December 7, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

THE FISH SAID IT ALL

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

A day out with fisherfolk

In 2009 I found myself at Puthiyathura, a fishing hamlet on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram.

In my many years of knowing Kerala’s capital city, I had never ventured into these parts.

The fish reached the refrigerator in our home, carried all the way by a fisherwoman. You saw the fisherwomen all over town, hurrying along at a fast pace. What we never knew was why she hurried. She too had family; she had left home early and had that far to get back, before dark. Wanting to save the little she earned, she walked; a hurried walk.

The only time the fisherwoman’s home captured our concern was when the police resorted to firing to disperse clashing groups. In the days I attended school and college in Thiruvananthapuram, the city’s fishing hamlets witnessed clashes. When a fisherwoman came to our home after one such incident reported in the local papers, my mother would ask her about it. Some of them talked at length. It was, I guess, a venting, unloading one’s mind of life’s burdens to a fellow woman. Some others spared just a few words. As the crow flies, I lived maybe three to four kilometers from the sea. We went to the beach on weekends, enjoyed the sea breeze, wet our feet in the surf, had the hot, roasted groundnuts sold by vendors and returned home. Amid the silhouettes of fishing canoes drawn up on a sunset-beach, would be people relaxing over a chat or card game. Once in a while a kid or two came prancing down from the shadows towards the waves, jumped into the surf, swam about confidently and went back to the shadows. They were the people of my fish.

Years passed. I began catching up on things I didn’t do. I wanted to venture out to sea in a fishing boat; watch fishermen at work. My sister Yamuna, who had studied sociology and worked with communities, pitched in to help. She had worked before in the Puthiyathura area. She put me in touch with the fishermen. Several phone calls later, we had a trip scheduled. Then, Varghese who was to be my guide cut his arm and so the first attempt got called off. The second one saw us all on the beach staring at an angry sea. The water was grey, turbid toward the shore and the waves crashed with a dull resonant thud, which has always been the audio signature of a south Kerala beach. On that particular day, the thud was too strong for comfort. “ We won’t have a problem,’’ Johnson said referring to himself and his fellow fishermen, “ but a newcomer, if required to jump off the craft on the return may end up in trouble.’’ To put it in perspective, the coast towards the south of Kerala slopes steeply into the sea. You can find waist deep water within striking distance of the shore, neck deep trifle beyond and start swimming around where the nearest wave arches to crash. In contrast, beaches in Gujarat have extended shorelines; at low tide you can walk far out to sea. This is the secret to what was once the world’s longest stretch of ship breaking yards at Alang. You run the ship in on its last burst of energy and ram it into the shallows. At low tide, the steel hulk stands exposed for scavenging like a castle bereft of its moat.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Unlike Kovalam, which has a protected cove, at Puthiyathura the beach was a straight line exposed to the sea’s fury. Here, I may be able to launch off in a boat in rough weather but on the return, devoid of the skill to jump out of the boat in time and swim, risked getting hit by the craft, which would be tossing and pitching in the waves. “ The sea should be calmer,’’ Vincent said during moments stolen from his perennial focus on the auction happening on the beach. The auction was a miserable sight. On display was a meager collection of fish hardly echoing the famed plenty of the sea. “ There is nothing left to catch there,’’ Vincent said.

The time I was at Puthiyathura, an advertisement for the Grand Kerala Shopping Festival in the newspaper announced up to forty kilos of gold to be won if anyone bought the precious metal during the festival period. That’s twelve kilos shy of my body weight and many, many times more in value than my person. In a country recognized as the world’s biggest gold importer, Kerala is one of the biggest retail consumers. I suspect Kerala’s love for gold has much to do with an underlying conservatism. The advertisement for the shopping festival dutifully highlighted the logic. It asked: which other investment is as secure as gold?

The image in the advertisement about the shopping festival showed five fishermen folding their nets on a beach. The sea braced itself into a wave in the backdrop; large, shining gold coins morphed into the photograph tumbled out from the nets – a haul of gold. The caption said: Swarna Chaakara. It was a play of words and imagery. Swarnam in Malayalam means gold. Chaakara is the phenomenon of mud banks that occur along the central Kerala coast bringing with it shoals of fish. Old timers distinctly remember it for the flurry of activity it brought on the beach. Years ago as a journalist in Kochi, I had traveled south to Ambalappuzha to witness a chaakara. Venu, my colleague from the Alappuzha bureau and the person who loaned me a wonderful collection of Hemingway’s essays to read, accompanied me on the trip. I reached the beach expecting festivities and jubilation. The mood though was matter of fact. More like – been there, seen it. I was the only one straining to see a great story for a new generation. Most people on the beach probably saw it as a stroke of luck to pay off debts. That was in the early 1990s. As an introduction to the economics of fishing that laconic attitude was the right initiation.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

In the Malayalam language, chaakara has evolved to become an expression of plenty. And times of plenty are rare. Whichever way you look at it, fishing is a tough business; hardly the stuff of gold. For most of us landlubbers dreading the fury and unfathomable depth of that vast blue expanse, returning safe from the sea is accomplishment enough. For the fisherman though, returning alive and empty handed is an invitation to accumulate debt, suffer from it. Behind each outing into the sea is a string of expenses, ranging from the cost of nets and fuel to the cost of hiring a boat if you don’t have one. A simple inquiry on the beach would reveal that these costs are not tiny even for your wallet, leave alone a person struggling to make ends meet. In a low capital environment like the fisherman’s beach, these expenses are incurred and paid for with promised claims on the catch. Thus the first right on catch is rarely the fisherman’s; his is typically the last. The math at its core is simple – if you spent a thousand rupees and fetched catch worth six hundred, you paid off the equipment providers on the basis of a local ratio, kept a small portion and started your second voyage with debt in excess of four hundred rupees. That is not just simple; it is simplified for atop that debt would come the fresh investment for the second trip, which may be another round of borrowing. Until some time back, this atmosphere of frequent debt was accentuated by loans from money lenders arranged at high interest rate. The rise of self-help groups may have partly addressed some of these monetary difficulties but there has been no escape for the fisherman from the basic model of fishing. The sea loves its unpredictable nature.

