S’pore runner Goh Chui Ling breaks 27-year women’s 5,000m national record

SINGAPORE – A sense of relief washed over national track and field athlete Goh Chui Ling after she clocked 17min 33.73sec for second place in the 5,000m in Munich on June 5, to eclipse the 27-year-old national record and erase her self-doubt.

Several near-misses this season were starting to take a toll on Goh, but the Singaporean finally attained the target she had been chasing for the past two years as her time at the Munchner Abendsportfest bettered Yvonne Danson’s mark of 17:35.3 set in 1997.

For that, she can finally crack open one of the bottles of champagne that she bought in 2022 and has saved for when she breaks records.

The 31-year-old said: “It felt like quite a relief so I can slowly break it further and continue the season without feeling the expectation that I should break the record.

“I’m not entirely happy with this timing – it’s a record but I can break it further. It’s only less than two seconds, but it’s a milestone out of the way.”

The thought of breaking the mark had been weighing on her mind, especially since she owned the 5km (road) and 10km (road) national records. Other national records she holds in individual events include the 1,500m, 2,400m and 3,000m.

Goh said: “Usually people run better on the track because the conditions are more consistent than running on the road where you’re running up and down hills, with wind resistance.

“I really do want to unleash the potential before I make any decisions about putting competitive sports aside to focus on my professional career.”

She has come close to the record over the last few months, after clocking 17:36.83 in the 5,000m in May. She also missed Danson’s 10,000m record of 36:27.39 by less than three seconds in April.

She said: “It reached a point where I was like, is this really not for me or could I have broken it? This is me feeling all this despite having fantastic times at training but that translation of the work from training to competition requires you to believe and trust your body.

“What I felt l lacked was trusting my body and being able to discipline and master your thought process, the preparation processes going into competition.”

Her mental resilience was further put to the test as her race got pushed back by an hour, resulting in her running past 9pm.

To stay focused, she reminded herself that other athletes were also waiting and thought about how to approach her race.

Goh thanked her support system for being “objective voices” whenever she faced self-doubt while she juggled her training and working on her PhD on sports and human rights at the University of Zurich.

This is not the first longstanding national mark that Goh has taken down. In 2022, she rewrote Kandasamy Jayamani’s 1,500m record that had stood for nearly 40 years.

Singapore Athletics general manager Shalindran Sathiyanesan said: “With this record, Chui Ling has proven herself once again as our leading middle- and long-distance female athlete. Her versatility and tenacity serves as an inspiration for our promising young crop of talents coming up, whom we see as medal potentials for the 2029 SEA Games.

“Longstanding records are starting to be broken, which is yet another sign that we are entering another golden era for our sport in Singapore.”