Spirited marathon runners ready to put their health on the line

Some of the most determined athletes in the world are in Hong Kong this weekend. No, they aren't jumping into the boxing ring with a golden gloves champ. And they won't be stepping into the batters box to face a pitcher buzzing a ball by their ears at about 180km/h, or hurling themselves down a ski-jump.

However, what they are doing is every bit as dangerous as the most extreme of extreme sports. These athletes will be running through the streets of Hong Kong. I think of myself as being in reasonably decent health and people of reasonably decent health should be able to walk a few city blocks with little trouble. Yet, after a casual stroll around town I come back home winded and gasping, a sad by-product of the perma-stench that passes for air here. If walking through the streets of Hong Kong is a hazard to your health, you have to figure running through those same streets would be far more dangerous.

Yes, I know that this is a redundant rant. But some redundancies are much nobler than others. As a record field of 43,000 runners prepared to traverse the much maligned route of the 11th Standard Chartered Hong Kong Marathon today, there is a great amount of trepidation and concern, with the most prominent being, naturally, the woeful state of our air.

It's an inconvenient truth, but the polluted state of this Special Administrative Region will likely bag far more headlines internationally than any other race related storyline. Unfortunately, the most enduring memory of last year's race was that of a 53-year-old runner who passed out midway through the race and never recovered. A total of 4,800 runners received medical attention.

While many of those cases were for muscle cramping and fatigue, there was still a preponderance of respiratory related illnesses and that, sorry to say, is not media hysteria. This is reality. The air stinks in Hong Kong and if you are going to hold a marathon here, you have to deal with it. This is not a golf tournament and this is not a leisure stroll out in Fanling.

This is a gruelling test of human endurance held last year with the air pollution index at a staggeringly high 149. This race is also run on a route that is widely ridiculed as spectator-unfriendly and unnecessarily difficult.