Crossing the Finishing Line
by Shameera Nair Lin
The story begins in the early nineties when my parents met at a hash run. A colonial-era tradition originating in Kuala Lumpur all the way back to the 1930s – which perhaps makes my current work as a postcolonial literary researcher even more crucial – hashing is a derivative of hare & hounds, where those assigned as “hounds” run after “hares”. Though that’s not exactly accurate. The story goes further back, when my mother served in the Malaysian army while doubling as a champion athlete whose running abilities would match those of national athletes. In all this, there rests an inescapable fact: a lot of how I’ve come to be involves running, which may make my experience of training for and successfully running the 10k leg of the 2023 Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon (SCHKM) seem inevitable.
Yet that could not be further from the truth. Growing up, I would have done – and indeed, did – everything in my power to avoid track and field activities during sports lessons in school. If I had been a film character in a stereotypical high school film, I would have been the one sitting on the bleachers, engrossed in some pretentious canonical novel. One of my formative memories of running involves a compulsory cross-country race in boarding school, where I placed 52nd out of around 100 participants and literally collapsed at the finishing line. I was not a runner, I thought, and would probably never fall in love with the act of damaging my knees gradually to cross an arbitrary finishing line alongside a group of similarly tired and sweaty fellow runners.
When the pandemic forced us out of gyms, then I was forced into running, or rather, walking with bouts of sprinting. In my final year of an undergraduate degree in the UK, it was one of few ways I could maintain some sense of minor removal from the stressors of the world while being able to explore the city I had lived in for nearly three years of my life, but which I hadn’t found the courage to roam around every nook and cranny of. I found myself entering random alleyways, meadows, a distant village, taking photos and writing down memories. Here’s one I took in front of my faculty, the day before my final submissions were due.
Running past my faculty most days grounded me in the belief that amidst Zoom University sessions and hiding alone, 13 hours from my home in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I was still trying to cross a finishing line for a reason.
Last year, after several starts and stops with running during the pandemic, I decided it was time to celebrate the courage, strength, and determination in myself that led to those months and years of picking up an activity I simply did not naturally gravitate towards. The SCHKM felt like the ultimate finishing line to cross, one I had to cross in order to materialise the reason I had started to run in the first place – I was not a runner, but I could be one, and why not?
Having only arrived in Hong Kong in August 2022, I found myself struggling to figure out a training plan involving going outdoors. As a naturally anxious person, I would fear the idea of running beyond the familiarity of the Kennedy Town pier, not knowing if I would get lost: after all, I had no idea if the whole running path I had randomly chosen using a map was suited to such an activity. More importantly, I am prone to overthinking and leaping to the worst conclusion conceivable. But it was how my training for the SCHKM started.
Prior to my first run, I scavenged ‘r/running’ , a Reddit forum where runners discuss all things running, for tips on how to train. My mother very kindly drilled in me the idea of pathlab training, a technique she once used to achieve optimal performance. I decided that, as someone more likely to win at Wii Sports than an actual race, trying to be overly competitive in running would prove pointless. It was then I remembered what Haruki Murakami – whose work I am generally not a fan of, but whose book proved pivotal to my running journey – wrote in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
“I’m not totally uncompetitive. It’s just that for some reason I never cared all that much whether I beat others or lost to them.”
Intuition guided each session, where the only person I was determined to prove something to was myself. I kept a written running log of each session, prioritising on noting down the food I’d consumed prior to the run (here’s a tip: do NOT eat Korean BBQ or a huge McDonald’s burger prior to a run), if I had gone to the toilet prior to the training session (this is extremely crucial prior to any activity in life, I promise you), and the usual metrics of mileage, timing and elevation. The aim was to go from having only run a 5k once in my life to running a full 10k, with two months to train – all I had to do was run at least 8k prior to race day, and I would be set to finish. As for timing, I set myself a time limit of 90 minutes to complete a 10k run. Another word of advice: get yourself a playlist filled with running songs compiled long before the race. Your energy levels and mind will thank you.
There is no way to spin this: I spent a lot of time panting, looking up plantar fasciitis on Google, worrying about overpronating, and again, more panting and fussing over failing to reach my goals. Each session presented different challenges on a physical front – my chosen route, the stretch from the Kennedy Town harbourfront all the way to Central and sometimes, Wan Chai – was a pained path packed with concrete and gravel.
Amidst the pain, however, I finally uncovered the one quality that could possibly draw me to running: it’s the other sweaty people you encounter as you run. The adorable dogs I would form eye contact with as I struggled through the fourth kilometre close to Central, the elderly woman whose pace would put mine to shame in a split second. It was, above all else, the presence of life and living around me, in every stride I took. In the month leading up to the race, the route would be packed with fellow runners at all times of the day. There is an illuminating depth to a collective group of people coming together to run a race, particularly one making a return for the first time since a devastating series of events.
On the morning of the race, I decided to wear make-up. If I was going to suffer at 8am for a prolonged period, I was going to do it in style. And yes, the toilet played an important role for several reasons. After taking wise advice from Reddit, I headed to the race an hour prior to race time. Those running the 10k would start walking from the Tin Hau MTR station, up to the passageway near Causeway Bay.
The weather was quite possibly the greyest I had seen Hong Kong appear in the daytime, with accompanying fog. With all thoughts of enjoying the scenery out the window, I focused on enjoying the company of those around me. From the starting line, I felt sheer happiness upon seeing everyone around me smiling at one another, laughing at the announcement, and waiting for the gun to sound off.
In the first three kilometres on the highway, I shocked myself by maintaining a consistent pace well below my predicted time, one I had never achieved during training. It was probably the sight of a fellow runner in a dinosaur costume whose pace, again, would have probably put mine to shame if they had not been in a literal dinosaur costume, that kept me going. On the third kilometre, I began marking my pace to match someone who had been slightly in front of me the entire time. By the time we reached the seventh kilometre, after various slopes, I paused for a brief moment to celebrate having reached the 7km mark at all – the furthest I had gone in training was 8.2km.
It was the final kilometre, across Causeway Bay directly into the heart of Victoria Park, that will forever be etched in my memory. A sense of welling nausea washed over me (another tip: eat more than just a banana prior to a long run). Looking at others for a sense of motivation, I noticed everyone had slowed down and decided that, for the first time, I was going to be competitive in a race.
It was for that reason I found myself dashing down the slope of the highway, crossing into Victoria Park, where a photographer captured a shot of me leaping past the finishing line. It was later on, when a friend texted me with a screenshot of my finishing time, that I learnt I had finished the race in 82 minutes despite stumbling blocks. A record time for someone who started off being unable to run more than a kilometre!
The experience of working towards running a race proved to be a celebration of life in more ways than I could have possibly expected. If there is one thing I learnt, it is to value every single detail and moment you can hold on to around you. There is nothing about my journey I would do differently: there was a reason I started running at that juncture in life, not a second earlier. I can only hope anyone who reads this has experienced or will come to experience a similar turning point, be it through running or something else altogether.