I consider myself a runner. I’ve completed dozens of 5-km and 10-km events, stretching back to a time when I still hadn’t shed all of my baby teeth. Before moving to China three years ago, as my life became busier and my stresses multiplied, I used running as my crutch - embarking on long, slow tears to clear my head and enter a sort of meditation.
In this way, inadvertently, my conditioning improved, and I began not just finishing in the races I entered, but competing. I won some, placed in others, and slowly but steadily improved my times. After finishing a half marathon four years ago in New Orleans and thinking “that wasn’t so bad,” there was only one frontier left: a full marathon.
The difficulty ahead of me was forbidding, however: I was moving to Beijing.
That meant a near deathblow for my training. If I wanted variety and hoped to escape a few well-worn paths in parks and inside campuses, I would have to putter along car-choked highways, dodge throngs of people, and endure throat-singing smog. Running inside on a treadmill was OK, but only for the first hour or so, before it became intolerably boring.
Still, I pushed ahead, and formed the habit of waking up with the sun to beat the morning crowds and run a few laps around my corner of Beijing. I joined a running group and stepped up my training. I was going to finish a marathon, the only question was where.
A few of my Chinese friends told me about the Xiamen Marathon, a well-respected January run in China’s beautiful southern port city. The climate is perfect, they assured me, and the race well organized. So, without giving it much thought, I registered online, and booked a plane ticket from Beijing to Xiamen.
When my plane lifted off from Beijing, I looked down on a landscape frozen in ice and dusted with snow. Dropping down in Xiamen, the ocean sparkled, and the hills surrounding the city were lush green. The temperature difference, I noticed as I grabbed my luggage and stood in queue for a taxi, was dramatic - I took off my jacket and wished I was wearing shorts instead of jeans.
The marathon was as promised. It was well organized, the route was gorgeous, with the pale blue ocean in sight most of the time. What struck me most, though, was the support I received from thousands of locals who stood near the path and shouted words of encouragement, “jia you, jia you, kuai pao!” Some brought bananas or water to pass out to the runners. Others dressed up in costumes and gave high-fives. Even the owner of the hostel I was staying at made a cardboard sign that said, “Nick, you are the best,” and waved it at me as I passed.
As I strode through the homestretch, my legs rubber and my willpower exhausted, it was these cheers that gave me the fuel I needed to cross the finish line in just more than three hours.
Most runners will tell you that you always remember your first marathon. You remember the hours of training leading up to it, the nervous waiting before the starting gun, and the jolt of ecstasy you feel as you cross the finish and realize that you can finally stop running. You remember the post-marathon meal and the next-day soreness that makes getting out of bed an exercise in torture.
Since that Xiamen Marathon two years ago, I have finished two more Chinese marathons - in Beijing and in a southern water town called Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. Each of these was memorable in its own right. The Beijing event started under Mao’s famous portrait in Tiananmen Square and wound around some of the city’s most famous landmarks. The Wuxi run stretched around scenic portions of Taihu Lake, China’s third largest freshwater lake. Some of our most vocal supporters were surprised fishermen waving to us from their boats.
But, no matter how many marathons I run in the future, none will match my first experience running along the ocean in Xiamen. It was, and remains, one of my fondest memories of living in China.
