Dear friends who are following Soh Rui Yong’s open challenge, I would like to offer my thoughts from both a commando’s and a competitive runner’s perspective.
As competitive runners, our primary responsibility is to be the fastest athlete we can be. Our athletic life revolves mainly around getting sufficient sleep, taking care of our nutritional needs, and putting in the hard work in training, that is specifically optimized for our performance.
As commandos, we require a wide range of skills and a high degree of fitness to carry out our duties and responsibilities. We need to spend a lot of time and effort to perfect our fieldcraft, master our airborne drills, learn combat skills, practice our marksmanship, just to name a few, you get the drift. I am proud to say that most commandos have/had the necessary fitness (speed, strength, stamina) and precision to complete our missions.
As you can see, commandos and runners lead very different lifestyles to achieve very different objectives, and hence, naturally we become skilled at what we train for. The point I am trying to make is, we should not and cannot measure a commando’s abilities by how fast a commando runs. We run fast enough.
And, as one of the fastest commandos, I do not and will never claim that I am one of the best commandos. There are too many commandos, past and present, who can complete their tasks much more effectively than I do. I was just fortunate to have received specialized athletic coaching prior to army enlistment.
So why is there an open challenge between Soh and Army/Commandos?
After Soh posted his record-breaking run, there were several non-commandos who tried to discredit Soh’s effort by saying, they know someone from commandos who ran faster.
Soh’s 2.4km achievement took many, many years of dedication, blood, and sweat to accomplish. Most of us don’t even stay in a job for that long. Now, discrediting his achievement is akin to our colleagues taking credit for our work. Let’s be fair and celebrate each others’ achievements.
Therefore, Soh is trying to fight for what he deserves by issuing the open challenge.
In the end, we, commandos got dragged into this saga by the “keyboard warriors”. Nasty/unpleasant/insulting words were exchanged all over the internet.
One of the things being said about Soh was, he is a show-off. What they don’t understand is that posting achievements and gathering attention is part of his job to gain sponsorship contracts (apart from the actual running). As a coach, I too, show off my students’ achievements in my resume.
“He is too attention-seeking”. The more eyeballs he gets, the greater his sponsorship deals are. It is his livelihood. I don’t see sponsors knocking on my door for my achievements, while slower athletes have been awarded sponsorship because of the attention they get.
As for commandos, let’s keep our cool and let keyboard warriors say what they want. When we hear a song on the radio that we dislike, we switch channels. Any reaction/response to the open challenge will probably cause more anger and division between different communities in Singapore.
Congrats to Pocari Sweat Singapore, the biggest winner in this saga.