It had anyway spoilt my chances that day of the second attempt to go fishing. Confined to the shore, Vincent and Kennedy, both activists for the fishing community, took me around to see the day’s catch. Prominent on the Puthiyathura beach were plates of normally overlooked cartilaginous fish, the sort seen hiding in the sands of the sea bottom on National Geographic. Also around was fish, dead in a different way – it was already dead and floating on the sea when the fisherman hauled it in. This was fish rejected at high seas as unwanted collateral catch by large trawlers. With few fish to come by, the trawlers’ refuse was also getting cleaned and sold. The woman cleaning the lot for sale stayed absorbed in her work. She didn’t look up at either Vincent delivering a commentary on her plight or me, clear stranger to the beach, standing there and listening to it. She seemed indifferent to the whole world.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Two days later, I made a final attempt.

This day and no more on this visit home, I had promised myself.

Bad luck threatened from the start. The global economy – certainly the US and Europe – was in recession; India was claiming to be free of the disease, yet showing signs of it in every business update. At that most blessed moment when thousands were losing their jobs worldwide, the country’s well paid oil company employees decided to go on strike. Simultaneously, by design or coincidence, a nationwide transport strike began. Soon fuel stocks at retail level reduced to a trickle. Long queues of vehicles appeared in front of petrol pumps. This was the situation at the city bus depot that morning, many buses were caught in queue for fuel, some trips were cancelled and some that ran were way behind schedule. That was the case on the route I was to take. Finally I got a slow bus.

We ambled along at leisurely pace, as these buses have always done in the city of my childhood. In due course the breeze became sea-tinged and the sky above the coconut palms betrayed that openness so characteristic of proximity to the sea. Christian churches frequented by the fishing folk appeared and in the courtyard of one, reflecting the charismatic brand of religion followed by many in these parts, a lone man walked around, gently dancing, swaying, and holding aloft a leafy tree branch. He seemed to have stumbled upon some blessing or may be as part of the blessed, he was blessing the world – who knows? He seemed happy anyway. “ It is a fine day,’’ Vincent said on the ocean’s edge, the big blue expanse looked sleepy, almost tranquilized and prayed to stay so for a novice to sail its bosom.

My friend Swarup had helped me secure a life jacket. I put that on. It was an effort pushing the wooden boat in. The moment it hit the water Johnson fired the outboard engine. We punched ahead through the waves and shot on for a long time, till all sign of shore disappeared and we were in the calm waters of beyond. Here, more than from ashore, you notice the bulk and immensity of the sea. I watched three men drop long lines to catch whatever fish they could. I had expected to see a net or two. There was none. I suspect my companions on the boat took the outing less as fishing and more as an assignment to satisfy my curiosity for their world. The lines dangled in the water, managed by sensitive fingers alert for the slightest tug or movement. Every few minutes a line would be drawn in; several hooks empty, a fish or two being all that was caught. The sea may have turned calm but the fortunes it held, hadn’t changed.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

The few fish getting caught were all the slimy, grey type. A couple of them seemed painted at some art school but hardly the variety for eating. Save one type – red in color, with white spots that the crew said was tasty to eat. Yet none commanded value in the market. Here and there a creature resembling the seer fish or mackerel jumped out of the water but that was it; it wouldn’t be fooled to bite. Still in that highly diluted and watered down version of fishing’s thrills, I could sense the nature of engagement. As he drew up hook after hook where the fish had eaten the bait and escaped getting hooked, Gregory said aloud to himself, “ crafty characters.’’ By noon we were done. A small pile of low value fish lay on the boat’s floor. George, Clement, Johnson and Gregory sat pensive near the lone outboard engine. They had just concurred that given their life experience they would rather have their children educated and doing something else. “ In this profession, those who lost, outnumber those who gained,’’ the older, quieter, Gregory said. The sea slapped softly on the boat’s sides. Even at such gentle times, the swells resembled giant aquamarine saucers; you sank into one and crested at its edge like a two second-light house.

At one such cresting, I saw the most amazing sight – a man poised atop a slender catamaran, all alone and so far out. Had it been space, he would have been a planet all to itself. Here, he was a world on two logs drifting by, lost to the rhythm of a work getting longer and longer for want of fish. He would sit, stand, squat, and pull in a net – all on a foot-wide platform liberally washed by the blue sea. The minimalism of his life clothed him and two or three others like him that I could see scattered wide apart in that area; the briefest pair of shorts or a section of an old lungi wrapped around the waist and ending well above the knee. That bare existence on a fragile stick near submerged by the sea was apparently fundamental to anyone’s evolution as a fisherman. “ You start on a catamaran,’’ Gregory said.

In the boat Clement kept working, as though working against time, making good use of the little time, any time, he had. He was usually the last to draw in a line from a given spot, big hands reeling out the line and feeling it constantly for the faintest of tell tale tugs. Chaakara doesn’t happen this far south in the state, nor is plenty at sea anymore the plenty of old. Unless that is: some lucky fisherman borrowed money, bought gold and struck a Swarna Chaakara at a city jeweler’s shop. George would have liked that thought. Standing at fore with a hungry gaze seaward for any sign of fish, he seemed mad enough to indulge the absurd. He was getting restless. Suddenly, the placid sea and the hours spent fishing futilely, got to him. He whipped around, “ Let us go back to land, eat and get drunk! What do you get here?’’ My thoughts hung for a second on his last observation – what do you get here? I had heard that before in the mountains, where the sight of ocean is typically part of a lucky journey. Memory of the sea – if seen at all – is a good subject for conversation at mountain villages. There too, they ask with envious glance cast towards the plains – what do you get here in the mountains? Everybody wants to be somewhere else.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Johnson warned of low fuel. At the turn around point roughly eight kilometers out at sea, I gazed at the water all around and couldn’t resist taking a dip. I took off my life jacket and lowered myself over the boat’s side into the water. Then I pushed off. It was the least I could do as a puny statement of intent before the vastness of the surrounding blue, the length and breadth of it, the depth of it. “ Don’t go too far from the boat. The fish here is big,’’ Johnson said, half in jest. My conspiratorial mind immediately switched to National Geographic mode. Below me should be tiny teeth, big teeth, sharp teeth, suckers, stingers; there was a world of murderous characters lurking below. The quality and quantity of danger was directly proportionate to seventy per cent of the planet being water and that watery world being three hundred times – according to some estimates – bigger in volume than the land mass inhabited by terrestrials. With large bait splashing around in the water, all we needed on the boat was another aspirant for the World Press Photography award. The sea had been calm that day; the swim felt easy as though in a gigantic swimming pool, sole concerns being that sense of terrible depth and the inevitable drift of the boat away from you, away from you. For someone whose longest swim is a struggled lap in the swimming pool that specter of the boat slipping away evokes panic. In the ocean there is nothing to grab when starved of endurance, except water.

