On a farm, there are no snow days, no sick days.
In the quiet hours after midnight, when Hong Kong's Sheung Wan neighbourhood finally exhales, Petronella Harlin laces up her running shoes and heads for the trails of Lantau Island — not as an escape from her life, but as an extension of it. A restaurateur, mother of three, and competitive trail runner, she has built an existence that refuses to separate discipline from devotion, tracing a line from a Swedish dairy farm to a Nordic fine dining kitchen to the mountains that ask everything of those who climb them. Hers is a story about how the hardest lessons of one life quietly become the architecture of the next.
- Harlin closes Embla restaurant near 1am, then trades her service shoes for trail runners while her family sleeps — a daily rhythm that leaves almost no margin for rest.
- Working 40 to 60 hours weekly in high-pressure fine dining while competing in elite endurance races creates a compounding physical and mental load that would break most routines.
- Rather than compartmentalising her roles, she has fused them — recognising that hospitality and trail racing share the same brutal grammar of long hours, depletion, and the requirement to show up again.
- Her Swedish farming childhood, from a region that also produced trail legend Emelie Forsberg, gave her a foundational refusal of excuses that now anchors both her restaurant and her racing.
- A decade into building a life in Hong Kong, she is still running, still serving, still finding that the capacity she thought was her ceiling was only ever a threshold.
The restaurant closes around one in the morning. Petronella Harlin locks up Embla — her Nordic fine dining establishment in Hong Kong's Sheung Wan — after a service that has demanded everything. Her husband, chef Jim Löfdahl, is somewhere in the kitchen. Their three children are asleep at home on Lantau Island. And then, while the city settles into its deepest hours, Harlin changes into running clothes and heads for the trails.
This is not a weekend hobby. She works forty to sixty hours every week at the restaurant — high pressure, relentless pace, the particular exhaustion of being on your feet and performing for strangers across long shifts. And then she runs. She runs the trails near her home. She runs in races that demand the kind of suffering most people avoid entirely.
When asked how she manages it, she doesn't reach for the usual answers. She talks instead about a dairy farm in northern Sweden — the same region that produced Emelie Forsberg, one of the world's most accomplished trail runners. "On a farm, there are no snow days, no sick days," Harlin says. "The animals and the land don't care if it's minus 20 degrees." That was her childhood. That was the template.
What's striking is how clearly she sees the connection between the restaurant and the trail. High-end hospitality, she understands, is an endurance sport — same architecture of long hours, mounting pressure, the need to perform when already depleted, the requirement to return the next day and do it again. The restaurant teaches you how to hurt and keep moving. The trails just make it official.
She has lived in Hong Kong for a decade now, long enough to have built something real. But the discipline she carries is older than that — it comes from a place where excuses are a luxury nobody can afford. A farm teaches you that work is constant. A restaurant teaches you that pressure is survivable. And then you run, and discover you are capable of far more than you thought.
The restaurant closes around one in the morning. Petronella Harlin locks up Embla, her Nordic fine dining establishment tucked into Hong Kong's Sheung Wan neighbourhood, after a service that has demanded everything—her attention, her feet, her voice carrying across the dining room. Her husband, chef Jim Löfdahl, is somewhere in the kitchen. Their eldest daughter, Embla, is asleep at home on Lantau Island, along with two younger siblings. And then, while the city settles into its deepest hours, Harlin changes into running clothes and heads for the trails.
This is not a weekend hobby. She works forty to sixty hours every week at the restaurant. The hours are brutal by any standard—high pressure, relentless pace, the particular exhaustion that comes from being on your feet and "on" for strangers for eight, ten, twelve hours at a stretch. And then she runs. She runs the trails near her home. She runs in races that demand the kind of suffering most people avoid entirely.
When you ask her how she manages it, she doesn't talk about time management or coffee or the particular ruthlessness required to be a working mother in a city like Hong Kong. She talks about a dairy farm in northern Sweden, in the region that produced Emelie Forsberg, one of the world's most accomplished trail runners. "On a farm, there are no snow days, no sick days," Harlin says. "The animals and the land don't care if it's minus 20 degrees." That was her childhood. That was the template.
She has lived in Hong Kong for a decade now, long enough to have built something real—a restaurant with her name on it, a family, a reputation. But the discipline she carries is older than that. It comes from a place where excuses are a luxury nobody can afford. Where you show up because the work doesn't stop, because something depends on you, because the alternative is not an option.
What's striking is how clearly she sees the connection between the two worlds—the restaurant and the trail. High-end hospitality, she understands, is an endurance sport. It has the same architecture: long hours, mounting pressure, the need to perform when you're already depleted, the requirement that you show up the next day and do it again. The restaurant teaches you how to hurt and keep moving. The trails just make it official.
She is not alone in this—there are other people who work brutal jobs and train for brutal races, other mothers who somehow find the hours, other people who seem to operate on a different clock than the rest of us. But there is something particular about her story, something that speaks to how discipline compounds, how the lessons of one life become the foundation for another. A farm teaches you that work is constant. A restaurant teaches you that pressure is survivable. And then you run, and you discover that you are capable of far more than you thought.
Harlin is still running. The restaurant is still open. Her children are still young. The trails near Lantau are still waiting for her in the hours before dawn.
Notable Quotes
Working in high-end hospitality is an endurance sport in itself. You're on your feet in a high-pressure, fast-paced environment late into the night.— Petronella Harlin
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
How do you actually sleep? You're closing a restaurant at one in the morning and then running before dawn.
I don't sleep much. But I've never needed much. Growing up on a farm, you learn that sleep is something you fit in around the work, not the other way around.
But there's a difference between farm work and choice, isn't there? You could stop running tomorrow.
I could. But I won't. The running isn't separate from the restaurant—it's the same muscle. Both require you to keep going when everything in you wants to stop.
Your husband is a chef. Do you two ever just... rest together?
We rest differently. He's in the kitchen; I'm out on the trails. But we're both doing the same thing, really. We're both building something that demands everything.
What do your kids think about all this?
They see their mother working. They see their father working. They see that this is what it looks like to care about something enough to sacrifice for it. That's the real inheritance.
Do you ever worry you're missing something by being so driven?
I worry about a lot of things. But I don't worry about that. The farm taught me that you don't get to choose between work and life—they're the same thing. You just choose what work matters to you.
And trail running matters to you.
It's the only time I'm completely honest with myself. Everything else—the restaurant, the family, the city—there's performance in it. On the trail, there's just you and the mountain.