Some people are simply natural runners, without any training they can run times that most serious amateurs can be proud of. Abdi Abdirahman, a great American distance runner, ran a 15 min 5k the first time he entered a race as a high school student, with no training. Recently, I met a female Tibetan version of Abdi, a young nomad from Golok, a remote area of Qinghai province in China, famous for its tough warrior folk.
Yishi Drolma was born and grew up a nomad, looking after the family’s 400 yaks in the remote mountains in Qinghai province. The altitude was over 4000m, enormous Tibetan mastiffs kept the wolves away and snow leopards prowled the high passes above the pastures. Her own mother passed away early and she became a mother to her 4 siblings. Life was tough, unforgiving and sometimes violent. Yishi Drolma did not speak any Chinese, only the local dialect of Tibetan, but wanted to see the world, glimpses of which she saw on television and in the magazines that came her way. When she was 13 she managed to get her hands on 300 yuan and ran away to Chengdu in Sichuan where she knew one person. She spoke no Chinese at the time. When she was 19 she ran away again, knowing that her father would never let her go. She came to Shangrila, Yunnan where she got a job as a singer of Tibetan nomad songs at a gaudy Tibetan folk performance center aimed at Chinese tourists, which also provided room and board. I saw where she lived, a cramped, draughty freezing room, which she shared with two other Tibetan girls and two puppies. At least she had her own bed; the other two girls were sharing the same tattered mattress. People from Golok are renowned for their toughness and fighting spirit, as well as for their deep Buddhist beliefs. Yishi is no exception; once, in Shangrila, she confronted a lama, who, dressed in his robes, was sitting in a bar watching the girls, drinking and smoking. Yishi tore into him, admonishing him for disrespecting Buddhism, and setting a bad example to Tibetans.
In addition to singing, during the summer Yishi also takes Chinese tourists hiking, charging a pittance for her services as a guide, porter and organizer. She told me that it did not feel right to charge people for enjoying the natural world. This attitude is extremely rare now, as everyone is ruthlessly trying to cash in on the tourist boom in the area.
I met Yishi through a friend when I was looking for a Tibetan teacher, and she soon asked me to take her running. Wearing my old running tights, a t-shirt several sizes too big, my running shorts and a pair of basic running shoes I got her, she simply took off, bouncing, jumping and singing as she ran. We ran 10k that first day, at a very respectable pace for 3300m altitude, and she could have kept going. Then Project Y was born。
I soon suggested to Yishi that if she trained and trained hard, she could win trail races in China and could even support herself with prize money, as she was earning very little as a singer. My local Tibetan friends, who saw us running on the roads and trails around Shangrila, took to the idea whole heartedly. Tibetans, fiercely proud people, only have one high profile athlete, a speed walker who got a medal in the Olympics in London. The thought that a nomad girl from Golok could compete and win, and in a sport which meant running through the mountains, which Tibetans love, impressed and moved them. Older Tibetans would tell her to train as hard as she could in order to show the world what their minzu, (ethnic group) was capable of and not let slip the opportunity that came her way. They thanked me ceremoniously and profusely for becoming her coach. This made me feel both very honored and more than a little embarrassed by the attention.
Below is an interview with Yishi Drolma:
1. Where exactly are you from?
I am from Qinghai Province, Golok Prefecture, Jigzhil County. Our pasture was close to the sacred mountain called Nyanpo Yurtse; the highest mountains around the pasture are almost 5400m high. The closest town is more than 40km away. Our pasture was very large, 7 families are using it now; our family lived between two large lakes called Upper Rak Gan Lake and Lower Rak Gan Lake.
2. When you were growing up in the mountains, what was your daily life like? What was the hardest part of living there?
Most of the time was spent looking after yaks. They had to be milked twice a day. It was a huge job, as we had almost 400 yaks. In the afternoon we had to keep calves away from their mothers, to prevent them drinking all the milk. You can’t have fences in the upland grasslands. My brother and I had to run and run scaring the calves away from the cows.
Another job was collecting yak manure on the pasture which was then dried and turned into fuel to burn. We had a lot of fun with my brother running around the pasture collecting, playing games as we went along. I miss those times. I did not have much free time, but I would make time for myself by forcing my older brother to do the chores my parents asked me to do. I was tough, and he was afraid of me, if he didn’t do what I told him to do I would beat him up (laughs).
Once my father said that he would buy us new clothes when ours got worn out, so me and my brother got very excited and ran to the mountains were we tore up our clothes using rocks. When our father found out what we did, he refused to buy us new clothes, so we had to wear the ones we tore up for a long time.
3. Why did you leave the pasture and move to the town of Jigzhil?
After my mother passed away there was too much work for my father, we were five siblings, so my father decided not to make our lives harder than they were and we went to live in a town.
4. Why did you leave Jigzhil and come to Shangrila?
I wanted to study, and my father would not let me go to school, because I was the only one who could look after the house. I really like to learn and I could not learn anything in Jigzhil, so I came to Shangrila where I started to learn English at a volunteer-run training school.
5. What would your family think if they knew that you want to be an athlete, a runner?
I don’t really know, I actually told my father and the only thing he said was: “Can there be a future in this running, can it give you enough to live?’’ I said: “I don’t know yet”.
NOTE: this interview is from a few months ago. Things have changed, Yishi had to leave Shangrila and go home to look after her siblings. Her father, a heavy drinker and a gambler could not look after them anymore and put pressure on her to return. Yishi could not train for three months, but then took 4th place in a 50km trail race in China, the first time she competed. Unfortunately, she cannot rain now, as she looks after the household full-time, and her future as a runner is in doubt.