categories.

We thank everyone for the support that they have consistently given to the National Geographic Earth Day Run. But along with the gratitude, we also would like to apologize for the problems that that some of you encountered regarding the availability of the technical shirts. We did our best to plan the process to avoid such problems but the rapid growth of participants caused unavoidable delays in production of the shirts. Because of the surge in demand, our supplier temporarily ran out of materials for the shirt coupled with an unfortunate breakdown of their machines for a couple of days.

This unavailability of the shirts was also the main reason why delivery of race kits for online registrants was delayed. Since we have guaranteed that online registrants should receive the shirt size that they have indicated during registration, we had to wait for the succeeding delivery of shirts before we ship out the race kits. Again, we apologize that this scenario had to happen.

As of April 5, we have serviced 80% of the actual requirements and we look forward to being able to service all by completing deliveries for the last 20%. As we do this, we would like to let everyone know of the following courses of action:

1. Give the 10km registrants the BLACK shirts, instead of the original GRAY shirts as the black shirts are readily available.
2. Extend the schedule for release/claiming of the YELLOW shirts starting on Thursday, April 7 until Saturday, April 9 to give the registrants ample time to claim the shirt as we are expecting final delivery of these shirts by, April 6.

For the registrants who were able to grab any of the last 500 slots each for both 3km and 5km race categories, we would also like to assure you that the shirt you will be receiving two months after the race will be in your correct size. In addition, registrants will need not claim their shirts as this will be delivered in coordination with our courier-partner and with us shouldering the courier expense.

It is our greatest endeavor to ensure everyone who registered for this race event to be able to receive their shirts before race day. That is why as mentioned earlier, the Greenbelt 3 Mall registration center will be open to service everyone who will have to claim their shirt sizes at an extended period of April 7 to 9.

Again, we would like to truly apologize for this inconvenience and thank you for choosing to celebrate Earth Day and running with us at the National Geographic Earth Day Run 2011 on April 10, 2011.

Sincerely yours,