The Night He Finished Three Kilometers, He Finally Understood What Men's Vitality Health Was All About

Zhang Weilun is forty-one and writes backend code at a software company in Neihu. When the company health check report came out at the end of last year, he flipped to the body fat column. The number had gone up a notch from the year before. He said nothing, folded the report in half, and stuffed it into his backpack. What really got to him was a Saturday afternoon this March, when he took his daughter to ride bikes at the riverside park. She rode ahead, turned back, and called out, "Dad, hurry up!" He pedaled hard for five minutes, his thighs feeling like they were tied to sandbags, and finally leaned against the railing pretending to admire the view. That night he downloaded a running app and decided to start with three kilometers.

The first run, he wore basketball shoes he'd bought five years ago, the soles hard as wood. By the second kilometer, his calves started cramping. He stopped and walked, walked a bit, ran again. When he finally checked his phone timer, the three kilometers had taken twenty-eight minutes. In the shower that night, he looked at his belly in the mirror and a thought surfaced: "This isn't age. This is me not moving for ten years." The next day he set his alarm for six, but hit snooze three times and didn't get up until seven-thirty, with only enough time for a cup of soy milk for breakfast. For two straight weeks, he bounced between "I have to run today" and "I'll just skip today."

The turning point came in a slightly funny way. One Wednesday evening, he ran into his downstairs neighbor, Brother Chen, in the community courtyard. Brother Chen is sixty-three and walks briskly every day in the same fluorescent yellow vest, rain or shine. Zhang Weilun asked casually, "How long have you been walking like this?" Brother Chen said, "Eleven years. At first I also thought I needed to buy something impressive, but then I realized the most impressive thing is just not leaving those shoes in the closet." Zhang Weilun laughed out loud, because his running shoes were sitting on the top shelf of the shoe cabinet, still wrapped in a plastic bag. That night he went home, took off the plastic bag, and placed the shoes by the front door.

He started adjusting his routine. In bed before eleven-thirty, phone charging in the living room; dinner with half the usual rice and a couple extra helpings of vegetables; weekend trips to the market for chicken breast and sweet potatoes, boiled at home. These changes weren't any secret, but they were annoying to keep up. Once his wife, Lin Yijun, saw him eating only half a bowl of rice at dinner and asked if he was dieting. He said, "No, I just don't want my daughter to keep beating me." Lin Yijun paused, then replied, "Then you should have said so earlier. I'll walk the track with you." Starting that week, they went to the school track after dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays for forty minutes—not running, just walking.

At the end of April, he overheard colleagues in the office pantry talking about someone who'd bought one of those one-page ad products online, claiming it boosted energy and metabolism. Zhang Weilun didn't chime in, but when he got home he looked it up himself. He found many pages that looked almost identical, with blurry images, customer service only via LINE, and vague company addresses. He didn't buy anything, but he noted the words "men's vitality health" in his phone's notes app, thinking he'd look into it more on the weekend.

The next day he did something very practical: he laid out all the health supplements in the house on the dining table. B vitamins, fish oil, probiotics, a jar of unknown powder won at last year's year-end party, and a box of his wife's iron pills. He took out his phone and checked each package's ingredient list and permit number one by one, taking photos of anything he didn't understand. Saturday morning he took the photos to a pharmacy near his home and asked the pharmacist, "Will these conflict with the blood pressure medication I take regularly?" The pharmacist asked him to bring his prescription list too, and reminded him that some ingredients are redundant when taken together—first figure out what you're lacking, then talk about supplementing. Zhang Weilun went home, put away the duplicates, and kept only the items his doctor had originally recommended.

One early morning in May, he finally ran three kilometers without stopping. The time was nineteen minutes and forty seconds—not fast, but standing on the levee catching his breath, he felt his chest was open. His daughter was there too, and she circled back on her bike to ask, "Dad, were you faster today?" He said, "Yes, eight minutes faster." She said, "Then next time you can chase me." He smiled and shook his head, knowing this had nothing to do with any capsule and everything to do with how many times he'd hit snooze and how many laps he'd walked these past two months.

Later, he saw someone in the company group chat share a news article about health supplements, with a headline roughly saying that more isn't necessarily better. He thought of that photo of his dining table, and of Brother Chen's fluorescent yellow vest. He hadn't become any kind of expert; he'd just learned three things: first, when your body changes, ask yourself how you've been living lately; second, anything you put in your mouth, look clearly at the label and source first, and if you have doubts, bring a list and ask a professional; third, the more urgent the ad, the slower he should go. He wrote these three sentences in the notes section of his running app and read them after every run. As for all those dazzling options, his reaction now is to take a deep breath first, then decide whether to spend the money.