VM Nghe An 2026: Mai Trung trails Dan Quyet by 10m at 42km, My Hien leads the women's field

At exactly 3:00 a.m., the starting gun at Ho Chi Minh Square cut through the night in Vinh City. Within the first seventy seconds of the 42km race, the lead pack had already broken away from the field. Dan Quyet, Dao Ba Thanh and Nguyen Mai Trung immediately left the rest behind. Ten minutes later, only two men remained at the front. Mai Trung and Dan Quyet took turns setting the pace, the gap between them hovering around ten metres. Over the full marathon distance, ten metres on flat ground is worth roughly one and a half to two seconds. Not enough to call a breakaway. Not enough to call it safe either. The two men were running the classic shoulder-to-shoulder race, and in that kind of contest the winner is rarely the fastest man over the first 30km. The winner is usually the man who holds the steadiest heart rate across the final 35km. This was the first time the VnExpress Marathon Grand Tour set foot in the homeland of President Ho Chi Minh. The event featured four distances: 5km, 10km, 21km and 42km. All runners started at Ho Chi Minh Square and finished on Truong Thi Street, at its junction with Le Van Huu Street. Race bibs were distributed at the Nghe An Labour Culture House across two days, 25 and 26 September, before the course was closed on race morning. According to the organiser's schedule, the 5km started at 6:00, the 10km at 5:00, the 21km at 4:00 and the 42km at 3:00. The order runs against distance: the longest race starts first, the shortest last. There is a clear technical reason for that. The course closed at 7:15 for the 5km, 7:00 for the 10km and 7:30 for the 21km. Had the 42km started later, the fastest runners would have run head-on into a stream of shorter-distance athletes heading back to the finish line. The 42km course left Ho Chi Minh Square, passed Ho Tung Mau, Truong Thi and Le Nin Avenue before joining Vinh – Cua Lo Avenue. After roughly 16km, the route turned onto Binh Minh, hugged the Cua Lo coastline and made its turnaround at Cua Xa before returning to the city centre. The 21km started at 4:00 along Ho Tung Mau – Truong Thi – Le Nin Avenue, continued straight down Vinh – Cua Lo Avenue and turnaround near km 11. That distance carried two cut-off points: km 10 at 5:40 and km 16.9 at 6:50. The 5km took place entirely in the city centre and had no cut-off. On infrastructure, the organiser mobilised hundreds of volunteers alongside local police, traffic police and medical staff. From the evening of 26 September, those teams were present at the start area to receive assignments, install infrastructure, complete aid stations and set up cheering zones. Before the start, Thanh Meo and Vinh Runner noted this was among the events with the fewest 42km runners, creating favourable conditions for racing and personal bests, given Nghe An's smooth course and good road surface. Nguyen Mai Trung is 35, from Hanoi, works in e-commerce and runs for Thanh Cong Runners. The name is familiar to the capital's running scene. Every number is a testimony, and my only job is to interrogate it. The first statement is 2 hours 41 minutes 55 seconds at VnExpress Marathon Hai Phong 2026, ranking 69th on the list of fastest full marathon runners in Vietnamese history. That mark reveals Mai Trung's underlying fitness: an average pace of roughly 3 minutes 50 seconds per kilometre across 42.195km. With that base, holding the lead pack after 10km is no surprise. What matters is that he chose to sit in rather than push. Watching on screen, I saw Mai Trung keep a compact stride, low shoulders and even breathing. Dan Quyet was the opposite, waving at the cameras in the early kilometres. In exercise physiology, staying psychologically relaxed early is a sign of a runner holding heart rate below the lactate threshold. But it carries a cost. Every time the arms lift to wave, the shoulders open, lateral oscillation increases, and the body burns energy it does not need to burn. Over 42km, the energy spent in the first 10km can decide the final two. Based on my experience watching long-distance races, a slight pace increase in the first half rarely causes immediate problems, but it eats into glycogen reserves and comes back to collect from kilometre 32 onwards. In the women's race, My Hien was leading. She runs for Nghe An Runners and owns a personal best of 3 hours 7 minutes 39 seconds. The home advantage here is topographic rather than emotional. Athletes who train regularly on the Cua Lo coastal route hold a specific edge from km 16 onwards: they know where the sea breeze shifts, where the road tilts gently, and where to ease off before the turnaround at Cua Xa. None of that appears on the course map handed out by the organiser. There is another way to read a thin 42km field. Thanh Meo and Vinh Runner saw it as favourable for personal bests. I see the other side. A thin lead pack means the front group lacks intermediate pacemakers to distribute effort. When only two men are locked together from km 10, the race becomes a single-track duel: whoever blinks first loses. There is no third group to apply tactical pressure, no one from whom the leader can borrow a recovery rhythm. That makes the risk of a pace collapse at km 35 far higher than in a deep field, where a large pack spreads the pressure across individuals. Data never argues. It only exposes the truth. At major marathons, the rate of personal bests tends to be higher in groups with at least five runners sharing the target pace over the first 20km. Conversely, the rate of DNFs or pace drops above 15% in the second half is also higher in lead groups with fewer than three runners. A thin full marathon field is not automatically an easy field for records. It is easier to win, but also easier to erode yourself. My Hien sits on the benefiting side of the opposite effect. She runs at home, before familiar crowds, on a course she knows by heart. That is a form of geological advantage that no results table displays. When the world stands still, read the old charts again, and here the chart is the training map of the home runner. People may laugh at my name, but they cannot laugh at my chart. At 3:00 a.m. at Ho Chi Minh Square, the gap between Mai Trung and Dan Quyet was still ten metres. The real question is not who led at km 10. It is who still has enough glycogen to make one single surge at km 38, on the coastal stretch where the Cua Lo wind begins to turn. There, every training dataset becomes equal, and only breathing remains as the final testimony.