Vincent remembered a day some twenty years ago when the sea was far from calm. He had been out with a crew that included his father. They had just pulled in the net laden with catch, when the weather turned bad. The furious sea flipped the boat throwing everyone into the cold water. He reasons that things would have been different had they not pulled in the laden net as it may have worked as a stabilizing anchor. Each time they steadied the boat, the sea flipped it till over a series of capsizes, the net wound itself around the boat. It was a mess now, a tangle of men, boat and net in the deep waters of a furious sea. Night came. At some point during all that agony, the cold water proved too much to bear for one of the crew and he died. For a while they kept the body in sight, lashed to the remains of the boat. By day break, they had lost two people – the second being Vincent’s father. Luckily for the crew, they were discovered by a boat that had set out from the Tamil Nadu coast, further south from Puthiyathura. “ That boat just burst out from the surrounding swells,’’ Vincent said. He didn’t go back to sea for a year and when he did, the memory of the accident shadowed.

Back on land, Johnson rather apologetically, presented me with a bill for the fishing trip. In tune with the fluctuating fortunes of his work, he said, “ had the catch been good, I would not have insisted.’’ I couldn’t argue, the fish said it all. “ That’s alright Johnson,’’ I said.

Before I left Thiruvananthapuram for Mumbai, the local newspaper reported on one of the winners from the Grand Kerala Shopping Festival. It was a fisherwoman who had borrowed money to buy the coupon for the lucky draw.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. Please note: the economics of fishing outlined here are as perceived in 2009.)

December 2, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

RUNNING THE SAHARA

Girish Mallya (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Near South Mumbai’s President Hotel, not far from the high rises that characterize Cuff Parade, is the popular garden called Colaba Woods. Noted for its rich variety of trees, the garden was in the news in early 2015 due to fears that a proposed metro station may eat into the property. Colaba Woods has a shaded jogging track. “ A round of it is about 400m.That’s my all time favourite place to run,’’ Girish Mallya said.

Born in 1975, he used to stay at Colaba’s Navy Nagar. He was a good cricketer in school with affection for fielding. It was when he finished his tenth standard that he took to running, visiting Colaba Woods three or four times a week. Girish does not stay in the neighbourhood anymore. But Colaba Woods was where he gained his running legs. “ Those days there were very few runners,’’ he said. The running continued even as the young man shifted to Manipal for higher education. The university town in Karnataka’s Udipi district was less busy than today; it was an inviting place to run. Girish ran three to five kilometres, twice or thrice a week. After completing his MBA from the T.A. Pai Management Institute, he was picked up through campus placement by Tata Donnelly for a position in Mumbai. The company would later become Tata Press, then Tata Infomedia and finally Infomedia, at which point Girish left it to join Next Gen Publishing where he has remained till now.

At the Puma Urban Stampede, Mumbai (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

The first major running event that Girish ran was the first edition of the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon (SCMM). The year was 2004. He heard of it through a friend and without knowing much about the marathon, registered for the full marathon. He decided to do it his own way. From some months before the event, he referred Hal Higdon’s training program for the marathon and loosely followed it. The first SCMM, struggling to find its footing in the world of marathons, traded every marathon’s traditional early start for proper sunshine. Girish recalled a late start for the race apparently because TV coverage needed adequate sunlight. “ It was a first time for the organizers. There weren’t enough water stations,’’ he said, attributing it to likely focus on elite runners forgetting the existence of many rookie runners. From that shaky start, the SCMM has grown to be India’s flagship event in running, the race with the biggest prize money in the country and the largest marathon in Asia. Girish completed his first full marathon at the SCMM, in a little less than six hours. He has since run the full marathon at every edition of the SCMM. “ I would like to run the SCMM at least 25 times,’’ he said. The upcoming January 2016 edition is the SCMM’s 13th.

At the first edition of the Bangalore Ultra (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Ahead of the Goa River Marathon, Girish with fellow runner Deepa Raut (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Another trend with Girish is running the first edition of events that attract his curiosity. He thus ran the first editions of the the Bangalore (Bengaluru) Marathon, the Bangalore Ultra and the Goa River Marathon. He likes the “ uncertainty’’ that goes with something new. “ I like to experience everything first hand without clouding my opinion,’’ he said, adding, “ I watch movies but I don’t read movie reviews. I like it first day, first show.’’ To this, he adds one more parameter – the urge to try something others haven’t tried. On the average, he ran 40-50km per week for training, a modest mileage compared to what some determined runners pile on. “ I believe in conserving my legs and body. I would like to continue running as a veteran,’’ Girish said. Amid this preference for first editions and going where others haven’t, the second edition of an event made a major difference. But before that, a hark back to the time when Girish was around nine years old and far from frequenting the jogging track at Colaba Woods.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

