Vietnam's Running Track: The Footsteps Behind the Medal Table

DA NANG — 4:40 a.m., the long stretch of sand along Nguyen Tat Thanh Street is still damp with mist. A small, thin figure runs against the wind. Her shoes are worn away at the outer sole, and where they touch the sand they leave an even trail of dents, like a fingerprint pressed into the running track. No spectators. No banners. No one keeping time. I have followed Vietnamese athletics for nearly thirty years, and I have learned one thing: the most memorable moments of this sport rarely happen at the medal ceremony. They happen on mornings like that one — when a person runs not to be seen, but to settle a debt with herself. In 2026, I skipped the Da Nang Marathon award ceremony to follow a ninth-place runner named Le Van Tuan, 23 years old, all the way back to the sand flats of Lien Chieu District. He kept a running journal of more than 1,800 pages over five years. I wrote a 2,500-word piece, "The Endurance Runner Who Doesn't Need a Finish Line," and it was shared more than 12,000 times. A year later, Tuan won the national championship. But what I remember most is not that medal — it was what he told me in the dark: "Brother, what I fear most is the day I run and no longer feel afraid." That sentence has stayed with me for years, and it became the way I see the whole of Vietnamese athletics. The race of those who run without spectators unfolds alongside a far noisier race. Over the past decade, Vietnam's running movement has exploded. From a few modest marathons, the country now hosts dozens of races each year — the Tien Phong Marathon, the Da Nang Marathon, international races in Hanoi, grassroots events in the provinces. Registrations multiply year on year. Shoe, watch, and drink brands pour in. Running has become a new faith for the urban middle class. But behind that wave, the national athletics team still lives in a very different world. At the SEA Games — the arena Vietnamese athletics treats as its main yardstick — we remain regularly among the leaders in gold medals, thanks to figures like Nguyen Thi Oanh in the middle distances and steeplechase, Hoang Nguyen Thanh in the marathon, and Bui Thi Thu Thao in the long jump. But between a SEA Games gold and a place in an Olympic final, the gap is not a few seconds — it is an entire system. I always start with the number few people notice. A Vietnamese woman wins the SEA Games 1,500m in around 4 minutes 15 seconds. In the same event, a place in an Olympic semifinal usually demands under 4:05, and to reach the final you must approach 4:00. That means between regional peak and world peak there is a gap of fifteen seconds — which sounds small, but in athletics, fifteen seconds is a generation. In the marathon the gap is even harsher: Vietnam's men's national record sits around 2 hours 20 minutes, while the common Olympic standard is under 2:12, and the world's leading group runs under 2:05. These numbers do not say Vietnamese athletes are weak. They say they are running on a track drawn with different conditions. What creates that gap? Not innate talent — the Vietnamese genome is not short of endurance. What is missing lies in the system: nutrition, base conditioning, recovery, data science, and above all the number of athletes properly developed within a generation. Let us talk about nutrition and base conditioning — the two least glamorous but most decisive things. A world-class 1,500m runner trains around 100-130km a week, alongside strength, plyometric, and active-recovery sessions. Every session has a specific physiological purpose: raising the lactate threshold, improving VO2max, increasing running economy. Data is recorded daily — every heart rate, every heart-rate variability. In Vietnam, many teams still train on feel and word-of-mouth experience — which is not wrong, but is not enough to catch up. I remember one evening in 2026, after the World Cup quarterfinal between Croatia and Russia, I stayed awake until four in the morning to write about Ivan Rakitic — the way he kept dropping between the two centre-backs to circulate the ball, a detail no commentator mentioned. I called it "control by conceding control." A young coach in Vietnam tried it with his amateur team and called to thank me. The white night of Russia taught me that the best game plan is the one no one expects. And that lesson holds outside the track too: to catch up with people, sometimes you must refuse to run the way they run. In the middle and long distances, tactics matter as much as speed. Vietnamese runners tend to run in two ways: either sit on the leader and kick at the end, or lead from the front and try to hold on. Both are predictable, and on the international stage, predictable means being read. East African runners — Kenyan, Ethiopian — are not only faster; they are "harder to read." They change rhythm suddenly, create surges that break opponents, then relax to recover while everyone else is still tense. It is an art of patience and cruelty at the same time. Nguyen Thi Oanh is the most interesting case I have ever observed in Vietnam. She does not possess the region's best pure speed, but she has an ability to endure and recover across distances that few share. The fact that she competes in several events in a single SEA Games — sometimes on the same day — says two things. One: her physical foundation is very solid. Two: we are still exploiting athletes as a resource for counting medals, rather than building a long career. I do not believe in abnormal victories, and I do not believe in abnormal defeats either. When an athlete suddenly smashes a personal best by ten seconds, my first question is not "how?" but "at what price?" It could be a training cycle ripening after many years. It could also be a peak traded for an injury waiting behind. Athletics gives nothing away for free. In Vietnamese marathon running, I have watched athletes cross the line and collapse into a sitting position — not from physical exhaustion but from something else: emptiness. They spend eight months on a three-hour race. After the finish line, there is nothing left to hold on to. Some of them vanish from the track within a year. There is a paradox few in the field want to state plainly: