Success at last year’s Newton Challenge! (Reproduced with permission from Chan Meng Hui)
My weight then, was also its heaviest, at 65kg when I retired, and I looked about 70 when I was only 55 years old. So I decided to run. Initially, I could not even run 200m – before my heart started panting.
After a few months, I improved to 400m and then 1km and eventually 5km. I realised at that point that I like running. I also lost weight – I am about 52kg now.
Why do you like running?
Running helps me to make a lot of friends. Many people know my name and they often call out to me – even though I don’t know them. This makes me happy.
You also only need to have a pair of shoes too, for running. Moreover, you don’t need to find someone else to run with you – unlike say, in badminton, where you would need to find a companion to play with.
For running, you can go anywhere and run anytime you want, too. After work, for example, you can just whip out a pair of running shoes to run wherever you feel like.
How often do you run overseas?
My latest overseas marathon was the Myanmar one in January this year. Before that, I did a marathon in Shalom, Sri Lanka last December. Earlier on, I used to run overseas every two to three months.
Are there any marathons that you have not managed to complete?
One race I did not complete was the Berlin Wall marathon – running from East Berlin to West Berlin. It’s not that I could not run, but I took too many pictures along the route and I was too far behind. I was the last runner, as a result.
They had a sweeper bus that picked up the runners who were too slow, because the road needed to be re-opened. But I tried to be stubborn and whenever the sweeper bus came near, I picked up my pace and tried to run faster. But it eventually caught up with me at the 38km mark and I was picked up to go to the finish line.
Meng Hui (far right) and a group of friends taking a selfie at the Penang Bridge International Marathon! (Reproduced with permission from Chan Meng Hui)
What is one marathon that you remember fondly?
One such race was in Mongolia. It was a very mountainous course, where they used horses as ambulances. The officials and assistants will ride one horse and pull the other. The spare one is the ambulance. That was quite interesting.
This marathon also had no markers to indicate the distance that runners have completed – unlike at most marathons.
One thing good about the Mongolian race was that every station had a checkpoint where they will mark everyone’s attendance. For example, if there were 50 runners altogether and only 40 crossed the checkpoint, they will send a horse out and try to search for the other missing 10 runners. If they were missing someone, they will really go out into the jungle and search for them. One of my Singaporean friends went off-course and got lost, so they actually mounted a full-scale search for him for more than an hour.
And at night, we even stayed in tents in the jungle – not in houses. To keep warm too, we had to go outside and get dry leaves and branches to burn for heat – an amazing experience.
What were two of the toughest marathons that you have done?
One was the Great Wall of China marathon because there are so many steps that you have to climb – in order to reach the top. I found that a real challenge.
The Hokkaido marathon in Japan was also tough. It was really cold there and the winds were extremely strong. These were blowing towards the mainland and not out to sea, so at one stage, I had to look for a big tree and hug it for a while to wait for the winds to dissipate a bit before I could continue running. That was definitely a huge challenge for me.
What do you look for, when deciding on a race to enter?
I will take note of what the cut-off time is and whether they will wait for the last finisher. For example, in KL, they will wait for everyone to finish. There will be some officials still there to wait for the last runner to finish and they will take your timing manually. That is important to me. To Next Page >>>
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