The Sahara needs no introduction. It is the stuff of school geography. There can be no description of the planet’s topography without it. Precisely because of that its superlatives engage. Wikipedia describes it as the world’s largest low altitude hot desert. Including the Libyan Desert, its area is comparable to the respective land areas of China and the United States. In 1984, a French concert promoter called Patrick Bauer decided to attempt a solo self-supported journey of 350km in the Algerian Sahara. The passage on foot took him 12 days mainly because his backpack weighed 36 kilos. He required enough food and water for the whole journey. In an interview available on the Net, Bauer has said that prior to this undertaking he had lived and worked in West Africa for two years, selling encyclopaedias to teachers and books on medicine to doctors and pharmacists. Returning to France was difficult for he had no wish to stay and wanted to leave again. During the two years he was in Africa, he had crossed the desert five to six times by car. The desire grew to cross it on foot. Later, after crossing so in 1984, when he made a presentation at his village he found that he had kindled curiosity but local runners didn’t want to make the trip alone. He therefore decided to organize a marathon in the Sahara. With the exception of one Moroccan runner, everyone else who participated in the first edition of the Marathon des Sables in 1986, were French. Over the years the event has grown to be one of the world’s toughest footraces with some legendary winners, among them the Moroccan brothers Lahcen and Mohamad Ahansal, the former winning the Marathon des Sables 10 times, the latter five times.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Girish, who had no particular fascination for the desert and Sahara, was at the second edition of the Great Tibetan Marathon in Ladakh around 2006-2007. “ It was my first adventure marathon and a well organized one,’’ he said. At this event set in a high altitude cold desert, he met Brigid Wefelnberg, a German runner who had run the Marathon des Sables. She told him of the 250km-long race in the North African Sahara. Looking back, Girish said, “ I like extreme stuff. I am not a spiritual person, so it isn’t the life changing part of things that catches my fancy. Searching on Google for more on the Marathon des Sables, I found it billed as the toughest foot race on Earth. That attracted. Plus, based on my enquiries, no Indian national had completed it before.’’ From this onset of interest in the event to actual execution, it took Girish five years, including three years of training. It was during this training phase that Girish acquired the image by which he came to be known in Mumbai – the runner who always ran with a backpack. He had to train so for the Marathon des Sables expects its participants to be self sufficient. A relative stranger to camping, he started familiarizing himself with sleeping on the floor in a sleeping bag. The ultra marathon in the Sahara has a night stage wherein runners cover 75-80km. To replicate this experience, Girish turned to randonneuring, which form of cycling had just taken off in India. He complemented this with running events like the Bangalore Ultra. Mumbai’s Juhu beach and Girgaum-Chowpatty doubled up as training ground for running on sand. It was, as Girish realized later, only a rough approximation of conditions because the sand of the Sahara is drier and finer. “ It is super fine,’’ he said. The beaches also became venue for running in gaiters, a sock like-appendage required to tackle the sand of the desert.

That familiar picture from Mumbai running - Girish with backpack (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Familiar sight from Mumbai running – Girish with backpack (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Then for a taste of multi-day stage racing, he participated in and completed the first edition of the Kerala Ultra. It gave him a realistic perception of the potential relation between himself and multi-day stage races. “ I am a slow runner. I don’t like cut off times. Single day stage races have stringent cut off times. Multi-day races are more reasonable; they are better suited to my tastes,’’ he said. Incidentally, according to Girish, the winner of the first edition of the Kerala Ultra was Jordan’s Salameh Al Aqra, who would go on to win the 2012 Marathon des Sables. Girish’s own preparation for the Marathon des Sables continued. At the Kerala Ultra, which was a five day-stage race, in which the participants were provided only water, he tested the freeze dried food he planned to take to the Sahara. His go to-person for all matters Marathon des Sables was Brigid, who, prior to their meet-up in Ladakh was a three time finisher in the Sahara and is currently at six. One interesting thing in Girish’s preparations is that he didn’t try to run in a hot Indian desert as training for the Sahara. His logic was simple: there are many runners coming from cold countries to run in the Sahara. Compared to them, he would be reaching the venue in Morocco after preparing in India, a warm country.

The antivenin kit (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Participation in the Marathon des Sables is routed through regional representatives. An Indian runner’s application would normally go through the Korean representative. Courtesy Brigid, Girish’s papers moved via Germany. In April 2013, he flew to Frankfurt and then with the German contingent of runners, proceeded to the Moroccan Sahara. From the last airport, it was a 350km-bus journey to the starting point of the race. Here the organizers provided tent and food; the runners acclimatized for two days. Interestingly, nobody knew the race route till they got onto the bus. On the bus, the runners got the route details. The whole camp at start was an amalgam of around 1000 runners and 1500 support staff. This would keep migrating across the desert for the days of the race, along its assigned route. Ahead lay six and half days of running in the Sahara. Girish’s backpack weighed around 10 kilos plus 1-2 litres of water. According to him, the eventual race winners, wizened by previous experience had trimmed their backpack weight to around six kilos or so.

The nature of the Marathon des Sables is evident in two items Girish had to mandatorily source – a reliable compass for navigation and an antivenin kit to address snake bites. Things can go wrong in adventure. Ten years before the first SCMM in Mumbai, in 1994, the Marathon des Sables was backdrop for the story of Mauro Prosperi. A former Olympic pentathlete from Italy, he was lost for ten days in the desert following an eight hour-long sandstorm. When the storm hit, he had just half a bottle of water with him. Mauro would eventually walk off course by over 290km into the Algerian Sahara. He took shelter for a couple of days in a small, unoccupied Muslim shrine. There, he attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. It failed because his blood clotted, likely due to dehydration. Mauro took that as a sign. He resumed his walk heeding the advice the Taureg (nomadic inhabitants of the Sahara) had given ahead of the race: if you are lost, head for the clouds that you see on the horizon at dawn, for that’s where you will find life. During the day, it will disappear. So set your compass and proceed in that direction. Miraculously, Mauro survived the entire ordeal drinking his urine (not recommended as urine dehydrates) and bat blood, and eating bats, snakes and lizards. Notwithstanding such risk, most runners find the Sahara beautiful. Even Mauro did. In his account, available on the BBC website, Mauro says, “ when I arrived in Morocco I discovered a beautiful thing – the desert. I was bewitched.’’ The Italian returned to run the race again in 1998 and 2012. He completed it in 2012, the year Salameh Al Aqra won the Marathon des Sables; the year the Jordanian runner ran the Kerala Ultra, in which Girish had been one of the participants running it as preparation for the 2013 Marathon des Sables.

