The ignition sequence of Shanti Pereira begins with a grain of rubber.
On a running track at the Singapore Sports School, which is her alma mater, that’s all she focuses on as she looks down. One single granule. The afternoon June sun is high in the sky and she is crouched low on the starting blocks. Her head is empty, her body is taut, an instrument of speed clothed in Nike black.
Her coach Luis Cunha calls “set” and she rises and pauses. There’s something hypnotic to this stillness which precedes explosion. Think of it as the human equivalent of a cocked gun.
What do you think at the start?
“Nothing,” she says. “I just listen for the gun.”
Her place of work today is 100m long – often it is 200m – and 1.2m wide. A bit like hurtling through a tunnel. Most athletes work in minutes, her world is encapsulated in the seconds it takes you to read this paragraph. They can afford mistakes, she is not allowed any.
Are you a good starter, I ask her.
“No,” interjects Cunha.
Pereira, 26, laughs.
“I am better,” she says. “I am not bad.”
Still in New Zealand earlier in 2023, she “panicked” after a very good start. Panicked, I ask? “I was surprised, lah.” When hard work and change actually translate into a moment of excellence, it’s both startling and delightful.
I just listen for the gun.
She and Cunha have forged a partnership built on sweat, trust, faith, science and smiles. He’s always her coach, always checking, investigating, correcting. Even today, which is not a practice day, he’s at work, adjusting her foot on the blocks or correcting the position of her hand during flight. Perfection is an all-day, everyday obsession.
Cunha takes A4 sheets of paper and fashions them into tiny pillars and places them just in front of Pereira’s feet. Rarely has paper been used for such athletic purposes.
During her start, Pereira’s first step was too high, a sort of cycling motion, and she was inadvertently braking when her foot landed. Cunha wanted her feet in her first stride to be closer to the ground and that’s why he put the paper there. If she stepped over it as she started, she was erring. If she kicked it over, she was doing it right.
“It’s incredible,” smiles Pereira, “how simple his method was”.
From this low-cost, smart-thinking experiment with stuff you find in your office printer has been found the very thing they both obsess over.
Milliseconds.
The science of speed
In the High Performance Laboratory at the Singapore Sports Institute (SSI) you can feel the tremors. A high-speed treadmill is clattering away at unfamiliar velocity.
How fast?
“32kmh” grins Cunha.
It’s earlier the same June day, somewhere past 9am. It’s not a practice day but still Pereira, who is wearing a safety harness, warms up. Her muscles are her engine, always to be cared for. Then Cunha turns the dial to 35kmh for a few seconds and as she accelerates, everyone in the room goes quiet in awe. This is pure speed from five feet away.
Three slow-motion cameras are aimed at Pereira. A fourth one is documenting the experience. I am scribbling notes. The Straits Times’ interactive, video and editorial teams are following Pereira for a day to try and answer a simple question as she readies to compete in the Asian Games next week.
How did she get faster?
How did a runner who was stagnant for years and lost her Spex Scholarship suddenly discover herself?
In 54 races between June 2015 and May 2022, her 200m time stayed static at 23.60 seconds. Then arrived a runner with a second wind. From May 2022 to now – according to World Athletics data – she has run below 23.60 18 times till it now stands at 22.57sec (a time which qualified her for the 2024 Paris Olympics). In the 100m, her time remained unchanged at 11.58 between April 2019 and August 2022. Since then, she’s run below it 25 times and her time stands at 11.20.
The answer to her progress, like her race itself, is complicated, a jigsaw whose parts took time to be arranged. It involves sometimes going backwards which is what she did with her back leg on the starting blocks. Just positioned it half a step further back to find an optimal position for her knees and hips to produce more force.
Running is more sophisticated an exercise than Tom Cruise on the move in Mission Impossible. It’s small things and big moves. It’s sports scientists using high-speed cameras to film her at 300 frames per second. It’s her body strengthened, stride lengthened – in the 100m her maximum stride has gone from roughly 206cm to 227cm – and her finish refined. It’s science polishing art.
