I always imagine the type of handshake I will get if I meet a man who has done it all:

Spent over 10 years with the Commandos; conquered Mt. Everest; scaled the impossible K2 (that’s the second-highest peak after Everest); serial ultra marathoner, running across the scorching Gobi desert and dense Amazon jungle; led post-Ebola healthcare reconstruction for Sierra Leone; UN peace-keeper at East Timor; went for a ski-expedition to North Pole.

Look, he also climbed frozen waterfalls, damn it.

At this rate, I wouldn’t rule him out as Singapore’s VR Man.

Right. Back to that handshake. The bone-crunching type? Likely. The bro hand hug? Perhaps. The fist bump? Nah.

Surprise, surprise. For what it’s worth, it’s a namaste.

Thrilled that my fingers are still intact, I quickly count my blessings and namaste-d back.

Meet Lien Choong Luen.

Now that I’ve already covered the 43-year-old’s interesting bits, here’s the boring part: Studied mathematics at Berkeley and Cambridge; attained an MBA with distinction from the London Business School; currently the general manager of Gojek Singapore; and gunning for the presidency of Singapore Athletics — yes that national sports association that is kinda tangled up in knots.

But more on that later.

More importantly, I want to know why he did all that crazy stuff.

Is he a thrill seeker? Is he an extreme bro? I look around his patio looking for the proverbial Mountain Dew. Nope, just cartons of H-Two-O.

The Tao of thrill seeking

Turns out his answer to that is as surprising as the namaste, no flippant answers like “I do it for fun.” or “YOLO.”, no stoner-esque shrugs.

Instead, he leans forward, pauses for a moment and shares his motivations with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, breaking down thrill seeking into two parts: the momentary high of a short term thrill and the fulfillment of a longer version. And for him fulfillment comes in an intrinsic form: the satisfaction of mastery.

“It’s not thrill-seeking. It is about meaning. It is about flow. It is about improvement. It is about technical learning. It's about expertise. It is about fulfillment, fulfillment with mastery. The thrill-seeking part is a narrow piece of it, the meaning and the purpose part — if the endeavor is big enough, large enough — then the meaning and purpose really take over,” he says quite sagely.

I nod but deep down I’m deeply confused.

The flow, as he puts it, is about going from the exhilaration to control, to mastery and ultimately, performance.

Citing Alex Honnold, who climbed El Capitan -- an iconic, near-vertical 3,000 ft granite monolith in Yosemite Valley -- without ropes (!) in four hours, Lien says what the American rock climber did is more control than adrenaline because, after all, it’s a life or death situation.

“And then once you go from the exhilaration to control to mastery to performance. I mean, it is beautiful.”

I guess that’s quite the word to use on crazy, extreme stuff.

Wait, what?

So what’s his next hardcore stuff? He has something in the works, but he doesn't want to elaborate.

I nod again but his immediate exploit is already making the rounds.

Dear reader, it is at this juncture that I urge you to grab your popcorn.

Yup, Lien is running for president of Singapore Athletics.

Yes, the Singapore Athletics that was embroiled in a lawsuit with Soh Rui Yong — ahem, its own athlete — over comments made following his omission from the 2019 SEA Games.

It is the same association that was criticised by Sport Singapore for internal discord.

Oh, and its former vice-president Loh Siang Piow was sentenced to 21 months’ jail for molesting a teenage athlete twice in 2013.

Something tells me that you, dear reader, are thinking what I’m thinking.

That’s right, why even bother?

Well, as all love stories go, it’s for the love of the sport, of course.

Lien started his running journey in Sec 1 but only officially started representing his school, Raffles Institution, in Secondary 4, when he became faster — something he attributes to his growth spurt.

His pet event? The 800m, which he can complete in a mere 2 mins 5 seconds, the same time this writer usually takes — on a good day, mind you — to run 400m.

At 38, he won gold at the 19th Asian Masters Athletic Championships becoming, in his own words, “the fastest uncle in Asia”.

In fact, the nine-person team that Lien has put together to contest the Management Committee at Singapore Athletics' Annual General Meeting tomorrow (Sep. 25) is made up entirely of runners — from former sprint king Gary Yeo, who resigned from the current management committee, to cross country runner Chen Siyuan, now a law professor at Singapore Management University.

