Nanjing

I’m back from my post-season break – two voluntary weeks off running! My life follows the running calendar so it feels like the start of a new year.

I’ve written this newsletter for 9 months now. I thought I was simply blessing the world by documenting the extremely interesting life of a professional athlete while also trying to make that sweet newsletter money. What I’ve actually been doing is therapeutic journaling. Having to articulate my experiences helps me to keep perspective. It seems that the only way I will engage with self-care is by turning it into a career. After all, I’m the same person who became a professional athlete as a way of finding a regular exercise routine.

Nathan and I got back from China a few days ago. The last time I went was 2016 on a study tour with the Confucius Institute. Confronted by how horrible my Chinese was after that trip, I tacked on a Diploma in Chinese Language to my architecture study. However, since finishing the diploma in 2022, I hadn’t spoken a word of Chinese, so I was surprised to find that I actually had the language skills to get by this time around.

My favourite new phrase is 小腿肚子大! Wow, big calves! The characters literally translate to “the little leg’s fat stomach”.

My two uncles, cousin, and 94-year-old nainai (grandma) live in Nanjing. My mum, who’s lived in Australia for 30 years, was also over there visiting Nainai, who sadly now has dementia. I visited Nanjing at the ages of 5, 14, 22, and now 31, so I have strong memories of the city, especially Nainai’s apartment.

The big chunks of time between visits means that when I go back I really notice the changes. My Chinese family are shrimps and somehow they’ve gotten even shorter. I feel like a giant. I noticed this time that they even have custom kitchen benchtops that are lower than standard. Perhaps my short energy comes from an imbalance in the universe and I somehow cheated my short fate and I’m being cosmically punished for it.

The family dynamic was mostly a lot of eating, shouting, and antagonising each other which was both funny and stressful. It’s always interesting seeing yourself in your parents. As I watched my mum expertly rage-bait her brothers, I felt a sense of pride. Nobody should know peace when there isn’t peace in our heads.

Speaking of the quest for mental stability, Mum and I visited several beautiful Buddhist temples to pay our respects. We also cleaned and made an offering at the grave of my yeye (grandpa), a ritual I remember doing when visiting as a kid.

Nathan’s goal of the trip was to visit a geographical “confluence”, a place where the latitude and longitude are whole numbers. He “collects” these confluence points and adds them to an online project along with a global network of nerds. The closest to Nanjing was 32.000000°N 119.000000°E. He said this confluence was near a tiny farming town about an hour outside of the city. My mum on hearing this plan called Nathan a naive and sheltered foreigner who didn’t understand that walking around the Chinese countryside was a bad idea. He could be “disappeared without a trace”.

With that blessing, Nathan and I set off. Things began smoothly as we easily took public transport to the town near the confluence. We started walking through the farm plots, watching the locals quietly go about their lives. But after about 40 minutes of walking, and closing in on our goal, we stumbled upon an active military base.

There was a camera with flashing lights, a loudspeaker with a warning message playing on repeat, and big yellow signs including a stick figure man with a cross through it. Unsurprisingly this was not listed on Apple Maps. Some of the signs said:

擅入军事禁区军事管理区违法
“Trespassing into a military restricted area is illegal”

远离未爆弹药 / 珍爱生命 / 活离危险
“Stay away from unexploded ordnance / Cherish life / Stay away from danger”

As I’m making awkward eye contact with soldiers running laps in their barracks, I think about how good this story will be for my newsletter but also how much I don’t want to be blacklisted from China.

We abandoned the mission since the confluence point was several hundred metres on the other side of the warning signs. I told Nathan that I hoped there were some choice Chinese spies in Australian prisons right now that could be useful to us in a prisoner swap.

It will be disappointing if our future child turns out normal considering the mental illness in my family and whatever it is that’s clearly wrong with Nathan.

I hope to return to China next year for my post-season holiday. That is, if I haven’t been banned from entering the country. (Oops!) I want to improve my fluency ahead of the 2027 Beijing World Championships.

In other news, I wrote about sex testing at the World Athletics Championships for Good Sport Magazine. I wanted to highlight how athletes sign away their bodily autonomy to participate in high-level sport. Whenever I have a public opinion on a topic like this it makes me feel vulnerable and I long to return to my current project of restoring the 70-year-old armchairs my dad gave me.

I had been to Nanjing University’s track in 2016 and recalled the surface being run down, as well as a large number of people doing coordinated exercises/line dancing on the infield (anything but running).

This time around, we couldn’t enter the university grounds without a staff or student pass but my mum convinced the security guard to let us in. For a while we wandered around the outside fence, thinking we couldn’t access the track itself, lamenting loudly about the high security, but then embarrassingly discovered two open gates.

I was surprised to see a complete refurbishment of the facility including a Mondo surface. It felt gigantic, with large bends and a track surface that extended to the fenceline. There were still a lot of people around, more than you would see at a track on a random morning in Melbourne, but again, few were running. It seemed to be more of a playground. Parents and children were enjoying the open space to fly kites, drones, kick balls, etc.

Seating was sparse. There was one large tiered seating block off the first bend, lined with lovely shady trees, but the view was obscured by a high chain-link fence. For a Mondo surface you would expect that competitions should be held here but my mum informed me that it was for training only.

The clues that this track was in China were the security cameras, flag poles, and air raid bunker beneath the track.

I wasn’t yet back to training after my break but we still mucked about on the ancillary exercise equipment.

At a modern art gallery I spotted a cool lady wearing black baggy clothes but also a bright orange tangerine hat. I’ve been thinking about it ever since and my friend Kevin is buying me one from AliExpress.

I hope this sketch satisfies Shae, my new best friend, who requested a sketch of a dessert as their reward for being so loyal and devoted. Fruit is the go-to after dinner treat in China, after all.

xoxo Trina