It’s psychologist Dr Harry Lim, dietitian Cheryl Teo, physiologists Vincent Yeo and Steve Chow and bio-mechanists Neo Xi and Desmond Boey arming Pereira and aiding Cunha. Villages build their heroes. Pereira’s diet was altered (she’s even fastidious about “the order I eat my food”), her mindset tuned (learning to be adaptable in non-optimal conditions) and even her “sleep hygiene” monitored. Like what time does she put away her phone before she sleeps.
And it’s also occasional trips to a higher place.
Great races are run in the brain
In the morning, through a door you’ll never enter, emerges Pereira.
She has arrived from the Altitude House at the SSI which artificially mimics the thin-air environment of the running factories of Iten, Kenya. Normal air has 21 per cent oxygen; here, where Pereira lives sometimes for 30 days at a setting of 2,500m above sea level, the oxygen is at 15.6 per cent.
What they’re aiming for, explains sports physiologist Chow, “is a 3 per cent increase in haemoglobin mass” which improves the oxygen-carrying capacity of the athlete’s blood. It allows athletes to “go harder in training, to sustain longer or recover faster, for example, from repeated sprints”.
Pereira is neither a science geek nor a technique nerd, but Cunha is. Data – he can tell you her flight time, ground contact time, speed over the first 10m – is his religion. Yet he tells her only as much as she needs to know and she believes in it for the most simple reason. It works. She’s faster.
Proof lies in her shaved decimals and her ranking on the continent. As at Sept 17, she has five of the top 10 100m timings in Asia in 2023 and eight of the top 10 200m timings. But caution is warranted. Bahraini runners have clocked faster times than her in other seasons and other nations might be keeping their sprinters in cotton wool. Winning is never a guarantee.
Detail is Cunha and Pereira’s armour. At the Asian Games, she will have multiple races (heats and finals in the 100m, 200m, relay) and so Cunha will plan her sleep times, wake-up times, meal times, recovery times and travel times to the stadium. He will consider anti-doping protocols and medal ceremonies and anything which might interrupt her recovery. “We try,” he says, “to control everything that we can to influence her performance.”
But the repairing and reinvention of Pereira has also been mental, for the great races of sport are run in the brain. When athletes stagnate, harsh voices congregate in the mind, and it takes time to sort out why you run, for whom, what you get from it, who you are and what you can’t control.
We try to control everything that we can to influence her performance.
Now that self-doubting runner has fled and this courageous woman walks in spikes like a supermodel in stilettos. Her step has confidence.
And confidence triggers speed.
Fast has no finish line
Pereira sprints, dips and the finish-line tape drapes her like a ribbon.
Again? Yes.
After a morning session at the high performance laboratory we’ve driven to the Sports School. The sun and clouds flirt as Pereira explodes from the blocks again and again. Camera angles are altered. She does it again. Once she produces such force the blocks go skittering backwards. Then she does 20m sprints to demonstrate her stride and posture – pieces which have been tinkered with by Cunha – and we have to position the camera further back. It’s hard to capture someone so fast for she’s barely in the frame and then she’s gone.
Occasionally all of us peer at a replay on the camera. We find her running mesmerising, they only find flaws.
Pereira must feel like a lab rat in an experiment but she doesn’t complain. People ask if all she does at practice is run. They also don’t always understand time. What does it mean to finish the 100m in 11.20sec? Pereira feels this project will give answers to who she is and how she found speed. So she’ll sweat for the cameras.
The final part of Pereira’s race, the part which separates runners, is the final 20m. The finish. “One thing I’ve changed,” she says “is that I started practising it. So what I’m training for is that I want to time the dip exactly at the finish line.”
At the Asian Games, photo-finish cameras will be taking 10,000 images per second. Here, two of us are holding a reel of red finishing tape found on Amazon as Pereira comes galloping down the track and leans into the tape, forcing her shoulders and torso forward.
Don’t panic, Cunha told her. Keep your form. These little things are decisive. At the SEA Games in 2022, she was in “sixth or seventh place” through the halfway stage of the 100m. “But I managed to keep up with the pack and at the finish line I dipped just in time for me to come in second place”.
It’s just past 2pm and the day’s running education is over. Irrespective of where she finishes at the Asian Games, her story has been a triumph. Medals matter but the great victory has been in how a lost athlete found herself. Doubt has flown, speed has come and pressure is being worn. One might say the graceful Pereira has finally found some Shanti.
Her first name, you see, means peace.