Girish,during the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

The race edition Girish was on went off incident free. There were no sand storms. While temperatures in the Sahara during the race can range between 50 degrees centigrade and seven degrees, Girish had to cope with a manageable 37-38 degrees and 14-12 degrees. Progress was a mix of running and walking. According to him, the night stage was exhausting. After the fourth and fifth stages got over, he had a sense of potential finish. “ You are hungry most of the time. You are thirsty. Yet you keep going,’’ he said. According to him, each day a runner at the event burnt on the average 5000 calories against an intake from the supplies he carried, of approximately 2000-2200 calories. That meant an accumulated deficit over the race’s six days of almost 18,000 calories. Girish completed the Marathon des Sables in the stipulated six and a half days. Across the Kerala Ultra and the Marathon des Sables, Girish suffered no blisters at the former and just one at the latter. After a long run, he also recovers fast. “ I think I was made for multi stage races,’’ he said. Europeans repeat running the Marathon des Sables several times as they find it life altering. Girish has no such plans; at best perhaps, “ one more time.’’ For someone who trained three years and waited five years overall with the Marathon des Sables in focus, Girish had a puzzling self assessment to offer. “ I don’t like discipline at all. I like to enjoy what I am doing,’’ he said.

Girish (fourth from right, back row) with his German and Austrian tent mates at the Marathon des Sables. The blue UNICEF T-shirts is for the last day's charity run (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Girish (fourth from right, back row) with his German and Austrian tent mates at the Marathon des Sables. The blue UNICEF T-shirt is for the last day’s charity run (Photo: courtesy Girish Mallya)

Similarly, despite his apparent clarity in terms of what his strengths are and what his preferred type of stage races are, in 2014, Girish participated in the Langkawi Ironman. Triathlons are single day multi stage events with pretty strict cut off times, the abject opposite of his growing faith in multi-day stage races as personal forte. He suspects that it may have been a Timex Ironman Triathlon watch, which he got in the tenth standard that injected the longstanding desire to try the event. “ That watch may have put Ironman in the head,’’ he said. His hopes were also boosted by participating in a triathlon in India, which incidentally had a more relaxed stage cut-off time than the overseas Ironman. The Langkawi experiment ended a Did Not Finish (DNF). A committed runner who is additionally well versed in marketing, Girish has sponsors. Won’t DNF hurt sponsorship? “ Being honest and upfront about failure is the best way to handle that,’’ Girish said. Hours after we met him for a chat, Girish left for Athens to run the 2015 Athens Marathon followed by the marathon in Istanbul. In early January he will run the marathon in Los Angeles before keeping his appointment with the 2016 SCMM. Future projects also include the Marathon du Medoc in Bordeaux, France, a sort of gourmet’s delight with over 20 wine stops and a variety of foods available along the race route.

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai.)

November 28, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

A FARMER’S DREAM

Sabhajeet Yadav (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Mumbai’s Kurla Terminus resembled a bustling hive with long queues in front of ticket counters and people all around.

It’s the abject opposite of the solitude runners find in the depths of a run. Sabhajeet Yadav has to reach this station and then catch a train to Uttar Pradesh. In between, two independent journalists have sought time for a chat in the chaotic station.

Our allotted time shrinks as en route to Kurla Terminus, Sabhajeet is stuck in Monday morning traffic.

He calls on arrival.

The man is easy to spot – medium height, broad shoulders, lean build and taut face. You know an athlete when you see one. We head straight for the cafe above the ticket counters and queues, where he sits for the interview.

Twenty four hours earlier, Sabhajeet had just completed a full marathon at Vasai-Virar, a township on the northern edge of Mumbai. He finished second in his age category of 55 and above at the Vasai-Virar Mayor’s Marathon (VVMM), running the 42km-distance in 3:25:51. He is a regular podium finisher at races across India, travelling from one place to another to run during India’s marathon season. At the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon (SCMM), he bagged top honours in his age category in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015. He has been winner in his age category at the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon (ADHM) in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014 (please see compilation at end of story for an overview of his performance at various events). The 2016 SCMM is due in mid-January. But before that Sabhajeet, following a quick visit home will be at two to three other events including the 2015 ADHM. That’s a measure of his running calendar. The 60 year-old now dreams of participating in events overseas, at cities not too far from India’s shores and thereby costing less to access. All this thanks to others, who noticed the farmer from Dabhiya village in Jaunpur, Uttar Pradesh and decided to help him for Sabhajeet is running more for income than achievement or a quest to know oneself. The prize money he gets augments the returns he and family get from farming.

Sabhajeet Yadav (Photo: courtesy Bhasker Desai)

The central government’s web page on Jaunpur describes the district’s topography as a mix of flat plain and shallow river valleys. According to Sabhajeet, Dabhiya, where he and family live is “ up and down’’ with a river not far off – the Basuhi river. Crops grown include wheat, rice and sugarcane. Years ago, Sabhajeet had a background in athletics in school. But it wasn’t running. He was into javelin, discus and high jump. If you search the Internet, you will find a Rohit Yadav who placed third in javelin throw at the 13^th National Inter District Junior Athletics Meet held in Visakhapatnam in 2015. Rohit is Sabhajeet’s second son; he has a daughter and three sons. His sons are into athletics, none of them are however in running. “ They are into the throwing disciplines, mainly javelin. I want them to do well,’’ Sabhajeet said. He reasoned that long distance running requires a touch of adequate years lived on the planet. You have to be a bit old and mature, he felt. Not to mention, have persistence and patience. These aren’t the strengths of youth. Among reasons Sabhajeet runs seeking podium finishes and prize money is to assist his children in their future in sports. From what we understood, the prize money takes care of family expenses allowing some of the other income streams to be used for the family’s future. Initially, his wife was not happy with his idea of travelling around for running events. But as he started to bring home a fair amount of prize money she learnt to accept his ways. “ With my prize money I was able to get my daughter married. It also helped me construct a house in my village,’’ Sabhajeet said. When he is away running, his sons take care of the family’s farming.

