When Soh Rui Yong announced that he was attempting the Double Up at the 2025 Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon (SCSM), he was prepared that he would “have to DNF (did not finish) one or both of the races if things didn’t go well”.
But the 34-year-old not only won the National Half-Marathon Championship yesterday, he also won the National Marathon Championship today – making him the first ever SCSM Double Up champion.
However, both victories didn’t come easy with Soh winning the marathon by just four seconds, in a time of 02:46:23, ahead of Aaron Justin Tan who executed a beautiful late-stage attack.
A Bold Attempt
“I tell you, it’s no joke man. I’m never gonna do this again. I definitely underestimated the race admin. The race starts at 4.20am, you wake up at 2am… You do it once a year, it’s okay. But you do it back to back days, it really sucks.
“After the half-marathon on Saturday, you can’t really eat because your stomach is upset from running at high intensity in this kind of weather. And then you can’t really eat or sleep properly at night again and then you get up on Sunday and you need to run 42km.
“All the knowledge about carbo loading before a race, I was carbo emptying by running. I wasn’t tapering as I was racing the day before, so none of it is following exact science. I wouldn’t recommend it,” he shared.
The objective of doing the Double Up was to try and see whether ultramarathons are for him, and Soh is glad that he pulled it off.
This is by far, the “most excitement” he has gotten from racing a marathon locally. Typically, he goes into a race fresh and figures out everyone’s redline and then tries to run above that so he can make a gap early on.
“This year however, I had to treat this like a SEA Games marathon mentally, where everyone is probably better than me because they didn’t race the half-marathon yesterday. I couldn’t afford to be aggressive with the pacing and I just played the game everyone else was playing,” he added.
Race For Redemption
A DNF at the 32km mark of the 2019 SCSM left unfinished business for Aaron Justin Tan. “Coming into this race, I wanted to finish strong and I started to feel good at the 35km mark and slowly caught up with everyone one by one,” he said.
In the last two kilometres, it came down to the wire between Soh and Tan, to see who could last all the way to the end. “I put up a good fight in the closing kilometres, but yeah, I lost to a worthy opponent,” Tan added.
Third-placed Darren Chong (02:46:45) was set up for a second-place finish and thought he had it in the bag, when Tan came from behind at the 36km mark. “To be honest, I thought I secured second place, but all of a sudden Aaron caught up. I think it hasn’t hit me yet but definitely really happy.”
In Dominating Fashion
Over on the women’s side, Rachel See snagged her fifth national marathon title with a sub-3 timing of 02:58:15, ahead of Chng Siew Lu (03:05:09) in second and Sharon Tan (03:11:34) in third.
See went out a bit too fast at the start, in part due to the overcast weather, but managed to hold onto her lead till the end despite “wanting to take the bus home” in the late stages of the race. She mostly ran the race alone, staying comfortably in front.
