The Legacy of the Lame

The lame man’s race

I had no business trying to run 10k in under 40 minutes. I hadn’t done much running in the previous year or two (the heat and humidity in Singapore are strong deterrents), I had been partying way too much, and I was coming out of one of those injuries that my no-longer-in-my-twenties body was struggling to forget. But this had been a goal on my new year’s resolution list for the past few years, the weather in Hong Kong was nice and cool, and most importantly, I had gone on a couple of runs recently and I was feeling strong.

For this challenge I decided to recruit Kelvin, a local runner I knew from the internet, who while unquestionably fitter and faster than me, was of a similar enough level that I would be able to keep him in my sights for most of the run. On our first attempt we ran quite well but ultimately failed: Kelvin gave up around the 8km mark, and I cleared the goal too late.

Two weeks later we met at the Happy Valley Racecourse again for a second try, this time with more of a strategy, mostly helmed by Kelvin. We had a proper warm-up, set pacing targets, and established an alternating pacing order, such that one runner would set the pace and lead the other on alternate laps. The conditions were great, the plan was sound, the feeling was good.

And we set off… to an excruciating run, void of any flow, a battle from the first stride. The pacing was good, we adjusted the plan only slightly on the go, things were looking good. But at just over the 7km mark I couldn’t go any further, and I stopped. I walked for ten seconds, hyped myself up, and began running again — I could still see Kelvin ahead of me. Another km later I stopped again. I had managed to keep apace, even at a distance, and I could see that Kelvin was on the way to clear it. Another ten seconds, then start again. And stop. And start. I ran the last 600 meters just in case — I might just make it! And I made it. Final time: 39:55. Kelvin’s pace had been so diabolical that even with a 30 second pause I was able to clear the goal.

I felt… empty. The goal had been cleared, but it had not been pretty. Whereas Kelvin flowed gracefully from beginning to end, I waddled, huffed, panted my way through, and only squeaked past the goal with seconds to spare. It was not a smooth victory. As I lay there catching my breath, I tried to make sense of this feeling that somehow this achievement didn’t count.

Building traditions for the underdog

During my freshman year at Yale I tried out for the club soccer team. This was supposed to be a level higher than casual intramural scrimmages, but below the demands of varsity level. I hadn’t really done team sports in many years but I had played some intense playground soccer in high school and was looking to do something a bit more structured.

I did not get picked, but then I got contacted by one of the juniors, a guy called Kaimmer, who was starting a second club team, or C2, with people who hadn’t made the cut for the first club team. He promised a lot of hard work, a few games per semester, and the chance to create a legacy for future generations. I was just happy to be part of something, so I joined the ranks of the nascent C2 team.

The problem was that we sucked. A lot. We would come back from games having lost 5–0, 6–0… Weak defense, lack of fitness, questionable skills…. The only consistent thing was that 0 on the scoreboard: we were incapable of scoring a goal. Kaimmer’s will, however, was just as resilient. Every time, after every defeat, he managed to rally the team and get us all to show up on the training ground the following week to keep drilling.

It finally happened towards the end of the year. We were playing against our biggest rivals — not Harvard, whom we had drawn 0–0 in December in what felt like a mini-victory, but C1, the guys we needed to show were no better than us. It was a scrappy game, as was our style, but then, suddenly, almost by accident, I scored. I was wandering the rival’s goal when the ball came near me, so I swung a leg at it, and mis-hit it so that I ended up striking it with the side of my thigh. This distracted the goalkeeper enough as the ball floated awkwardly into the net. An ugly goal if ever there was one.

The entire C2 went wild. It felt like a historical moment. Our first goal! The C1 guys couldn’t understand what was going on — after, we had only managed to draw the game 1–1, but we were celebrating as if it was a tournament final victory. Kaimmer shook me in disbelief. I stood there, happy for the moment, but also kind of hoping my contribution to the team had been with something other than my ass.

Regardless, we had broken the spell. We scored again in the following match (our last of the season), a precise lob from one of our captains, which made a beautiful parabola over the keeper and into the goal. The following season, we started winning games, so much so that by the start of the following season we began worrying that the new recruits would not realize where we had come from and forget what we really were: a team of underdogs who worked hard to beat the odds. So on initiation day we gathered the rookies and told them our origin story, how much we sucked, how much we still sucked, and that it was only practice, work, and dedication that allowed us to come ahead. To make sure everyone understood the point, we made the recruits drink beer out of the boot that had scored the first goal. My boot. In an uncoordinated act of complicity to the cause, all the other veteran players, not just the newbies, stepped up to drink from the boot, sealing a tradition that would endure for years.

Ten years later, I am told that the new recruits are still completing their initiation by hearing our history and drinking from the boot. I suspect (and I hope) that it’s not the same boot, but the point is that the message is passed down through different versions of the relic. Of course, there was no boot involved in the goal that changed our history — I scored it with my butt. But perhaps that’s less important. Elegant or not, I wouldn’t have scored that goal if it hadn’t been for all the training and the hard work. Aesthetic or not, the goal still echoes in C2 history and has helped shape the attitude of different generations of soccer-loving undergraduates. That goal, then, is perhaps best valued with the future impact it had.