Sabhajeet started running seriously roughly six years ago. Between the half and the full, he commenced with the half marathon; then embraced the full marathon as well. He has no problem switching between the two disciplines, which in terms of pace and strategy are as different as chalk and cheese. Initially he had no running shoes. Shoes of any type – old, used, local and gifted – has featured only for the last three years. Practice sessions in Dabhiya are at a local ground. It affords a loop of 200m and whenever he can grab time away from work, the farmer is there, practising. “ I run almost daily. Sometimes for two hours, three hours, even four hours. Apart from farming there is nothing much to do. And there is no concept of a holiday. So I run almost daily,’’ he said. Along the way, he consulted a coach and acquired a few exercises to do that complement his running. As for food – Sabhajeet typically sticks to roti, rice, lentils and vegetables, the standard North Indian fare.

Around the time Sabhajeet took to running, Mumbai based-businessman and runner, Bhasker Desai, was in Ladakh to participate in an early edition of the Great Tibetan Marathon. “ I met this poor but cheerful and smiling 17 year-old schoolboy, Tenzing, a free spirited runner who won the full marathon race way ahead of competition. He was running in cheap worn out Bata canvas shoes and his race apparel that day, was his school uniform,’’ Bhasker recalled. One of Bhasker’s friends, who was with him, suggested that they sponsor Tenzing for the upcoming ADHM in Delhi. “ It felt nice that we could support a talented runner to fly Leh-Delhi,’’ Bhasker wrote in by email. With help from still others, they took care of the travel and stay in Delhi for Tenzing and his school sports coach. The Tenzing episode sparked a thought – why not support some older runners who are talented but constrained by lack of resources and wish to complement their paltry income with prize money? At the 2012 ADHM, Bhasker followed up on Sabhajeet who had completed the race splendidly despite being 55 years plus. “ That is how our friendship started,’’ Bhasker said (for more on Bhasker Desai please try this link: https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/from-zanzibar-to-boston-the-bhasker-desai-story/). When we met him after the 2015 VVMM, Sabhajeet mentioned Bhasker’s support in matters ranging from running shoes to identifying the right events and assisting with the registration process including paying the registration fees. For the farmer from Dabhiya, that meant a lot. But why do people choose to help him? It probably has much to do with his nature.

Sabhajeet (extreme right) with fellow runners; from left: Breeze Sharma, Suresh Pillai, Sanjay Bhingarde, Dnyaneshwar Tidke and Bhasker Desai (Photo: courtesy Bhasker Desai)

Sabhajeet reportedly began his running career with an eight kilometre-run for veterans, which promised Rs 5000 for the winner. At the time he came to know of this race he was a desperate man with debts to repay following his daughter’s wedding. “ That desperation must have played a role in whatever happened since, for one thing about Sabhajeet is that he is self-made. He is committed to running, has devised his own training regimen and needs nobody to remind him of the required discipline. His farm is small and what he earns from it is little. When there wasn’t enough money from farming, he used to work on daily wages. It was a hard life. Possibly as a legacy of such life, he has no notion of ideal conditions. At a race, he accepts whatever is available as how things are – very unlike many of us who blame poor running performance on this condition and that,’’ a well wisher who didn’t want to be named, said, adding, “ all that we did was help him with travel expense, registration and logistics. The rest is completely to his credit.’’

Sabhajeet is remembered in the running circles of Mumbai and Goa for the way in which he evolved a committed approach to sports, in a village, far away from the anyway poor talent-scouting India’s sports apparatus does. “ He hasn’t had a word of professional input from anyone,’’ the well wisher said. Sabhajeet designed his training regimen for running by himself; he designed the training for his sons, the javelin they use for practise is reportedly home-made and at least one news report said the choice of javelin throw for the sons was also because everyone could share the same javelin. Urban running is notorious for the corporate-inspired fussing over every tiny detail to improve performance. Dietary inputs from overseas; costly shoes, energy gels, gadgets to measure athletic performance, exotic workouts – the list is long. In comparison, Sabhajeet’s ecosystem is frugal. A runner in Goa recalled how Sabhajeet arrived for the local marathon by long distance train with food his wife had made and packed for him. Ahead of race, he stuck to his routine and rituals; ate the home cooked food. It was after the race had been run and he had won that he let himself partake in a meal with friends. Such was the focus; a quiet, rural version of the urban spectacle. At Kurla Terminus, he was light on his feet, whatever he needed in a small bag.

In January 2015, Sabhajeet had reached Mumbai for the annual SCMM with a badly pulled calf muscle. He was limping. “ We took him to a physiotherapist. But what can you do on the eve of a race? He nevertheless went on to win in his category. He is clear about that – he has to run, he has to win,’’ the earlier mentioned well wisher said. In an article in The Times of India, after the 2014 SCMM, V. Anand pointed out that in 2012 and 2013 Sabhajeet – a winner in both years – had slept on the concourse at Mumbai’s CST railway station as he could not afford a hotel room. In 2014, after this was brought to their attention, the organizers provided him accommodation. Those who know him believe a season of running pays Sabhajeet more than he can manage in a year of farming. Over the years, with debts repaid and house built, he has begun shedding some of the earlier desperation and started to enjoy his running. “ It is good to see that,’’ one of his supporters said.

Sabhajeet at the 2015 Vasai-Virar Mayor’s Marathon (Photo: by arrangement)

According to Sabhajeet he is still the only one regularly running in Dabhiya. Nobody else has taken to the sport despite example at hand of one among them travelling around and earning podium finishes. Do they know of his achievements? “ Yes they do. Once in a while, my name appears in the newspaper and they get to know,’’ Sabhajeet said. In the early days of his running, things weren’t so. The sight of him practising was amusement for others. With victories, an element of respect has emerged. Among things he must now attend to is getting a passport. He doesn’t have one yet and his aspirations include running overseas.

We are now terribly close to the assigned time of departure of Sabhajeet’s train.

The conversation is wound up.

A final photo is taken.

Interestingly, it is we who keep reminding Sabhajeet that his train will leave shortly. He is lost in talk about running. The subject evidently engages him.

As we descend the stairs to the ticket counters, the din rises.

A handshake, then a namaste and Sabhajeet joins those proceeding to the platform.

A few days after our meeting, Sabhajeet won in his age category at the 2015 ADHM.

