The 1,800-Page Diary and the Unseen Finish Line of Vietnamese Athletics

On the long stretch of sand in Lien Chieu District, Da Nang, a young man runs at 4:30 in the morning, before the city opens its eyes. I came here after a marathon, skipping the award ceremony to follow the man who finished ninth. His name is Tuan, 23 years old. In his backpack there is no medal, only a thick notebook he has carried for five years, more than one thousand eight hundred pages long. Each page is a day of running: a rainstorm, a pain in the knee, a moment of wanting to quit before going on. He turned to the page written on his third day: "Ran 18 today, watch battery died at kilometer 14, ran the rest by feel."

I read that line over and over, and understood that I was holding something the results board never shows. At 44, after nearly thirty years watching running tracks from inside stadiums to open beaches, I have learned that the most worth-writing moment is not the winner, but the one nobody notices.

Context: a movement that grew in silence

Fifteen years ago, running in Vietnam was a matter for a few hundred people. The first races had only a few hundred entrants, mostly foreigners and a small group of office workers in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Today, marathons in Da Nang, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Hue draw tens of thousands of registrants each season, and some close registration within hours. Running has become a social ritual: people run to show off results, to take photos, to prove they are still young.

Vietnamese athletics, at the elite level, moves to a different rhythm. SEA Games editions have seen figures like Nguyen Thi Oanh win multiple gold medals in middle- and long-distance events, or sprinters bring home results at the regional stage. But these are exceptional individuals rising from a thin system, where each medal is an exception rather than a rule.

Behind the running wave lies a paradox few are willing to face. A country with hundreds of thousands of runners has produced only a handful of athletics figures of continental caliber. Tuan is one of them, and he has never been called up to the national team.

I followed him through three training sessions. In the morning he runs on sand, in the afternoon on the coastal asphalt, and at night he does strength work with exercises no one taught him. He has no coach. He has no gym. He has an old phone, a worn-out pair of shoes, and a notebook.

What the notebook reveals

I spent two nights reading almost the whole notebook. What I found there was a cold record of how a human body teaches itself to endure.

Tuan logs each session in three columns: distance, time, and feeling. But it is the third column that made me stop. He writes in very specific words: "heavy legs," "right knee stinging at kilometer 12," "breathing hard but under control," "today I ran as if someone were pushing me from behind." This notebook goes far beyond the notes of an amateur runner. It is the data of a self-coached athlete who, having no one to ask, turned his own body into an object of study.

I have written about athletics for many years, and I know one thing: most of Vietnam's athletics talent does not fail for lack of ability, but because no one can read their own data. A good coach teaches technique, but more importantly, reads the signs of overload before they become injury, adjusts the workload before the body collapses, and knows when to hold an athlete back rather than push them on.

Tuan had no one to do that. He did it himself, with a frightening patience. He discovered that he recovers slowly after short, high-speed sessions, so he shifted to long runs. He discovered that his body handles the heat of Da Nang better than the cold, so he focused on the dry season. He discovered that his right knee only hurts when he increases mileage by more than 10 percent a week, so he set himself a limit no one had taught him.

That is the knowledge coaching manuals call "individualization." In strong athletics nations, it is done with software, with medical teams, with laboratories. Here, it is done with a notebook and a man who refuses to quit.

One technical detail in Tuan's diary stayed with me. He records that at peak, he runs about 160 to 180 kilometers a week, including a 35-kilometer long run on Sunday morning. What stands out is that he never runs two quality sessions on the same day. He divides the week into three fast sessions and four slow ones, and keeps that structure for months. For a self-coached runner, holding back from running faster than necessary is the hardest thing, because the feeling of progress pushes you to go faster. Tuan held back, and that is why he never suffered a serious injury over five years.

There is another aspect the diary does not record but I observed: cost. How does a semi-professional Vietnamese track athlete live? Tuan works evenings, coaches a few small groups, and uses the money to buy shoes. A good pair costs a month of his income. He has no sponsorship, no sports scholarship, no salary from any team. He runs on his own money, and that raises a question about how much talent is stopped at the door for lack of funds to go on.

The contrarian view: the running movement does not nurture elite athletics

There is a widespread belief that the bigger the running movement, the stronger elite athletics becomes. I do not believe it, and Tuan's notebook is evidence to the contrary.

The running movement measures success by participants, by the number of races, by bib revenue. Elite athletics measures by seconds, by centimeters, by the fragile gaps between a medal and oblivion. These two systems share a field but differ in purpose. A marathon can have thirty thousand finishers, but that does not produce an athlete who runs under 2 hours 20 minutes.

People confuse quantity with quality, between many people running and someone running fast. A country can have hundreds of thousands of runners and still lack a coach capable of leading one athlete to the Olympic threshold.

More worrying is that the running movement is creating a generation of runners obsessed with souvenir medals and social-media photos. Tuan, who runs faster than nearly all of them, is running in silence, with no one waiting at the finish line for him. There are athletes who never reach the finish, yet keep running forever in my memory.

I do not deny the value of the movement. It brings health, community, and a new sports economy. But I refuse to equate it with the development of elite athletics. These are two different roads, and merging them only makes us complacent with numbers that cannot measure true speed.

Conclusion: the finish line no one sees

I once thought athletics was the most transparent sport, because everything is measured by the clock. But the more I travel, the more I understand that the clock only measures the tip of the iceberg. A record is only a shadow; the person is the track.

Tuan did not win that race. He finished ninth. But a year later, he won the national championship. I tell this story to point out a gap in how we see sport: we always wait for the crowning moment and ignore the whole road leading to it. Athletics and life share one thing: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right path.

What I carried home from the sand of Lien Chieu is a question: if one young man can teach himself to become a champion with a notebook, how many is our athletics system losing simply because no one reads their notebook?