How Hong Kong athlete Vriko Kwok ran 300km in 6 days, showing plus-sized people can blaze the trail in the running community

When she came third in her very first BJJ competition, the IBJJF Asian Championship, held in Tokyo, Japan in 2019, Kwok realised that her physical agility had never been a problem. On top of entrepreneurship and competing, she began advocacy work. She became a wellness campaigner, a TEDx speaker and a Lululemon ambassador.

“I wanted my ambassadorship to be perceived as an invitation for anyone like me who doesn’t feel welcome in the sports space,” she says. “I want to show up for people like me.”

Little did she know, this ambassadorship would push her boundaries even more. 

Running has a long history of discrimination, says Kwok. “Fifty years ago, women were told that they would lose their uterus if they ran a full marathon. These days, people like me have been told that we are too big to [run], as if the two are incompatible.”

So when Lululemon asked her in 2023 if she would run a six-day ultramarathon for “Further”—an initiative in collaboration with Canadian Sport Institute Pacific meant to support women athletes with resources and product innovations typically reserved for men—she was hesitant.

For Kwok, the running space had never felt welcoming in the past, and she was far from being an ultramarathoner—she had never run one kilometre before without taking breaks. It was a challenge for sure, but Kwok loves a good challenge. 

When she started training in Hong Kong, coached by ultrarunner Stefanie Flippin, she encountered a few experiences that could have easily deterred her. She received many negative comments online: “Out of all the ignorant and hateful comments I received, the ones that come back the most are people saying I don’t run hard enough because I don’t lose weight, and others said I’ll need knee replacement if I continue running,” she says. 

This negativity also followed her in real life. At the beginning of her ultramarathon training, she recalls an unwanted interaction with an unknown personal trainer who stopped her treadmill run to tell her that “she wouldn’t lose weight like that”. 

With only 11 months to prepare for the ultramarathon, while being surrounded by negativity caused her fat-shaming-induced trauma to resurface and she found herself getting emotional on her runs. “Jiu-jitsu has always been a great stress reliever for me,” she says. “It’s a very human sport with a lot of close contact, and it keeps my mind busy. I’m always thinking about the next move. But running is the complete opposite.”

But once again, it takes more than that to deter Kwok from reaching her goals—and especially when it comes to running for furthering the cause of feminism. Lululemon’s “Further” initiative was more than just a personal challenge for her, and Kwok was eager to take part in this scientific exploration, which documented the anatomical differences between female and male ultrarunners, and analysed whether female ultrarunners have superior fatigue resistance compared to their male counterparts.

This study was also meant to test gear designed specifically for female runners, such as trainers moulded after women’s feet (which are more curved than their men’s), running tee-shirts, shorts and backpacks that are adapted first to the female physiology—as opposed to a smaller version of men’s gears. 

This ultramarathon took place in Lake Cahuilla, California, in March 2024, and Kwok took part alongside nine other female athletes from around the world. 

Collectively, the women ran 4636.327 kilometres, with US ultrarunner Camille Herron setting 13 records, including the women’s six-day world record at 901.764km. As if running for six days wasn’t intimidating enough, Kwok was the only participant with no prior running experience. 

Far from being ashamed of her lack of experience, she used this opportunity to represent what women who run (as opposed to athletes) can go through: she started the race while on her period, which made her first run uncomfortable. She also tried to normalise her diet: “Fuelling for an ultra isn’t all that granola,” she wrote in an Instagram post. She also posted a lot about the pain she went through: from the tears to the muscle aches and morale drop. 

“‘Further’ was bigger than just a sport. I hope the 303.313km I ran can be an invitation for everyone looking like me to explore their full potential,” she says.

While the run is over, Kwok’s sports journey and the “Further” initiative aren’t. The results of the research will be published over the next two years, with initial findings to be published in the later part of 2024. Meanwhile, Kwok will be running head held high on the streets of Hong Kong. 

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