Wang Chen-kuo is very rarely absent from his weekly running club gathering on Tuesdays, when he and about 80 other runners circle downtown Taipei, kilometer after kilometer.
He has been a jogger for more than 30 years and does not like breaks in his running routine.
“I’m anxious when it rains on a Tuesday,” the 62-year-old said. “It feels like forever when it rains for hours and I can’t go running.”
Dressed as usual in a light yellow vest, Wang chooses to run in the opposite direction to the other members of the club so he can set and maintain his own pace.
Each year, he takes part in about 30 races, trying out different techniques, distances and types of terrain to improve his running skills.
In July, he logged 420km in 25 days in the sports brand Nike’s “Summer Night” campaign, which required participants to track their performance on four designated routes.
In recent years, more and more enthusiastic joggers like Wang are being seen in Taiwan, thanks to an increasing number of running events and better marketing strategies, according to people in the field of sports.
Chinese Taipei Road Running Association secretary-general Chen Hua-heng (陳華恆) said the number of running events in Taiwan skyrocketed to about 500 last year, compared with a few dozen annual events 20 years ago.
The association currently has 457,000 members, which suggests that one in every 50 people in Taiwan has participated in at least one of its running events.
“The events have become so popular that registering online [and filling up an event] can come down to a matter of seconds,” Chen said.
This is no exaggeration, as evidenced by the challenges encountered by people trying to register for the Color Run, a 5km non-competitive race and global event series that debuted in Taipei in September last year.
With about 90,000 applicants jostling for 13,700 spots available, the online registration system crashed and the organizers had to hold a lottery to select the participants.
Those who did not get into the fun race joined a parody event, organized by a local group, in which the runners were showered with potato flour instead of colored powder at stations along the course.
Competitive running events in Taiwan, such as the Taroko Gorge International Marathon and the Taipei International Marathon, have also been attracting strong participation in recent years.
Organizers are becoming more proficient at working with local governments and sponsors to create attractive promotional campaigns for various year-round running events, according to Chen.
However, the key to successful sports events is “branding,” said Essie Hu, general manager of Elite PR Group, the local promoter of the Color Run.
“Promoters have begun to realize that jogging needs to be perceived as a lifestyle rather than just a type of sport,” Hu said.
There are other advantages to be gained from promoting jogging, especially because health awareness is increasing across the nation, Chen said.
The percentage of Taiwanese who exercise regularly jumped from 18.8 percent in 2006 to 30.4 percent last year, according to a national survey by the Sports Administration.
In the survey, people who exercise regularly were defined as those who engage in at least 30 minutes of exercise three or more times a week, at a level that produces a heart rate of 130 beats per minute.
Among the 82 percent who indicated that they exercised to a certain extent, 21 percent said they chose jogging and 43 percent said they preferred walking, which put those two activities at the top of the list of popular exercise options nationwide, the poll found.
Jogging tends to have a solid fan base because it is simple, cheap and does not require special skills, which means it can thrive relatively easily, officials of the road running association said.
In addition, the generally low registration fee for running events in Taiwan — usually less than NT$1,000 — helps to encourage participation, Chen said.
“The registration fee for a marathon in Taiwan is the second-lowest in the world, after China,” he said.
Another incentive for runners in Taiwan is the chance to obtain various types of souvenirs that are usually handed out at local events, Chen said, adding that during the Nike campaign this year, he bagged four souvenir sports shirts and a pair of sneakers.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching