A Chinese man has gone viral after running a marathon in a more than respectable time whilst chain-smoking his way through a packet of cigarettes.
Obviously, we’re not condoning this – smoking is really bad for your health and if you’re a runner then you should certainly know that.
Still, the pictures of this bloke rattling his way through both a packet of cigarettes and the Guangzhou marathon are quite compelling, if utterly bizarre.
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We know fairly little about the man behind the photos, other than that he’s known as Uncle Chen and that he was pictured running around the marathon track with a tab constantly hanging out of his gob.
In the end, the group that organised the whole marathon spotted that he’d gone viral and shared a picture of his final running time.
On the certificate to state that he’d completed the race, it showed that he’d actually managed to go around the whole 26.2-mile course in just three hours and 28 minutes, which is a more than respectable time.
I mean, how quick would you be able to do it? Let alone whilst filling your lungs with unhealthy chemicals and smoke.
Chen’s time was good enough for a 574th place finish out of around 1,500 competitors on the day, so he’s well into the top half of all finishers.
And it’s not even the first time that Uncle Chen has done something like this.
In fact, he is believed to have taken part in both the 2018 Guangzhou marathon and the 2019 Xiamen marathon whilst smoking through a pack of cigs as well.
He ran 3:36 and 3:32 respectively in those races, so the 50-year-old. – we believe he is 50, anyway – seems to be getting better as he goes.
One report – though we can’t possibly comment on the veracity of it – suggests that he only smokes when he runs.
That would really be silly, though.
Chen is apparently also an ultra-marathon runner, taking on distances of 50km and times of up to 12 hours.
Since he went viral on Weibo, some have seen the weirdly funny side of it, but others have complained that he shouldn’t be allowed to spark up whilst he’s in an actual race.
“This type of behaviour should be banned from the race,” one said.
“I feel bad for the runners around him,” another commented.
There aren’t any rules around smoking on marathon courses generally, not least because it’s outside, but also largely because everyone sort of accepts that it’s a fairly dim idea.
But imagine the kinds of times that Chen might be capable of if he stopped smoking, right?
Tom Wood