A 50-year-old Chinese man, who goes by the name ‘Uncle Chen’, has gone viral after he ran the Xin’anjiang marathon in three hours 28 minutes all whilst chain-smoking a full packet of cigarettes.
Running a marathon is not easy, let alone if you’re filling your lungs up with smoke. But this new technique – one which we do not recommend you try – is something that doesn’t seem to stop Uncle Chen.
His three-hour 28-minute finishing time is roughly one hour faster than the average 50-year-old male can normally finish the 26-mile run; according to livestrong.com, the average marathon time for a 50-year-old man is around four hours and 19 minutes.
This time put him in 574th place out of a total of nearly 1500 runners. Very impressive given his ciggie consumption.
The photos went viral on the Chinese messaging app Weibo, and event organisers shared his finishing certificate afterwards.
But this is not the first time the “the new Marlboro man” (as one social media user put it) has been snapped running with his signature pack of durries. ‘Uncle Chen’ was also photographed running the 2018 Guangzhou Marathon and 2019 Xiamen Marathon lighting one up.
Both marathons he recorded insanely quick times, clocking a 3:36 in 2018 and a 3:32 in 2019.
He is also an ultra-marathon runner, having run distances over 50km all while puffing on a smoke.
According to some sources, Uncle Chen is not even a regular smoker, saving his darts for when it really matters on race day.
However, there are some that are critical of Uncle Chen’s technique. On the original post on Weibo one user commented, “Whoever is next to him is unlucky.”
Another commented, “Serious runners don’t smoke.”
Yet another quipped: “When you need the air to be ‘just as home.'”
But this takes away from what is a fairy remarkable – if completely bizarre – feat, which realistically, even the most seasoned runner would struggle to pull off.
There is currently no Guinness World Record time for quickest marathon while chain-smoking, but if there was, you can be sure that it would go straight to Uncle Chen.
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