This is basically a series of sports events organized by the local government, opened to people with local resident permit...
After the Beijing Olympics, now every town/city feels the need to host some kind of sports games.... so while Guangzhou is getting ready for the Asian Games in November and Shenzhen for the University Games next year... a small town like Qingxi must make herself happy with "Qingxi Games"...
The so called "around the city" long distance run was actually a 3.2km race around the town center...
being the one and only foreigner and kind of serious runner, I felt a bit of pressure...basically there were 500 people all staring to a gwailo trying to warm-up...losing out would have been a terrible loss of image...
For these kind of events in China, you really do not know what to expect from the other participants: there might be only "once a week" runners, but it might come out some young stud who was in a Sports School until the month before....
....Anyway for sure I knew that the start would have been crazy... crazy fast.. so I wore a Garmin to not let be carried away...
... all things put together, I really thought that an honest effort at 3'30" pace would have been good enough to win the race and avoid "loss of face" for my running reputation...
The start was fast indeed...very fast..it was like hundreds of hungry panthers let free... After 150m I gave a look at the watch and I realized I was running at 2'50"/km (!!!!!) while being overtaken by everybody!
totally insane... without losing my calm I set down to a more "modest" 3'05"-3'10" pace and start to pick-up those who went out too fast...
... the problem arose when after 1k, I got the autosplit at 3'08": I was running fast like never before in any race and I was still far from the lead !! was going to be a defeat in front of the local TV ??
I reached the leaders around mid way and picked up the pace.... i was running sub 3'/k ! (give a look at the Garmin file if you do not believe it !)
Also the 2nd K passed by with a 3'08" split and I eventually got a margin...
In the last stretch I saw that I had a good margin and started to relax cruising to the finish line without appearing too spent on TV... my passage at 3k in 9'31" is easily a huge PB for me !!
So... all well what ends well, but this was a suffered one...
I spare you from the TV interview in Mandarin and a translation of the newspaper article, but for a bit of fun, give a look at the first minute of the video below (taken from local TV footage)... with the crazy start
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