Zhang Fenglian

Zhang Fenglian only has a pair of pink sneakers, which she bought for 25 yuan three years ago, and she usually wraps them carefully in waste newspapers and plastic bags. In the past three years, all her competitions have been run down by this pair of shoes. This is the only piece of equipment she has purchased for the competition.

Zhang Fenglian, 50, was a doctor at the Gansu Provincial People's Hospital and married her husband Chen Fahai, 17 years her senior, at the age of 28. 42, when she found out she was pregnant with her second child, a boy like her eldest, she lost her job at the hospital and made her living by selling vegetables in the nearby villages and occasionally treating villagers for minor illnesses.

Every morning before dawn, Chen Fahai goes to the nearby vegetable market and wholesales a hundred or so pounds of vegetables, which he loads into Zhang Fenglian's back basket and carries to the nearby villages to sell during the day. The only cheap vegetables that sell well in the villages are cabbages and leeks, which can earn 30 yuan a catty. Zhang Fenglian has a strong personality, and her family will not come back until the vegetables are sold.

They rented a rough house of less than 30 square metres in the county, and the rent was more than 10,000 yuan a year. The family ate vegetarian noodles every day of the year, buying a 70 yuan bag of flour and rolling out noodles that would last for almost a month, and eating the rotten leaves in the basket that others had picked up and could not sell. Only when her children had a craving would Zhang Fenglian spend a dollar to buy two buns to improve their diet.

In 2016, a flyer for the Lanzhou New Area Half Marathon was slipped into Zhang Fenglian's hand. Seeing that the top 20 finishers would receive prizes starting at 200 yuan, Zhang Fenglian thought that she too was a good runner. She has been training herself ever since, waking up at 3am, running 30km along the Yellow River, going home at 6am to make breakfast for her children, then eating two whole bowls of noodles before carrying a hundred pounds of vegetables around the village. After getting the 200 yuan prize money for the Lanzhou half-marathon, she started to participate in races all over Gansu and the country, half-marathons, marathons, cross-country, all of them. Her requirement for herself was to finish in 10 hours, so that she could catch the return train that night and not have to spend more money on accommodation for one night.

There was no room for the large number of medals at home, so Zhang Fenglian hung them up with her towel. The clothes and backpacks for the race were all given out by the organisers of the previous race, and she took the sportswear home so that she could give the loose ones to her 17-year-old son and the tight ones to her younger son. When she runs in the morning, she can't afford to wear the 25 yuan pink sneakers, so she wears the shoes she picks up from the nearby rubbish dump, and wears whatever shoes she finds. Chen Fahai, 67, is too old to work and can only pick up bottles at nearby scenic spots. By running so hard, Zhang Fenglian is able to increase her family's annual income by 30,000 to 40,000 yuan to pay for her children's schooling.

Chen Fahai has heard Zhang Fenglian talk about the Baiyin race, which she has participated in twice before, and her biggest impression is that the roads are dangerous and supplies are inadequate. She tries to pack as lightly as possible for other races, but when she runs the Baiyin cross-country race, she has to carry two bottles of mineral water on her back for fear of running out of water at the midway supply station. These two bottles of mineral water could not save her life on that windy and rainy afternoon.

When Chen Fahai arrived at the funeral parlour, he saw her belongings: a set of sportswear that had been given out free of charge by the organisers when she took part in the race in Zhangye, and a shoulder bag whose zip had broken when he picked it up from the dump. He looked left and right, but the pair of pink sneakers had disappeared.