Wu Panrong
The weekend before heading to Baiyin for the cross-country race, Wu Panrong participated in the China Mountain Marathon Series and the Danxia 100 Mountain Run in Jiyuan, Henan Province and Shaoguan, Guangdong Province respectively, and he said in his TikTok, "This weekend's race was a bit intense, next week, the first 100KM Yellow River Shilin of life, go!"
This race in Baiyin is his first 100km trail race, but the venue is not new to him. Ten years ago, he had already worked on a construction site in Baiyin before he got involved with running; ten years later, he became a god-like figure in the Shenzhen running scene, running a personal all-marathon PB of 29 minutes and 45 seconds in Wuxi in April this year.
From primeval forest to stone forest and Gobi in one week, Wu Panrong said that Baiyin was "familiar and strange".
The night before the race, Wu's best friend asked him on WeChat how he was doing and cheered him on. He replied that he was ready to run, but his friend noticed that the number book on his racing suit was buttoned up backwards and joked to him that "elite runners should be careful about their image". To cheer him up, his friend said, "When you return to Shenzhen after the race safely, I will give you takeaway crawfish orders over here." Wu Panrong replied with a puppy nod emoji, looking in a good mood.
On May 22nd, Wu ran with his running buddy Zhang Xiaotao for most of the day. According to Zhang Xiaotao's account afterwards, "After reaching the halfway point of the mountain, he (Wu Panrong) began to shiver all over, and started to shiver when he spoke, so I saw that he was in bad shape, and held him with my arm. I remember later, the wind was too strong and the road too slippery, so we couldn't walk together, because we were going to fall and slowly separated."
Thunderstorm days also swept through Wu Panrong's hometown, Tongren, Guizhou.
According to ahwang.cn, Wu Phanrong's father, Wu Manba, did not receive a call from Gansu because of the bad weather and the impact on his mobile phone signal. But afterwards, from his daughter-in-law's incoherent account, Wu Manba sensed that something was wrong. In order to get to Baiyin as soon as possible, Wu Manba high speed train to plane and then by car, the whole 1500 km, finally saw his son in the funeral home.
Wu Panrong was born in 1989 and went out to work after graduating from junior high school. He wrote on his TikTok, "He started running in November 2015, started with love and stayed true to it. The dream is a bright light when you are running wildly in the stormy night, a warm sympathy when you are isolated and helpless, and a persistence that you can't give up after your heart is exhausted and you are so tired that your whole body is weak." According to Sina Sports, when Wu Panrong worked in a factory in Longhua, Shenzhen, he often ran at four or five in the morning, sometimes even at two in the morning, in order not to miss work.
In the 2016 Qingyuan Marathon, Wu Panrong's time was 3 hours 42 minutes 38 seconds, after which he set a plan to run into 3 hours in a year. In the Shenzhen Marathon in December that year, Wu Panrong achieved his goal with a time of 2 hours 50 minutes 03 seconds and won the team championship together with his teammates from the "Donglingyuan Flying Tigers".
Every time he runs, Wu Panrong will make a short video of his route map and data screenshots and post it on TikTok to cheer himself up. In the Baiyin cross-country race, the image of Wu Panrong turning back while drinking water at a resupply point was recorded, and some runners exclaimed, "How good it would be if we didn't keep going".