Sabhajeet Yadav / some of the races he won with timings therein:

2011 – Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – 1:31:48 – senior veteran category

2012 – Full Marathon at Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon – 3:25:08 – senior veteran category

2012 – Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – 1:33:41 – senior veteran category

2013 – Full Marathon at Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon – 3:21:54 – senior veteran category

2013 – Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – 1:28:16 – senior veteran category

2014 – Full Marathon at Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon – 3:25:39 – senior veteran category

2014 – Full marathon at Shriram Properties Bengaluru Marathon – 3:15:38 – age category of 55 years and above

2014 – Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – 1:28:29 – age category of 55-65

2015 – Full Marathon at Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon – 3:28:40 – age category of 55 years to less than 60

2015 – Full Marathon at Shriram Properties Bengaluru Marathon – 3:20:34 – age category of 55 years and above

2015 – Airtel Delhi Half Marathon – 1:31:00 – age category of 60 years to less than 65

Source: Timing Technologies

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai. Please visit https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/half-or-full-thats-the-question/ for the story of Kamlya Bhagat, a runner – albeit much younger – who, like Sabhajeet, runs to support his family.)

November 23, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

AN IMPRINT FOR NOVEMBER

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Footprints are the stars of suspense and mystery.

Depending on context, a footprint can be much more than the trace of a foot or boot-sole on earth. A common contextual feeling among hikers for instance, is: I am not lost, I am not alone! Provided of course, whoever walked by is good company. Can you be sure of that? A footprint on earth is also imprint in restless brain. It is what it is and then, it is what you make of it. Or is it what it is because of what you make of it? Ha! – says Holmes, that solver of mysteries. Eyes closed; head thrown back, palms joined, a mocking smile on his lips, the triumph in needling Watson with his occasional barbed quips showing through.

One thing I know – I can’t be Holmes, for there is nothing as delightful as watching the character from far. Inhabit him and you trade that perspective for the hound’s nose glued to a trail. I’d rather be Watson capable of seeing Holmes or better still – the reader of a book or viewer of a TV serial showing them both, for Holmes with Watson alongside, is one of the finest character portrayals there is.

In my case, Holmes is an imprint in the brain.

Nobody means Sherlock Holmes more to me than the late Jeremy Brett.

I still remember my first meeting with Holmes. I was approaching middle school. Readers Digest was popular those days. Once in a while, the magazine sent out a list of the books it published, which readers could buy. There was a thick blue book with fiction abstracts and a red one. I ordered the red; my cousins procured the blue. The blue had chapters from Sherlock Holmes. Ours was a family appreciative of the creative arts. On weekends, the cousins gathered to indulge in some form of creativity. Initially it was painting; slowly that gave way to each one getting serious in some chosen passion – dance, music, reading, writing, painting, football, aero modelling, films etc. It continued till tenth standard, maybe some more. Then life, like water poured down a funnel, was recast in service of livelihood. It is like the story of mineral water; once was free, flowing water, now eminently saleable in bottle. By the time we finished college, we were just that – saleable.

Somewhere in the period partial to creativity, an evening at their house, Manju and Rajeev kept me spellbound by their narration of The Speckled Band. That was my first Sherlock Holmes story and it came from the blue book. Not exactly fond of snakes, the snake in the story left an impression, strong enough for me not to forget either the story or my cousins’ narration. For several years, Holmes stayed just that in the head – a story. I came across his collected adventures at other households in the extended family but the youngster in me wasn’t keen on a character set decades back in the past. My mother told me that Holmes was even a case of character brought back from the dead by popular demand. Such had been his impact. It failed to register for I wanted modern characters. Time passed by. The shape of Indian cars changed; the shape of household appliances changed – among them, the television. Colour TV arrived and with time, cable TV.

Among programmes telecast was the Granada TV series, ` The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ with Jeremy Brett as Holmes. It changed everything for me. I found myself keeping my appointment with the telecast that opened with unmistakable violin-notes. A simple, bare tune that resonated of an era gone by and told you clearly – get ready to be transported back in time. It was a fine series with good performances by not just the lead actors but also those making special appearances as important characters in each episode. In my opinion, the series was one of those productions in which the average quality across episodes stayed pretty high. Brett and his committed, intense portrayal of the detective grew on me. Above all, for someone sold on ` modern,’ I found myself enjoying the eccentricities of ` period.’ Everything, from conduct to language – it lingered distinct in the slower pace of the past, it cut a style. Holmes had style! When the series ended, I acquired a thick volume showcasing all the Sherlock Holmes adventures and set about reading it. There is still stuff I haven’t read, stuff I forget. I am glad it is so for it lets me get back.

Thanks to the Internet, I have sampled different actors as Holmes. None inhabited the character or created Holmes like Brett did. I don’t hold portrayals strictly accountable to what the author prescribed in every little detail. No, I don’t. That is probably why Brett impressed me so much. I was a blank slate for although I had read some of the detective’s adventures, characterization is picked up easier from an enacted piece than a written one. Brett provided a face to a figure, voice to a brain, life to a character and mannerisms, even arrogance, for recall; plus intensity. For all the logic Holmes attributes to his ability to deduce, Brett infused a crucial contrarian element to his Holmes – a touch of mystery. The sum total of what he offered as Holmes was a portrait of deduction as much enigmatic and enticing as a case delivered as question mark. It was the perfect package for imprint by image. The man was a genius; perhaps more accurately – it was acting genius unleashed by defining role. No Basil Rathbone or Peter Cushing for me and definitely no Robert Downey Jr or Benedict Cumberbatch; it has to be Jeremy Brett. Like imprint in mind authoring perception of footprint, Brett became Holmes for me. David Burke and Edward Hardwicke did an excellent job essaying Dr Watson in the series. I am partial to Burke. His Watson showed the spunk to stand up to Holmes, a sharp contrast to say, the rather bumbling Watson of Nigel Bruce.

I am not a researcher on Holmes or an academic knowing every detail of every story. I have also not been to London and Baker Street. I am sure learned discussions on Holmes and Brett may hold opinions different from mine. My journey with Holmes continues in occasional readings of the book, still enjoyed as return to character and language and every once in a while – recourse to YouTube where the old Granada series survives and Brett comes alive as Holmes to the fans he made.

