![]() ![]() Tan in 2015 after finishing the New York City Marathon. ![]() “He looked a bit ridiculous the first couple of times.” Tan would head out in Vans and board shorts, until he bought his very first pair of running shoes: the Nike Lunarglide 4, in blue. “Jeff wasn’t an athletic, sporty guy,” Kennedy says. His roommate, Adam Kennedy, was a casual runner, and eventually Tan began to join him occasionally for runs of one to three miles. In 2005, a year after graduating, he moved to London and took an apartment across from Clapham Common, a park on the south side of the city. That was final validation that I could do anything I personally wanted to do.” By age 18, he had won a contest that led to him performing Chopin’s “Fantaisie Impromptu” at the Sydney Opera House for an audience of 2,000.Īfter high school, Tan officially left the church, joined a rock band in Sydney, and enrolled in the University of New South Wales to study engineering. “Now that I’ve turned away from God,” he thought at the time, “just like when Samson chopped off his hair in the Bible, I thought that would happen to me.” He saw it as a test: Could he achieve the degree on his own, without God and his faith community? “ I doubled down and I practiced harder, and I got the qualification. But still he wondered if, without religion, he’d lose his talent. Ryan YoungĪround the same time, he was working toward the Licentiate in Music of Australia, one of the most prestigious music degrees in the country. Tan at his home in Santa Monica, California, in October. “If you tell yourself every day you are worthless without God, or you are a disgusting sinner and need forgiveness and redemption,” he says, “then it takes away personal agency.” By the age of 17, his faith had dissolved. As his mastery of the piano developed, people would tell him it was not a product of hard work, but rather a gift from God. “I started having creeping doubts,” he says. As he got older, that dogma didn’t sit well with him. He felt a requisite blind faith to never question anything, a complete indoctrination into fundamentalist religion. “The type of religion I grew up in was like the thought police from George Orwell’s 1984,” he said. Tan was raised in an evangelical Christian home. He took to the solitary nature of the piano and practiced for two hours every day. “And I had no sporting ability, or at least I didn’t think I did.” Tan excelled in school and loved classical music. The thing that really mattered to the people around him, he said, was sports. “If you don’t look like them, they will reject you. They would learn horrible slang from their parents and call me names,” he told me when we met at a café in Los Angeles, where we both live. For much of his childhood in the 1980s and ’90s, kids tortured him with racist taunts and obscenities. Born in Sydney to Singaporean immigrants, Tan grew up in a predominantly white working-class area. As a child he was lanky, one of the tallest kids in his class. He is six foot one and thin, with tattoos on his arms and back. Today, Tan appears to have been built for adventure running. At a prerace meeting, Richard Donovan, the race director, told the runners that their time on the glacier would split their lives in two: before Antarctica and after Antarctica. Tan made it back, but by the time they landed on the blue ice, they had just under 34 hours to exit the plane, set up tents, run 26.2 miles in subzero temperatures, take a few photos, pack up, and leave. Storms delayed the other runners, who had to stay an extra five days in Chile before departing. He had already come close to having that dream dashed: Just before his plane took off in Chile, he was deported back to the United States due to a paperwork mishap. But he was still nervous that something might stop it. Only when an outline of darkness from what seemed to be the Ellsworth Mountains emerged did he realize that what he was descending into was snow-pure and unadulterated.Īs he took in the landscape, Tan kept thinking, I’m going to achieve my dream. It was hard to tell where the whiteness of the clouds ended and the whiteness of the snow began. But Jeff Tan, a 41-year-old adventure runner, hadn’t realized they’d arrived. ![]() The plane approached the blue-ice runway-made of glacial ice compacted over the centuries and the safest surface to land a plane on in Antarctica-after a five-hour flight from Punta Arenas, Chile, the southernmost port in the Americas. ![]() They are racing on snow and ice to qualify for one of the most elite groups on earth: the 7 Continents Marathon Club. For 62 runners from 21 nations, the Union Glacier in Antarctica is home for a brief period as they attempt the 16th annual Antarctic Ice Marathon. Here, in this nearly untouched land, the sun shines, uninterrupted, for six months over blankets of snow so fine it has its own name: spindrift. Freezing temperatures and subzero wind chills harden the air. ![]()
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