the running movement has exploded, but the national team has not benefited proportionally. Tens of thousands of recreational marathoners, hundreds of races springing up, yet the number of athletes meeting international standards has barely grown. Why? Because the movement serves the runner's experience, while elite performance demands something entirely different: a selection system starting from youth, a class of properly trained coaches, and resources patient enough to be measured in decades rather than seasons. I have followed many matches and many SEA Games. Based on my own experience of watching, the most worrying thing is not that we lose at continental level, but that we are far too easily satisfied with winning at regional level. Every SEA Games gold is a real joy, but it is also a sedative. It makes people believe the system is healthy, when in fact it is merely good enough to hold a place in a small playground. Let us talk about the coaches. In many provinces, one athletics coach must handle sprints, distance, jumps, and throws at once — events that demand completely different methods. They work for modest pay, with little equipment, and few chances to update their international knowledge. Yet they are the ones who keep the flame. Without them, no athlete reaches a SEA Games podium. I once sat for hours with a coach in central Vietnam who had given thirty years to the track and never once trained abroad. He told me: "I don't teach the kids how to beat a Kenyan. I teach them how not to give up." It sounds sad, but it is the bare truth of a sport racing against itself. There is a view I know will upset many people: our obsession with the medal table is holding back athletics itself. We push athletes into medal-certain events instead of investing in difficult events that hold developmental value. We celebrate a SEA Games gold while no one remembers the name of the twelfth-place finisher at an Asian meet. Focusing on regional medals creates a safe loop: investing just enough to beat our neighbours, not enough to reach the world. Another paradox: we talk a lot about lacking funds, yet we spend in ways that create no long-term assets. Medal bonuses are paid, but money for recovery, sports nutrition, data analysis, and sports medicine — the things that produce durable athletes — is severely lacking. We reward results but do not invest in the process. And the process is what produces the next result. I also want to speak plainly about how the media and public treat athletes. When they win, they are heroes. When they lose, they are asked about "lacking character." No one asks how many hours they slept, what they ate, where it hurts. My identity is to walk alongside an athlete's fear, not to criticise it. My heroes never lift a trophy; they only whisper to the grass of the arena. There is one thing I have learned over the years: a record is only a shadow, the human being is the track. A results table can tell you who came first, but not who paid the most. An athlete who breaks a national record may be someone running away from something in their life, not running toward a medal. If you don't understand that, you don't understand this sport. And athletics and human life are alike in one point: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right course. The most frightening thing for an athlete is not losing, but running with perfect technique, perfect programming, and everyone else's expectations — only to realise they were never running for themselves. I once spoke with a female athlete who had won a medal at a SEA Games. She told me that the day she returned home with the medal, neighbours came to congratulate her and her parents wept. But that night, when everyone had gone, she sat alone in her room and did not know what to do the next day. The medal could not answer that question. She told me: "Brother, a medal is light, but that emptiness afterward is heavy." That is the human part the standings never display. And as for the young people stepping onto the track today — they are different from the previous generation. They have smart watches, tracking apps, running communities on social media. They access international knowledge far more easily. But they also face a new pressure: the pressure to look perfect online, to achieve fast, to become a "phenomenon" before truly maturing. That haste can be a trap. A mature marathoner needs five to seven years of serious training. There is no shortcut. Anyone who promises you a shortcut is selling you a dream with a price tag. So what is the road ahead? I do not believe in grand solutions that sound good but that no one carries out. I believe in small but steady steps. One: build a data system for each athlete from their teens — heart rate, training load, sleep, injury. Two: retrain the coaching corps, send them out into the world, let them see how others train. Three: invest in sports medicine and recovery, because one healthy athlete over ten years is worth more than ten burned-out athletes over two. Four: be patient with difficult events, accepting defeat on the big stage in order to learn. There are athletes who never reach the finish line, yet keep running forever in my memory. They taught me that sport is not about winning and losing — it is about a person daring to place themselves before their own limits, day after day, in silence. If one day a Vietnamese athlete runs into an Olympic final, I hope we will not only ask whom she beat. I hope we will ask what she gave up to be there. Because the answer to the second question is what truly changes a sport. Back to the Da Nang sand at 4:40 a.m. That young woman is still running. She does not know I am watching. She does not know someone will write about her. She only knows that today she must finish her distance, because tomorrow someone else will run faster than her, and she must be ready. That is athletics. Not the medals hung on a wall, but the mornings no one sees. Not the moments of glory, but the years no one counts. If you want to understand this sport, do not go to the stadium on match day. Go to the beach while it is still dark, and you will see what I have seen for nearly thirty years: people paying their debt, one step at a time, in silence.