HDBank Green Marathon 2026, fifth season: Can Gio, AIMS certification and the story of thousands of unnamed footsteps

Six in the morning, sea salt still clings to the mangrove leaves of Can Gio. The ground beneath my feet is no longer smooth asphalt but a mixture of fine sand and tree roots — something anyone who has run long distances knows well: it does not hurt you immediately, but it silently drains every step. This is kilometre thirty-two of the marathon course. Behind me, the footsteps of hundreds of runners stretch into a dense ribbon of sound, blending with the crickets and the waves echoing from somewhere in the mangrove forest. I sit on the edge of this course. Not as an athlete — my age no longer permits that, and my knees remind me of it every time the weather turns — but as a chronicler. Seventeen years holding a microphone and forty-seven years observing the sports industry have taught me one thing: a results sheet never prints the breathing, the stride, or the way a woman past forty clenches her fist when she sees the final marker. In 2026, the HDBank Green Marathon enters its fifth season. And this season brings a change that both amateur and professional running circles must note: the course has been certified by AIMS. AIMS — the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races — is the body that certifies international road races. When a course is AIMS-certified, it means the distance has been measured and verified to international standards, with error margins within the permitted range. To amateur runners, this may sound technical. But to those of us in the trade, it carries another meaning: a promise that the result you achieve on this course can be compared with any standard course in the world. In a sport where the number of internationally certified courses can still be counted on one hand, this is no small step forward. The HDBank Green Marathon 2026 takes place under the technical guidance of the Ho Chi Minh City Athletics Federation, in coordination with HDBank and Unique Company. The event features four main distances: 5km, 10km, half marathon 21km, and full marathon 42km, along with children's and team categories. This structure says far more than a simple list of distances. If you have ever stood at the starting line of a marathon, you know the feeling: thousands of people of different ages, fitness levels, and goals sharing one line. Some run 5km for fun, some run 42km to break a personal record, some run alongside small children in the family category. The Green Marathon is organised precisely in that spirit: an inclusive community race, in which the 42km distance plays the leading role but is not designed to crown a national champion. I remember 2026, when I submitted an analysis of the high pressing of Japan's U20 women's team to the men's World Cup section and was rejected for being "off-topic." That piece later reached one million views on my personal page, and coach Mai Duc Chung shared it with the line: "This is what we need to learn." The article that was rejected that year is now the scar I cherish most. It taught me that what is considered "marginal" today is often the centre of tomorrow. The Green Marathon occupies a similar position. In a sports scene where men's football takes almost all the spotlight, a community race in Can Gio may look small. But the numbers do not lie. A fifth season with stable participation demonstrates a durable community foundation. Previous editions recorded thousands of participants, planted more than 2,000 trees, and organised beach clean-ups. These are not the numbers of an elite event. They are the numbers of a movement. And it is movements that nourish athletics. Look at the structure of the event. The inclusion of a 5km distance and children's categories is not there to fill empty slots. It is a gateway. A child running 800 metres in Can Gio today may be a marathoner at thirty, or — in the luckiest case — a national track athlete. I have seen too much talent lost for lack of a starting playground. A community race does not create champions immediately. But it creates the ecosystem from which champions can emerge. The second point lies in the technical structure of the course. The Can Gio route runs over variable terrain: sand, roots, the high humidity of a coastal mangrove zone. No wind or elevation data has been published, which makes the course difficult to reproduce precisely for performance purposes. This is a technical limitation that must be honestly recorded. Yet at the same time, that variable terrain is precisely what makes Can Gio distinctive — it is not a "record-breaking" course, but an "experience" course. And there is one detail I cannot overlook: temperature and humidity. Running in the heat and humidity of a tropical coastal zone is entirely different from running in a temperate climate. With the race falling in September, the tail end of the rainy season in southern Vietnam, runners must face conditions far from ideal for setting records. This does not diminish the event's value. On the contrary, it highlights the nature of the race: a test of endurance and will, not a stage for results. The third point, and perhaps the most notable from an industry perspective: the "Green Marathon online" component. The digital race extends the event beyond race day. This is a model spreading throughout global athletics — maintaining year-round training instead of compressing everything into a single day. For beginners, it can lift baseline fitness. For HDBank, it is the intersection of a banking app and healthy living habits. Integrating digital features such as eKYC into a sports event is a concrete example of the "digital sports" trend I have tracked for years. I always keep one principle when analysing races: never judge an event solely by its structure, but by the value it leaves behind once runners cross the finish line. That value may be a new training habit, a new friend, or simply a Sunday morning not spent in front of a