Chapter 12 — The Finish Line of Years Gone By

At the age of twenty-two, Son was officially called up to the reserve national team, and on the advice of the coaching staff, he began to change his expertise from medium distance to long distance - half marathon and then full marathon, more suitable for his fully developed physical condition and outstanding endurance compared to his teammates.

The transition was not easy. Running a marathon requires a completely different mindset than the short distances he was used to during his school days - no longer a burst of speed in a few minutes, but a more than two-hour battle with his own body, where every calorie of energy, every sip of water, every step must be meticulously calculated to avoid "hitting the wall" - the phenomenon of sudden glycogen depletion that causes the body to collapse in the final kilometers.

Son spent nearly two years getting used to the new distance, with more failures than successes in the early stages — once he had to give up halfway at mile thirty-five because of body cramps, and once he finished with a time fifteen minutes worse than expected because he miscalculated his speed in the first half of the race. But by the age of twenty-five, he had become one of the top male marathoners on the national team, winning a bronze medal in the men's marathon at a regional games, the best achievement an athlete from a poor district school had achieved in many years.

During this period, Son had a short relationship with Vu Diễm Khanh, a young sports nutritionist working with the team, who helped him develop a scientific diet to optimize performance. That relationship lasted nearly a year, sincere but lacking something that they both implicitly understood, and in the end they broke up peacefully, still maintaining good friendships - Diễm Khanh once told him, half joking and half serious, that she always felt that his heart had a locked corner that she could never reach.

The most painful turning point in Son's racing career came when he was twenty-eight years old, at an international marathon held abroad. At mile thirty-two, while he was in the top five, he felt a sharp pain shoot through his right heel, then immediately collapsed to the pavement — his Achilles tendon completely ruptured, one of the most serious and terrifying injuries for any runner.

The tendon fusion surgery was successful, but the recovery process took nearly a year, and the consensus among sports doctors was that his chances of returning to top competition were very low — the Achilles tendon after surgery rarely regains the elasticity needed for the intensity of movement of a high-level professional athlete. Son practiced physical therapy for many months, trying to return to running, but in the end had to accept the truth: his top competitive career was over at the age of twenty-nine.

"I don't regret it," he spoke to his father in a phone call, his voice more calm than he expected. "I've had ten years to live fully with my passion. Now I think it's time to find another way to stay with running."

That path is training. Son spent two years studying for professional athletics coach certifications, combining the extensive field experience of a former athlete with thorough sports science knowledge. At the age of thirty-two, he was invited to be the head coach for the Bạt Phong Athletics Club, a newly established private club with the ambition of training a generation of high-quality young marathon runners, sponsored by several domestic sports-loving businesses.

He pulled Tống Gia Huấn, his close friend from school days, who now also has a coaching license after pursuing his own sports career in a different direction, to be his assistant coach. Two old friends, now working together to rebuild their athletics dream from the days of recording achievements on the clay court of Vọng Hải school, the only difference is that now they have enough resources and enough experience to do it in a more methodical way.

***

In another direction, after graduating from university, Khue joined Khang Vinh Group, starting from the position of project development specialist in the Communications and Events department, although as the president's daughter, she could have completely chosen a higher position from the beginning. She wants to prove her abilities on her own, not relying on her father's shadow.

Three years later, she was promoted to the position of Head of the Sports Event Development Department - a new department established at her own suggestion, based on an idea cherished from her university years. During this period, her family also arranged for her to meet Kỷ Đắc Nhân, the son of a long-time business partner of Khang Vinh, a polite, successful man, and that meeting gradually developed into a serious relationship, and then became engaged when Khue was twenty-six years old.

But the closer the planned wedding date came, the more Khue felt a vague emptiness that she could not explain. Đắc Nhân was a good, thoughtful person with nothing to blame, but every time she was with him, she felt as if she were playing a pre-scripted role instead of being true to her own emotions.

"Are you sure you want to marry me?" Đắc Nhân asked directly, one evening the two sat discussing wedding plans, when he noticed an unusual lack of enthusiasm in her eyes.

Khue was silent for a long time, then in the end, she was honest with herself and him - calling off the engagement just two months before the wedding day, a decision that caused quite a stir in the business relationship between the two families, but both her father and Đắc Nhân's family, after initial tensions, respected that decision, keeping the business partnership separate from personal love affairs.

"I don't hate you," Đắc Nhân said in the last meeting before everything officially ended. "But I think, you still keep an empty place in your heart for someone else, whether you realize it or not."

That sentence haunted Khue for many months later, because she knew, deep down, Đắc Nhân was right.

When Khue was thirty years old, the domestic real estate market fell into a long period of quietness, severely affecting Khang Vinh's core business. During a tense Board of Directors meeting, when cost-cutting options were discussed, Khue stood up to present the proposal she had cherished for many years: organizing a large-scale international marathon, taking advantage of the group's existing land fund and partnerships, as a new direction to diversify revenue sources and reposition the Khang Vinh brand.

The proposal faced fierce opposition from Uông Đắc Thành, Deputy General Director in charge of finance, who believed that this was an unnecessary risky gamble at a time when the company needed to tighten its belt, and implicitly considered this an unrealistic project of the "president's daughter" wanting to prove herself.

"Sport is not real estate, Ms. Khue," Mr. Thanh said frankly in the meeting, his voice full of skepticism. "We have no experience and no expertise; investing in it while the company is in difficulty would be like throwing money out the window."

But Mr. Vinh, after carefully listening to the detailed plan that his daughter had been preparing for many months, decided to give her the opportunity, with one clear condition: she must take full responsibility for the success or failure of the project, and has exactly one year to prove its effectiveness before the Board of Directors reconsiders this entire new business.

The Bình Minh International Marathon was officially launched, with the goal of becoming one of the largest long-distance running events in the Central Coast region, attracting professional athletes and movements from across the country and internationally. Khue threw herself into her work with all her enthusiasm, understanding that this was not only an opportunity to prove her own abilities, but also a gamble that would determine the future of a new business department, on which she had bet her entire career.

One of the first and most important tasks is to find and sign contracts with reputable athletics clubs to ensure professional quality for the tournament, attracting the attention of the media and the running community. After weeks of research, her team, including Lữ Gia Kỳ - a close friend from school days who has also joined Khang Vinh after several years working in the sports marketing industry - came up with a shortlist of potential clubs to cooperate with.

"I see that this Bạt Phong Athletics Club has been quite popular in the last two years, training several promising young faces for both recreational and professional marathons," Ky said, giving Khue a file introducing the club, along with information about the head coach. "You should schedule a face-to-face meeting with their coach to discuss the possibility of cooperation."

Khue picked up the file, skimmed through a few lines of brief introductions, her eyes stopped at a name printed in bold at the bottom of the page - a name that made her heart suddenly skip a beat, although she told herself that it was probably just a coincidence, because "Hồ Nhật Sơn" was not such a rare name that there couldn't be a second person with the same name in a country of more than ninety million people.

But when she turned to the next page, she saw the head coach's portrait - the face was much more mature than memory, but those steady eyes, those familiar features, she knew for sure, this was not a coincidence.