Everyone’s doing it. Getting fit, that is. As such, so do ever-more stories of inspiration hit the headlines. In our very own Jiangsu Province, two ladies are dominating the media these days, with their each very different tales of working out and getting fit.
Ms Wang is a bus driver in Suqian City in northern Jiangsu with quite the daily routine. She’s up at 04:50 and out for a run, usually 5-10 kilometres. That’s unless she’s on the night shift, when she’ll instead run in the evening.
But that which has captured people’s attention is what Wang gets up to on her bus during her break. And when we say “up”, we mean literally “up”. For after dusting down the seats ready for her return drive, Wang puts the rest of the break to good use. And the bus too, for that matter.
Those safety railings that her passengers shall very soon be clinging onto also happen to make for Wang’s improvised gym. Think parallel bars, balance beam and high bar; the assortment of moves Wang is capable of on her bus would make any gymnast proud.
Interested readers may watch Wang going through her paces in a video released yesterday, 30 August, by media outlet, The Paper, via this link.
A bit south of Suqian, in Huai’an in central Jiangsu, we then find Pang Shijie, a 37-year-old woman who used to weigh 100 kilograms. Now a bodybuilding champion, she has also recently been admitted to the Nanjing Institute of Physical Education (NIPE) as a graduate student majoring in sports training. This is the combination of factors that have brought about her trending on Weibo.
Pang, a Chinese teacher in a primary school in Huai’an, began gaining weight after giving birth to two children.
Seeking to do something about it, Pang resorted to some extreme methods at first. She ran frantically and often didn’t eat, which led to physical weakness, swollen knees and tendinitis. She was worse off, not better.
In 2014, she came across a scientific fitness diet and gradually fell in love with sports. “At that time, I understood that only sports and this diet could help me lose weight in a healthy way, so I often went to the gym after work and stayed for several hours”, said Pang in a report published by The World Journal.
With the pounds soon coming off, Pang’s coach joked with her that she could enter a bodybuilding competition.
And so it was that in April 2017, Pang came to Nanjing to participate in a fitness and bodybuilding invitational. She was placed sixth in the bikini section. She trained harder and just 2 months later was first in the bikini section of the Huai’an Fitness and Bodybuilding Championships. She has also won various awards in fitness and bodybuilding competitions in places such as Guangzhou and Sanya.
Pang also said that after completing her master’s degree at NIPE, she plans on perhaps doing a PhD. On education, she said, “I don’t study for the purpose of lengthening my professional title or getting anything. I just enjoy the fun of learning. It brings me a lot of happiness”.