screen. Here, I must state plainly a question I always raise in every piece about women's sport and grassroots sport: who benefits from their sweat? The Green Marathon receives backing from HDBank, a financial institution with more than thirty-six years of involvement in Vietnamese sport, from football to athletics. That deserves recognition. But corporate backing for a community race raises questions about where the money flows. A community race appeals to sponsors because it generates measurable brand exposure: logos on shirts, on banners, in thousands of photos posted on social media. That is the sound logic of business. But sometimes I wonder whether sponsorship money for a community race could be redirected — or at least balanced — to nourish the national athletics team, where athletes still make do with modest wages and inadequate support schemes. I do not raise this question to deny the value of the Green Marathon. I raise it because I have followed far too many cases of female athletes, from football to athletics, selling lottery tickets, selling bread, or taking side jobs to pursue their passion. I established the "San Co 2026" fund to support some of these cases directly. Not because I believe charity solves the problem, but because I believe silence never solves anything. People see a race; I see destinies running on it. A community event with thousands of participants can be a springboard for some of them. But for that springboard to become a path, there must be transparency about resources and the will to convert sponsorship money into training infrastructure, scholarships, and nutritional support for the next generation. There is another technical limitation I do not want to overlook: the race does not announce an elite athlete field. This is entirely reasonable for the community nature of the event, but it also means there is no performance data to compare, no professional benchmark. For a sports journalist like me, this is a gap. But perhaps that is precisely the nature of this kind of event: value lies not in results, but in the journey. And I want to devote the final part of this analysis to an aspect I consider pivotal: sustainability. The Green Marathon's environmental commitments — tree planting, beach clean-ups — are not merely marketing. They connect directly to the nature of the venue. Can Gio is Vietnam's first mangrove biosphere reserve to be recognised by UNESCO, since 2026, an ecosystem vital to preventing coastal erosion, absorbing carbon, and preserving biodiversity. Running through this forest is a rare experience, and reminding runners of environmental responsibility is reasonable. But I also have a concern. When a sports event ties itself to a sensitive ecological space, the question is how to let thousands of people run through it without causing harm. This is a challenge many international races have faced and continue to face, and I hope the Green Marathon organisers do too. Sustainability is not only about planting trees to offset; it is also about minimising impact from the outset: plastic waste, drinking water, and the footprint of thousands of people on a fragile ecosystem. In sport, people often speak of an event's "legacy." For the Green Marathon, that legacy may not lie in a record, but in raising a community's awareness of the link between personal health and environmental health. I witnessed something similar at the Tokyo 2026 Olympics, when I chose to watch the women's football final between Canada and Sweden instead of focusing on the athletics team. Christine Sinclair, at forty, scored at a fifth consecutive Olympics. After the match, she wept not because of the victory, but because Canada's women's team received only one-eighth of the men's budget. From then on, I began to view every sports event through a different lens: not just performance, but fairness. With the Green Marathon, the question of fairness lies elsewhere: not between men and women, since community races make no gender distinction in the main distances, but between urban and peri-urban areas, between those with means and those without. A race in Can Gio — an outlying district of Ho Chi Minh City — is more inclusive than a race in the centre of District 1. It pulls runners out of the city centre to a less-noticed area. That is a meaningful choice. I also want to speak about women's participation in the running movement, because that is what I follow most closely. Looking at recent community races, the share of women participants has steadily increased, especially over 5km and 10km distances. This reflects not only a shift in social awareness of women's role in sport, but also a need for safe spaces for women to train. A race in a peri-urban area with wide open space, little traffic, and natural scenery can be an ideal environment for that. Yet I must also repeat something I have written many times: broad participation does not equal fairness in resources. At the top level, female athletes still receive less funding, fewer opportunities, and less attention. A community race can be a starting point, but without a proper training and funding system behind it, it remains only a movement. As I left Can Gio, I had a scrap of paper in my pocket with a few numbers: four distances, more than 2,000 trees from previous seasons, the fifth season, AIMS certification. Those numbers are not glamorous. But they are proof that a community running movement exists — and endures. The pitch has taught me that there are lessons which are never rejected. And one of those lessons is: sometimes the race that matters is not who finishes first, but how many dare to step onto the starting line. What is worth watching in the seasons ahead is not some record broken in Can Gio. What is worth watching is whether this movement can produce a generation of Vietnamese track athletes strong enough to run on international courses — and whether, when they get there, we will pay them enough that they never have to sell lottery tickets again.