Darell Kuang / Founder of Holistic Running  

My name is Darell Kuang. My Chinese name is 鄺文漢. I’m a Chinese Canadian. And I have started doing long distance runs and marathons for over 15 years. I have been in Nansha for 9 months now and I'm the founder and company owner of Holistic Running in Nansha. In my previous career I was doing hospitality. I was in the hospitality industry for 7 years as the assistant manager at a resort in Canada.    

After covid I started to rethink my life and rethink my career, and want to follow my passion which is running over 15 years, and also incorporate teaching others as well. And I believe that I also feel that success that when I'm able to help others achieve their goals, it is very rewarding.

So why pick Nansha to start my business is because back in Canada, we saw a lot of TV shows and videos broadcasting Innovation Bay. They provided a lot of incubation programs in Nansha which helped a lot of new entrepreneurs and businesses. They provided a lot of benefits and opportunities. And I felt like this was a great opportunity for me to start my running business in Nansha.  

We notice that there is no local races set up here. We want to promote our own race such as a 10k, half marathon and a marathon race Another reason I picked Nansha is I follow my cultural heritage as a Chinese person. So it's one of the reasons why I picked China, to come here, is basically I want to do some culture searching for myself. In Canada we didn't get an opportunity to learn about our Chinese heritage.

As a runner, I think Nansha is very suitable, there’s a lot of suitable to run as there are a lot of many beautiful scenic roads. The roads are paved really well and they're very comfortable to run on. Compared to Canada and Toronto, they also offer a lot of scenic roads but they don't offer many.  

At times I resorted to running in neighborhoods that can be very dangerous and very uncomfortable. So we believe that Nansha is a great scenic place for running roads. Some of the running roads that I have been to in Nansha are the Jiaomen River, the beautiful running roads here. We also have the Huangshanlu Mountain which there are two options: you can run around the mountain, which is a 2.5-kilometer loop or you can climb up the mountain which is about a 300-meter elevation.

And also there are multiple and beautiful routes developing in DongChung around the schools such as MinXin School and the university around that area. So people can join running groups every week. I do a running group every week and we also every month we would do a destination run so it would be a different place that we choose around Nansha with the beautiful and scenic landscapes. Right now we have four different avenues.

Again they were targeting schools and we also have company runs. We also have one-on-one coaching and then also a general membership as well. I find that running can be very boring to start and so people don't know what to think. People would just give up and have no interest. It is quite boring. It’s long distance.

We want to not just improve the physical benefits, but we also want to improve the emotional, the social and the mental benefits as well which I think I believe that this is what makes us unique from other just coaching programs. And this is why we are call ourselves holisticrunning, holistic being bulk inside the whole package, whatever can help everyone feel great, not just from the outside, but from the inside as well.  

And as a foreign Canadian, I had to come across a lot of difficulties. Two of the most difficult parts as a foreign Canadian coming into China was getting my work visa and opening a bank card. These issues were all solved and made my transition very easily with G-Rocket’s help.

I would say Nansha is very, very affordable. It’s very affordable compared to places compared to Canada. Again, transportation, the cost of living, food and groceries and even entertainment, everything in general is much more affordable than Canada by about 3 to 4 times. Opportunity is with my word.  

I see that as an opportunity, I look it in a way where a business can grow ,and people will have a bit more of a better outlook in healthy lifestyle which what I'm doing is running. So I do believe the opportunity not even just running but everything else is growing.  

We see that everything is going for the better. Even the outside of Nansha, the beautiful outside shows a great example why opportunity can be made.