Address: 21 Shing Mun Rd, Tsuen Wan, Hong Kong
To Shing Mun Sport Field:
When I say I miss you, I really do. And when I say you’ve made me shed blood, sweat, and tears, I meant it in both a literal and figurative sense. You welcomed everyone — seniors, adults, parents, teenagers, and especially middle-school kids, the person I was (and still am) since 10 years ago. In the earlier years, I was never able to come visit you alone by myself; my parents said it was still too dangerous for me to run alone unsupervised. That was fine with me, as I had the opportunity to visit you at least twice every year, with nearly half of the school accompanying me in a school-wide sporting event. We were all divided in teams that represented the different values of the school, such as respect, knowledge and community. Each team wore T-shirts and face paints of differing colors. Do you remember? I was the tiny little girl wearing the light-orange face paint, cheering for others who were running on the track.
I’ve always loved running, and I still do, and you’ve provided me with the exact space to cultivate and exercise that love. I would start sweating out of sheer nervousness when getting into the sprint start position, and when the teacher blares the sound horn, that is when my nervousness skyrockets. But the straight lanes stretching into endless loops seemed to be telling me,
“you’ve got to just do it. You’ve got this”, and split seconds right after the horn blares through the air, I would charge up my muscles and break through that intangible barrier of nervousness as I sprinted down the lanes alongside other students. The adrenaline rush always feels like a blur that is way too short, but like my homeroom teacher and my classmates standing at the spectator platform above, I knew that you were always there to cheer for me. The wave of cheers, the winds rushing through my face, the afternoon sun casting a bright glow on the grass fields and the rubber tracks — within that 7 second of running at high speed towards the finish line, it felt like a moment I was living in forever, and that I wish I could capture permanently as a documented trace of you and me.
You’ve allowed me to thrive in individual races, but you also taught me how important teamwork is. As the last runner on a 4-person relay team, I gradually learned that more than my starting position itself, it is the pivoting position that matters even more. In the beginning, I never really knew how much to run forward for and where I should start as my teammate was running closer towards me with the relay stick. A few times, I had almost dropped the stick or ran too soon that my teammate had to take extra steps to catch up for that additional distance. However, as I got to practice more, I was able to find the golden time frame in correspondence to the physical markings on the ground. In a discussion with my teammates, we agreed that when they reach the intersection between the turning loops and the vertical lanes, I would wait 2 seconds before extending my hand backwards to receive the stick from my teammate and start running towards the finish line. I think this was a clue that you gave me, and it actually worked out well in some of my remaining relay races.
As I grew older, I finally had the freedom to visit you by myself, but I never really did that as it was quite a trip. I would have to take a 20 minute bus ride, go up a hill for 15 minutes and walk for another 15 minutes before I can see you. Instead, I visited you again but with my school’s track and field team every Friday after school. I usually ran for short distances, a usual 60m straight line, but you were a full 400m track! It was definitely not easy at first; I consistently ran out of breath halfway through, felt like I was about to faint towards the end of the full circle, and made way too much contact with the ground that the bleeding cuts on my knees and elbows sometimes blurred out with the imprints of the red rubber tracks. In retrospect, although it was you who made me adapt to you, I’m glad that I challenged myself with practicing a new distance goal. Through all these training sessions,
I learned resilience the hard way, but I’m also glad that I made this push throughout.
I wanted to say thank you regardless, for all the joyful moments we shared and for always challenging me to improve myself. Perhaps the next time when I visit you, it will just be myself. A “solo” running session of you and me, sometime in the future.
Sincerely,
Joyce Leung