Chapter 57 Ghost Lao, Let's Try It

After completing the basic registration and check-in procedures for the competition, the schedule ahead was packed for the next ten days, featuring two invitationals and two warm-up meets.

Upon arriving here, Zhou Bing couldn't help but feel a subtle sense of inferiority.

Up until now, he had just barely broken the 10.80-second barrier, but a vast majority of the people here possessed that exact level of strength. His modest pride was instantly shaken to its core. Truth be told, back home, one simply never had the chance to witness so many powerhouses competing in the same arena.

Even at the provincial level, only the finals were worth watching; the rest of the rounds were essentially just mediocre fighters pecking at each other like amateur roosters.

"Good grief, Tian, this is way too intense. Oh my god, I feel like absolute cannon fodder here." Zhou Bing had truly opened his eyes. This was precisely what Su Shen wanted—he needed Zhou Bing to recognize his own standing and knuckle down for proper training. In Su Shen's eyes, Zhou Bing possessed far greater potential than his older brother. Zhou Tao's adaptability was actually inferior to Zhou Bing's, and combined with years of erroneous training, he was already somewhat set in his ways.

Although Su Shen and others had managed to reform their techniques even after being set in their ways, the sheer difficulty and willpower required for that were beyond ordinary people.

Even Su Shen himself had been given little chance of success when he first began altering his technique, a true do-or-die gamble.

Let alone these ordinary provincial team members.

Even within provincial teams, there was a strict hierarchy of first, second, and third tiers. Someone like Zhou Tao would never make the first team; even the second team would be a stretch, leaving his most likely destination as the third team, coasting along until retirement.

"Don't sell yourself short. The training and nutritional systems these people have been exposed to since childhood are far more scientific than ours. If we were to incorporate those few elements, aside from West African super-geniuses, we wouldn't lack an ounce of talent." Seeing a white athlete who startled Zhou Bing, Su Shen gestured toward him and said, "Especially the white athletes—they are actually the slowest runners."

Zhou Bing was almost getting used to Su Shen's startling remarks, but deeply rooted concepts could not be erased by just a few sentences from Su Shen. He simply remained silent, though that did not mean he agreed in his heart.

Su Shen was well aware that inner acceptance was not something achieved overnight.

After decades of relentless brainwashing by media and society alike, echoing the exact same narrative everywhere, you expect someone to just say they don't believe it?

Don't even ask.

If you question it, the response is simply:

Are you somehow more authoritative than these so-called experts and professors?

As Su Shen arrived at the venue, people suddenly began pointing and gesturing at them.

Zhou Bing couldn't understand the language, but Su Shen could roughly catch the gist of it—more or less expressing shock at why there were East Asians here.

In this day and age, with Western and Eastern media joining forces to shape public opinion, people had truly bought into this narrative from the very marrow of their bones.

Non-Asians genuinely believed that yellow skin was unsuited for track and field.

And the most ironic part was that people with yellow skin were echoing the exact same rhetoric on behalf of the opposing side.

"Tian, what are they saying?" Zhou Tao asked anxiously, listening to the group jabbering away in a foreign tongue without understanding a single word.

"They're wondering why there are yellow-skinned people here," Su Shen replied nonchalantly, paying them no mind. You could never block out such prejudice with mere words; only by delivering solid results could you force the other side to accept your presence. There was no second way around it.

"What's wrong with yellow people? We..." Although Zhou Bing's blood was boiling, he stumbled over the word "we" for a long time before trailing off, unable to come up with a fierce retort. After all, the reality was that they couldn't win, and the "experts and professors" had already declared that their race was inherently inferior.

Unsuited for track and field athletics.

Su Shen once even suspected that this was a peaceful evolution strategy orchestrated by the West.

Planting the seed of racial inferiority deep within your bones, they could effortlessly sit back and reap the spoils without exerting any real effort.

Watching them tear each other apart in internal strife.

"We can beat them. These people's talent is nothing special." With that, Su Shen began his warm-up routines. There was a warm-up meet today, and he needed to perform well and put up solid numbers.

***

Because it was a series of consecutive invitationals with a tight schedule, there was no luxury of a three-round format featuring preliminary heats, semi-finals, and finals.

It was simple and brutal: just two rounds. Following the rules of a semi-final, the top three from each heat would advance directly to the second round, supplemented by the next two fastest overall times.

However, there was a major issue.

This venue differed from invitationals in most parts of the home country.

Instead of running just once a day, athletes had to race twice a day here.

Consequently, if you burned all your energy in the first race, advancing to the next round would be useless, as there was only a mere two-hour rest window.

This explained why foreign athletes could still maintain a remarkably high level of performance despite facing such an intense double-race schedule.