Working hard for the rebound

After graduating college I ended up in Asia, and before long I took up triathlon. It happened sort of on a whim, but it stuck. Compared to soccer, where some degree of talent is required and which I didn’t really have — ass-goals notwithstanding — triathlon was a very “fair” sport, by which I refer to the correlation between input (practice) and output (results). I may not be physically gifted in any particular way, but in a sport like triathlon the mentality from my C2 years of training hard until the results arrive fit right in. By my sixth year into the sport I had completed 20 triathlons, and had managed to clinch a few age group bronze medals.

By that point I had managed to get my colleague Domingo into the sport. This made our bond nigh unbreakable. Our long hours at work were balanced by a shared love for beer, which was in turn balanced by a shared love for tri. In one memorable business trip to Honolulu, we managed to deeply explore the Hawaiian craft beer scene a few hours before the Honolulu Triathlon, which we had managed to slot an hour or two before our first work meeting.

The problem with Domingo is that he got into triathlon very deeply very quickly. This put a lot of pressure on me to keep up, as I was the one who had introduced him to the sport, and obviously could not bear to lose face. Nevertheless at some point we transitioned from a sensei-grasshopper relationship to a healthy rivalry, quietly vying for supremacy over the other.

At some point Domingo decided that he was ready to attempt to qualify for the Half-Ironman World Championships, which basically required gaining a qualification slot at any of the few dozen local races taking place around the world throughout the year. He had set his sights on the Half Ironman in Xiamen (China), and I decided to tag along. At that time I had no faith that we could qualify for the World Championships, nor any real interest. However, through a sheer demonstration of determination, strength, and above all, faith, Domingo managed to get a qualification slot, whereas I did not. It was at that exact moment that my interest for the World Championship qualiftication began, so the next day I signed up for the next nearby Half Ironman (Goseong, Korea), and started training hardcore to earn my slot.

The way qualifying slots in Ironman work is a bit special. Usually, for every age group (usually a five year span, e.g. 30–34 year olds) there are three slots which are awarded to the top three racers of each gender. However, if any of the racers declines the slot (e.g. they are not interested or they are already qualified) it rolls down to the fourth position, fifth position, and so on. So unless you’re in the top three there’s a bit (or a lot) of luck involved, meaning that even if you didn’t rank in the top three, it is still in your interest to attend the roll down ceremony… just in case. In Domingo’s case, he ranked 19th in his age group and it rolled down to him, and there was a certain sense of inevitability about it — he knew he was going to qualify before we even started racing that day. In that same race I ranked 10th in my age group but it didn’t roll down to me.

I trained hard for 6 months and at Goseong I performed well, getting 13th in my age group. At rolldown, the slots were gradually taken up until there was only one left and it rolled down and down and down, until it got to me. As I accepted the token that represented my ticket to the World Championships, I tried to gauge the worth of the accomplishment. The feat felt real: I had trained so hard, part of me felt like I had truly earned this. The guy who came in 14th looked on with a resigned smile — if I had been a few seconds slower, we would be in each other’s shoes. And yet I had still been at the mercy of the 10 people who came before me and who for one reason or another had not taken up their slot. It did not feel like an absolute victory.

The World Championships in Nice (France) was an incredible experience surrounded by lean muscle, hyperactive triathlon-related geekiness, and a pervasive neoprene smell. It was fun just to be there. It was also my 25th race in my triathlon career, so there was an extra capstone sense to the event for me. My performance was pretty abysmal, but I wasn’t too bothered. For me it was a mini celebration, albeit with a bittersweet tone. “That’s it?” I thought as I crossed the familiar finish line. “Now what?”

During the race I made an observation, which was that racers coming from Asia seemed to be disproportionately slower than everybody else. I decided to look at the data and write a blog post about it. A year later, it got picked up by an editor at Triathlete magazine, who then reached out to see if I would be interested in writing other triathlon + data analytics pieces. This makes me revisit my assessment of the merit of qualifying, regardless of how it happened. The value of participating at the World Championships ended up being beyond what I could have imagined at the time, I just needed to wait and see.

The legacies we build

As I lay heaving on the track at Happy Valley Racecourse, I decided it was perhaps not the time to judge the validity or the value of that 10k run. For one, I was not giving the process its due credit. Kelvin and I had trained, we had planned out the race, and we had allowed for something to not go according to plan — we had minimized the amount of luck required!

More importantly, I was probably not accounting for the legacy of this achievement. What new doors will open as a result of this feat? For now, it has earned me a new friend, and that in itself already feels like a win, but to really see what comes after, only time will tell. It made sense then, after hobbling over to the nearest bar, to cheer not only for the completed challenge, but for the ones we have yet to face.