For Singapore hurdler Ang, life is a brilliant battle with time

0.01 is nothing to us.

Just one-hundredth of a meaningless second. Faster than just another blink of the eye.

But 0.01 is everything to Ang Chen Xiang, the record-setting 110m hurdler. So he’ll give all his time just to find this tiny piece of time. He’ll rise at 6am, do his core work, arrive at the National University Hospital at 8am, finish his rounds as a resident, decide on treatments, check scans, slog till 5pm, return to the track at 6pm, push his body till 8.30pm, have dinner, study, write reports, sleep at 11pm, day after gruelling day.

All this for just 0.01.

Going faster is a slow business. To find time you put in time. Ang recently met an athlete who was frustrated that her time wasn’t dropping and he told her the truth about 0.01. You can’t rush it. You work and trust and sweat and wait.

He knows this because in 2024 he learnt this lesson. “I was trying to qualify for the Olympics, which I failed to do. I was just trying too hard. You can’t try too hard. You’ve got to put in the necessary work and just let it happen.”

Even though, he’ll tell you, the “truth” is that “it may not happen”.

There’s no signed agreement with some sporting god which guarantees sweat will translate into improvement. “A majority of time,” says Ang, “you will fail as an athlete and just for tiny little moments you will succeed.

“And these are the moments that you hold on to very strongly and remember for the rest of your life. Because of the perseverance that you know you’ve given, and (how you’ve) pushed through the doubt, and pushed through hardship and injuries, and then finally reaching one summit of many summits.”

Like

the summit he reaches on April 24,

when he finds that 0.01 of a second and sets a national record. He runs 13.80, which is a hair’s breadth better than his 13.81 in March, which is a whisker away from the 13.84 he timed at the SEA Games in May 2023. To be precise it’s taken two years to go faster by 0.04 and it’s a feat, a superb scrounging of fractions of a second, because the shorter the race, and the faster you become, the harder it is to find time. 

Time is Ang’s life, a world divided into alarm clocks, stopwatches, rosters and calendars. Time is his nemesis, his thrill, his challenge. Time must be found for practice and study yet rarely allotted for leisure (“I really can’t remember when was my last holiday”).

This diversity of Ang’s interests tires him yet renews him. “I am exhausted after a day of work, but the contrast provides colour to your life. It is tiring but there is purpose and I get excited about chasing goals and forget about the fatigue.”

Sport might be art and medicine science but excellence, in whatever field, asks for labour and “very similar mindsets”. At the starting line he might be jittery but frames it “into a challenge”. During an emergency at the hospital it’s a little of the same. “Just taking a deep breath, calming yourself down, and saying, ‘this is what I’ve trained for’.”

And so he continues this double life, in scrubs and shorts, chasing the best parts of himself in a race involving 10 hurdles, each 1.067m high, which must be negotiated at top speed with polished technique. He takes eight explosive steps from the start to the first hurdle. Takes off 2.2m before each hurdle. Aims to clear the hurdle by 2cm (5cm is too much, or as he says, “flight time is wasted time”). Then takes three strides between every successive hurdle.

A spectacle of tempo and rhythm, this event is built of multiple, precise bits. Right now Ang is unsatisfied with his start, which is usually his strength, but this season his “set-up to the first three, four hurdles hasn’t been that sharp”. But despite that he’s broken records and so imagine how much faster and further he could go?

By 0.01, perhaps?

Or to another SEA Games gold medal in December? 

Ang “cherishes” every competition because as a part-time athlete he understands how precious and precarious time is. He can be a doctor till his 70s, but at 30 his use-by date as an athlete is not too far away. So he must extricate everything he can from himself and this year that means taking time off to prepare for the SEA Games.

These leaves of absence have had an impact on the rate of his career progression in medicine. For some, who view the world through a narrow prism, this might seem too high a cost. And yet, what Ang has gained in this adventure, in the discovery of himself, in the giving of himself to a cause, in his name in the record books, is priceless. This chasing of the clock, one might say, is the time of his life.