During the first round of heats, Zhou Tao burned through all his energy right from the start. While it looked like he managed to snatch first place, such an aggressive approach was completely unnecessary. Yet, driven by the desire to secure a spot in the second round and win a modicum of pride for his race, he couldn't help himself.

However, Zhou Bing failed to consider whether his opponents had also gone all out in that round.

In a three-round system, bleeding yourself dry to make the finals might be worth it, but who goes all out in the opening round?

Su Shen could tell that the vast majority of athletes in Zhou Bing's heat had not exploded with their full power.

Zhou Bing's starting point was well-intentioned.

Yet, it brutally exposed his severe lack of experience with double-race formats.

"You pushed way too hard in that first race; it was completely unnecessary. If you had just held back a fraction of your strength, it still would have been enough to secure second place in the heat," Su Shen said, passing on his experience to Zhou Bing as the latter stepped off the track. But when it came to these matters, hearing advice ten thousand times paled in comparison to experiencing it firsthand.

Once you experienced it yourself, everything became crystal clear.

In sprinting, even an improvement of a fraction of a second drastically changes the physiological load and burden on the body.

The human body is an exquisitely precise instrument. If you operate at 80% or even 90% capacity when you are young, recovery tends to be relatively swift. But the moment you tap into 100%—or push beyond 100%—your body will immediately react by going on strike, demanding massive amounts of rest.

Especially when breaking through personal limits, it heavily damages both physical and mental stamina.

Compared to Zhou Bing, Su Shen's heat management was far more experienced.

Gauging the situation in his race, Su Shen took first place and immediately throttled back his speed to minimize energy expenditure. Even if it meant settling for second in the heat, it was more than enough.

There was zero need to stubbornly fight tooth and nail for first place.

Otherwise, by the time you made the finals, you would merely be a decorative filler, and no opponent would ever feel threatened by someone whose physical stamina was nearly exhausted.

Seeing Su Shen step off the track calm, composed, and barely out of breath, Zhou Bing instantly realized the chasm in experience and tactics between them. He truly shouldn't have pushed himself so desperately under a "two races a day" format.

If he was going to empty the tank, he should have at least saved it for the second round.

Wait, something wasn't right.

Su Shen was clearly younger than him and had far less competition experience, so why had he grasped this so quickly?

Could it be...

Was this what intellectual suppression felt like?

Zhou Bing suddenly felt a profound sense of humiliation regarding his IQ.

By the time the finals arrived, Zhou Bing clearly hadn't recovered, operating at perhaps only 70% to 80% of his capacity. The moment the surrounding athletes caught sight of his condition, they instantly recognized him as an amateur.

***

He simply had no clue how to manage a double-race schedule.

Fortunately, Zhou Bing wasn't entirely fluent in English and couldn't catch the specifics of what they were saying, but a man's intuition told him—

These people were definitely badmouthing him.

And in truth, they were. Many were mocking Zhou Bing for his inexperience, whispering that someone who went that hard in the first heat might as well forfeit the second. Others laughed that after running like that, he was about to learn just how foolish he was.

Su Shen couldn't be bothered to intervene. He was no overpowered protagonist, and besides, this was a stage Zhou Bing needed to experience for himself.

Constantly shielding someone was never a good thing.

You reap the consequences of the mistakes you make yourself—that was the best and most profound lesson.

Yet, as fate would have it, stories always take coincidental turns. From out of nowhere, a white athlete strode over and dropped a sentence:

"Eastern Silver, you no good. Running, you no good, understand?"

A thick, laowai-accented Chinese hit them point-blank, leaving Zhou Bing momentarily stunned.

It took him a good long while to process what they were actually saying.

Instantly, Zhou Bing's anger flared up, and he demanded, "What did you say?"

"Running, you no good, no good. Yellow people, no good." The athlete mocked as he spoke. Seeing this, Su Shen walked over and calmly asked, "So you guys speak Chinese. Who taught you? Didn't your teachers teach you some manners?"

Su Shen had expected this to shut their foul mouths, but a single retort from this bunch nearly caused blood vessels to burst in anger.

"Our Chinese was taught by our Eastern girlfriends. They didn't teach us how to be polite." With that, another burst of laughter erupted around them.

Well then.

This era was indeed characterized by a widespread adoration of foreigners, subscribing blindly to the notion that the moon abroad was rounder.

One only needed to look at the outflow ratio of women versus men to understand; stating that foreigners were more popular at the time was an indisputable fact.

Even in domestic action movies, finding a white partner was portrayed as a symbol of status and prestige.

National pride and cultural identity had not yet risen to the level they would reach decades later.

Otherwise, how could domestic public intellectuals have run so rampant?

"Alright then, American boy, let's settle this on the track," Su Shen said, taking a deep breath, locking eyes with his opponent, and speaking word for word:

"Let's see if we're any good or not."