Dnyaneshwar Tidke (Photo: by arrangement)

April 21, 2015: Navi Mumbai based runner, Dnyaneshwar Tidke, completed the full marathon  in Boston in 3:00:57 hours.

At the just concluded 2015 edition of the prestigious event, he was ranked 404 among men in his age group of 40-44 years.

The men’s section of that age group had 2392 runners.

His overall rank was 2839 and within the men’s category, 2679, data from the event website showed.

Don’s best timing to date for the full marathon is 2:53, which he achieved at the Pune International Marathon in December 2011.

For more on Dnyaneshwar, aka Don, please see https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/the-constant-runner/

The winner in Don’s age group at the 2015 Boston Marathon, Danilo Goffi of Italy, had a timing of 2:18:44, which translated to 15th place overall and 15th within the men’s category.

The top finisher overall in the men’s category, Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia, had a timing of 2:09:17. The top finisher overall in the women’s category was Caroline Rotich from Kenya at 2:24:55.

On the event’s website, as per numbers quoted under the category ` countries of citizenship represented,’  India had 19 runners enrolled of which, 18 started the race and 17, completed it. Corresponding figures for India under the category `countries of residence represented’ were 10, 9 and 8 respectively.

In terms of timing, Don topped the list of Indian runners under the citizenship category.

The other Indians in the list after Don were Abhaya N Menon (Falls Church, VA, USA) – 3:03:41, Ashok Nath (Bangalore) – 3:04:26, Sunil M Menon (Hyderabad) – 3:05:39, Dharmendra Dilip Kumar (Jersey City, NJ, USA) – 3:17:11, Thomas Bobby Philip (Bangalore) – 3:30:08, K.C. Kothandapani (Bangalore) – 3:38:06, Jitendra Rawat (Jersey City, NJ, USA) – 3:38:17, Roopali Mehta (Mumbai) – 3:44:49, Vaishali Kasture (Bangalore) – 3:48:54, Neera Katwal (Bangalore) – 4:07:06, Praveen M Bahadduri (Wayland, MA, USA) – 4:14:09, Ruiban F. Coutinho (Ashland, MA, USA) – 4:35:02, Mehar Kaur (Cambridge, MA, USA) – 4:47:03. Akshay Singh (Cambridge, MA, USA) – 4:52:22, Ranganath Papanna (Medford, MA, USA) – 5:17:01 and Udayaditya Chatterjee (Boston, MA, USA) – 5:26:36.

Altogether the 2015 edition of the event had 30,251 runners on its rolls. Of the lot, 98 per cent finished the race.

Incidentally, the fastest time by an Indian in a marathon – the national record – remains still in the name of the late Shivnath Singh.

In 1978, he ran the marathon in Jalandhar in a time of 2:12:00.

Singh passed away in 2003.

His obituary in the Times of India noted, “ At the trials for the 1976 Olympics, Shivnath running a marathon for the first time, stunned everybody by clocking 2:15:58. In Montreal, the Naib Subedar defied sore and painful shins to finish as the best Asian and 11th overall out of the 71 who finished the marathon. For almost three-fourths of the race, Shivnath was up in the front with the best. He was alongside American Bill Rodgers, a Boston marathon winner, and Finn Lasse Viren who was trying the marathon after winning the 5,000m and the 10,000m for the second time. The field also had the 1972 Olympic champ, Frank Shorter, and the eventual winner, Waldemar Cierpinski of East Germany. Cierpinski clocked 2:09:55 and Shorter 2:10:45.8. Shivnath ended 11th with 2:16:22.0 which was only a little slower than his then best of 2:15:58.”

(The authors Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon are independent journalists based in Mumbai. The photo used in this report was sourced from Dnyaneshwar Tidke. The timings and rankings mentioned are sourced from the event’s website and as at the time of reporting; race data usually takes a while to settle down.)