No egos, no secrets, no conflict of interests, no excuses

Lien is leading -- though he is quick (hurhur) to emphasize it’s a team effort. The team is called Team Ground Up, a rather generic-sounding name, if I may.

“We want to rebuild things from the ground up. If we go back to how we will characterise the situation in Singapore Athletics, I think what we need now or what there is now is a deficit of trust. And building trust comes from the ground up,” he explains.

To mitigate that deficit of trust, his team is basing themselves off these tenets: No egos, no secrets, no conflict of interest and no excuses.

“Everyone's really professional. We all have other things that we could be doing. We're putting reputations, we're putting a lot of things on the line in order to do this. And so if you're going to do that, we're going to do it well. It is a very professional crew that really is very keen to come in here for the sake of the sport and not for any individual agenda.”

Team Ground Up is up against TeamSGP athletics, led by 70-year-old lawyer Edmond Pereria, who is fielding a slate that includes two of the current committee members in swimming legend Ang Peng Siong and lawyer S. Govindaraju.

Wait a minute. Did he mean Team Underdog instead?

“I think we're different. It's not necessarily that we are the underdog. But part of being a fresh team and a new slate is the awareness factor. And that's why we've worked very, very hard, and met, you know, as many people as we could. And it's not me, it's the team. Seven, six people in a zoom call, really to speak to an affiliate and so that they can also get a sense of us,” he adds.

Over the course of the campaign period, his team has worked the ground hard to persuade 23 affiliates (who will be voting for the next Management Committee) despite having to limit interactions to Zoom calls due to Covid-19.

Coaches, athletes, sports administrators, former sports administrators, athletes representatives, you name it, they’ve got it.

A promise of process rather than a promise of outcome

If elected, the term for the committee will be for two years. Realistically speaking, can change happen in just two years? He admits that for that to happen, his team will need a longer runway.

But true to what he said about having no individual agenda, he’s really just keen to lay the groundwork for the future.

“Hopefully, these longer-term time cycles can be embedded and grounded in the Secretariat. So there's the (Management) Committee and then there's the working level secretary who are full-time employees of the association. And the other ones that have the institutional knowledge, they are the ones that will drive this planning through cross cycles and cross committees.”

Being in the data-driven industry that he is in right now and with his inclination for the transformation from adrenaline to mastery, he speaks of a promise of process rather than a promise of outcome for the embattled association.

I nod yet again, this time knowingly, for I dish out promises too readily, too cheaply.

“If we say that we will give you a report card, at the end of Q4, we will give you a report card at the end of Q4. And if the report card unfortunately may not have a good score. I mean, we will be honest with them. But of course, we will do our best to make sure that it is a good report card.”

Win or lose, it doesn’t really matter

And as 23 affiliates cast their votes tomorrow (Sep. 25) at the AGM, he would have completed — win or lose — another hardcore act: For to be in the mix for an association that is down on its knees is already a feat by itself. And to reach out to not just the voters but also to the ground is a testament to his team’s desire for change, a ground-up initiative as the team’s name suggests.

But win or lose, for Lien, the race for the presidency is not about the spirit of competition but collaboration.

“After Friday, on Saturday, we still need to work together. On Sunday, we still need to work together. I had a chance to meet up with Edmond Pereira from the other team. And we agreed that we wanted to work together because motivations are similar. So the AGM is not the end, the AGM is the start.”

An hour earlier, I imagined how a handshake from Lien Choong Luen would feel like. After our chat, I feel like I now know all about him but yet still don’t know who he really is.

An hour later, I can’t help but imagine the type of Singapore Athletics run in his image — technical, purposeful, disciplined, with just a touch of daring — and how it can only elevate the quality of athletics in Singapore.

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Stories of Us is a series about ordinary people in Singapore and the unique ways they’re living their lives. Be it breaking away from conventions, pursuing an atypical passion, or the struggles they are facing, these stories remind us both of our individual uniqueness and our collective humanity.

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Top image by Faris Samri and via