Unmasking the painful obsession of endurance athletes

A sailor stitches his gashed tongue during a solo sailing race where no assistance is allowed. An adventurer loses seven toenails while crossing 1,600km of the Gobi desert. A climber on the wall of the Eiger sleeps on a foot-wide ledge and claws up rock the next day with bleeding fingers.

- Rohit Brijnath

Out in the "untamed world" of nature, as the mountaineer Reinhold Messner described it, exists a tribe of humans who examine themselves. The geography that their expeditions explore includes not just areas of the planet but the unknown spaces within themselves.

"The quality I look for most is optimism," wrote Ernest Shackleton. "Especially optimism in the face of reverses and apparent defeat. Optimism is true moral courage." This great Antarctic explorer's boat was named Endurance and it is this virtue which shines through the hallucinating, pain-wearing, diarrhoea-ridden runners of the film Four Trails.

Showing this weekend at Shaw Balestier, this documentary directed by Robin Lee on the 2021 edition of the Hong Kong Four Trails Ultra Challenge is a striking study in suffering. Most sports have a compressed physical beauty, but this is four trails run non-stop over three days across 298km in Hong Kong. The interrogation hardens as the distance grows.

Any endurance event, speckled with vomit and tears, isn't a spectator sport. And yet the planet is littered with them as lean, spartan humans run hundreds of kilometres across deserts and around lakes. This isn't the swooning heroism we attach to champions, but the everyday grit of common folk who find escape, validation and discovery in the dirt.