Vietnamese Athletics Mid-Season: When Training Logs Say More Than the Scoreboard

The left heel of Lê Văn Tuấn's shoe had a crack running across it, exactly where he put the most force on every downhill. I saw it on an August afternoon, after the crowd had left the prize ceremony of the Da Nang Marathon and I followed him all the way back to Lien Chieu district. He finished ninth, no medal, no one calling his name. On a wooden table in his rented room, he opened a running log more than eighteen hundred pages thick, kept for five straight years, one line a day, small handwriting, the ink fading. Between the distance figures were other lines: it rained today, my left foot hurts, I did not want to get up but I got up anyway. That moment changed the way I write. I abandoned the habit of opening with results and began digging into the life behind every number. Because a record is only a shadow; the person is the track. The annual athletics season is entering its middle stretch, the point where the standings say little but the athletes' bodies have begun to reveal real signals. This is when the mass marathon races in Da Nang, Ha Long and Ho Chi Minh City run back to back, drawing a new class of runners, most without a coach or a gym, armed only with a watch and a distance-tracking app. They belong to no payroll and draw no salary, yet they step out every morning. The interesting part lies in the data they generate. The professionals look only at finishing time; I watch the pace distribution of each lap. A runner who holds an even pace for the first twenty kilometres of a half marathon and then collapses in the last three usually has a lactate-threshold problem, not a willpower problem. Another who runs slower but negative-splits steadily, each kilometre a few seconds faster than the last, is building a far more durable foundation. The scoreboard cannot tell those two apart. Training data can. I call it the submerged part of the track. It never appears on the podium, never reaches television, yet it decides who will still be running five years from now and who will vanish after a single season. A good coach reads that data the way a doctor reads a pulse, knowing when to ease the load and when to let an athlete rest a full week even as they beg to keep running. In 2026, when I followed Tuấn out to the sand, I asked why he did not train on a stadium track as protocol demanded. He said the sand taught his legs to endure, that a beautiful track can make a person lazy. That answer has haunted me ever since. The Russian white nights taught me that the best play is the play no one expects. And in athletics, the best running is usually built on the worst roads. The price these athletes pay is not measured in prize money. It sits in four a.m. mornings, when the city is asleep and they are already running through rain. It sits in relationships that break because family cannot understand someone who spends two hours a day just running in circles. It sits in the dull injuries they hide, because speaking them aloud would be read as weakness. Some athletes never reach the finish line, yet they keep running in my memory. The media usually waits for a medal before writing. I understand the pressure, because every newsroom needs numbers. But if we write only when a medal arrives, we miss the entire process that produced it. A SEA Games medal is the result of thousands of uncounted training sessions. Skip that part and the article becomes a dry list. Looking back at this season, I see an encouraging signal. The number of mass races is rising, which means the talent pool for elite athletics is widening from below. A student in Quang Nam today can touch a running course for the first time at a community race and, ten years later, represent the nation. That is the road many strong athletics nations have taken. But I still want to raise a warning. When a movement grows fast, people fall in love with numbers more than with people. The number of races, of participants, of records broken, all look beautiful on a report. Athletics and life are alike in one thing: everyone has a finish line, but few run the right course. The scoreboard stands still; people run, and people feel pain. Once, a young coach in Da Nang called me at eleven at night. He said he had read my piece on how Croatia controlled a match by giving up the ball, and tried applying the principle to how he distributed pace for his students. I learn to listen from late-night calls, when athletes say what they dare not say in daylight. Sports journalism is not the trade of counting medals; it is the trade of recording the human part the scoreboard forgets. In the days ahead, I will again pick a name few mention, follow them to where they train, and read the log lines never printed. Readers deserve to know how the ninth-place finisher lived to stand at the start line. My heroes never lift a trophy; they only whisper to the grass of the arena. Perhaps it is time we learned to hear that whisper before asking who won.