Brett died in 1995.

He was born November 3, 1933, three years after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, passed away.

This is a November.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)

November 18, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

MUMBAI-GOA ON A KAYAK

Kaustubh Khade (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Mid November, 2015.

Secured atop the car was a long, narrow kayak.

The car was in the parking lot of a set of apartment blocks in Powai, best known as location for the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai. In some other countries, a car with a kayak on top would be common sight. Mumbai is a metro by the sea. But it shares India’s inertia for water sports, puzzling given the country’s 7,500km-long coastline. There are thousands of fisher folk, who venture out to sea for livelihood. There is the navy and the merchant navy too. But recreational sailing, canoeing, kayaking – all these are still evolving in India. It contrasts an ancient past in which, Indians engaged with the sea. Some, who investigated the phenomenon, have attributed the Indian preference for terra firma to religious strictures that discouraged ocean voyages. It may also have much to do with a heavily populated country’s insistence that everything people do in manic rat race make sense. Livelihood makes sense. Sport for livelihood may also make sense. Sport for sport sake makes no sense. Who knows? What Kaustubh Khade does know is that the drive from Powai in Mumbai’s north east to South Mumbai’s Chowpatty, with kayak on top of his car, attracts attention in island city surrounded by sea. Cops, curious about both kayak and its length exceeding Kaustubh’s mid-sized sedan, stop him and question regularly. “ I am now used to it,’’ the computer engineer said. His is a white kayak, an EPIC 18X model; the names of his sponsors and `Paddle Hard’ – a brand and concept he is promoting, posted on it.

Kaustubh expected none of this.

He has a couple of dolphins in Goa to thank for the turn his life took.

Born 1987 to parents who are doctors, Kaustubh grew up in Mumbai. He has an elder sister. By 1991, the family was in Powai. During his days at the Hiranandani Foundation School (HFS), he was an athlete into sprinting. He also played rugby and football. After tenth, he shifted to the Kendriya Vidyalaya at the IIT campus, a phase associated strongly with sports. “ We played football at least half an hour to an hour every day,’’ he recalled. Next stop was the IIT itself, but in Delhi. Kaustubh and his sister, who elected to pursue engineering, stood out in their extended family dominated by doctors. “ At a very young age, I saw my father give an injection to a kid. The kid was howling. I decided to do engineering,’’ he said laughing. At IIT Delhi, he continued his passion for football but it was marred by recurrent knee problems. Passing out from the elite institute, he secured his first job via campus placement. He was back in Mumbai.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

In 2010, Kaustubh went on a dolphin safari in Goa with his friend, Sarang Paramhans. They noticed that the motor boat they were on was scaring away the dolphins. To be less invasive and closer to nature, they decided to shift to a two person-kayak. Kaustubh had briefly kayaked before on the Ganga in Rishikesh. That hadn’t stuck in mind. But being out at sea on a kayak with curious dolphins for company was a life altering experience. So strong was its spell that on the way back to Mumbai, Kaustubh stopped at a boat shop at Panjim in Goa, to buy a kayak. Rajiv Bhatia, who owned Rae Sport Goa (the company is headquartered in Mumbai), quizzed Kaustubh for previous experience in kayaking. The young man confidently quoted Rishikesh and Goa; Bhatia brought him down to earth. He asked Kaustubh: why don’t you train properly in kayaking first and then if you still wish, buy a kayak from Rae Sport?

Kaustubh signed up for a kayaking course with the company in Mumbai. He pursued the sport diligently. Over time, he graduated from the regular kayak to the surf ski variety, a pretty fast kayak, narrower and longer than its brethren. In 2012, Rajiv asked Kaustubh whether he wished to participate in the national championship for dragon boat racing, due in the city under the auspices of the Indian Kayaking & Canoeing Association (IKCA). It was designed to select a national team in the sport. Unlike kayaks, the dragon boat featured 10 rowers in five rows of two each. Additionally, there was a person to steer and a person to drum, which was the means to set a rhythm for the rowing. In some ways, it was a miniature version of Kerala’s famous snake boats. Weighing 200-300kilos each, the dragon boats were imported canoes. Kaustubh was interested. Rajiv Bhatia set about building a team. At one end of South Mumbai’s Marine Drive, on Chowpatty, is an organization that goes by the name: Pransukhlal Mafatlal Hindu Bath & Boat Club. Strong paddlers existed there. So a team including these paddlers was formed. Then, the unexpected occurred. Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is capital, decided not to participate in the national championship. Where would the Mumbai team go? An engaging solution was found: they would represent Goa! “ Our team was a melting pot,’’ Kaustubh said. It was a good team; they trained regularly for three and a half months.

Fourteen states turned up for the nationals held at Marine Drive. Team Goa did well in the time trials based on which the national team was announced. Kaustubh found a place in it. The new team trained for a week in Mumbai. A highlight of 2012 was the training Kaustubh received in Mumbai, from Oscar Chalupsky, twelve-time world champion from South Africa. He taught the fundamentals of kayaking. “ Unlike popular perception, kayaking is not an upper body sport. It actually uses the whole body. Oscar taught me that,’’ Kaustubh said. The Asian Championship was due at Pattaya in Thailand around March-April 2013. Kaustubh would report for practice at Marine Drive from 7AM to 9.30AM; then attend office, report for practice in the afternoon, go back to office and then report after work for evening practice. The balancing act was tough; he was under review at work. His office wasn’t appreciative of the national team and Asian Championship-bug. One day he was asked: what will the office get from this craze? “ Following that exchange it became easy to quit the company,’’ Kaustubh said.

The kayak on top of the car (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Thirteen countries participated in the Asian Championship. Across events for men and women, India won six silver medals and three bronze. In the races Kaustubh participated in, India won two silver medals and one bronze. “ We participated in every race. At one stage, we had just got off a race requiring 10 paddlers, when the coach came and said we had to rush for the race featuring 20 paddlers,’’ he said. The championship lasted three days. On return, Kaustubh resigned his job. He would move on to attempting unsuccessfully to start his own business in Bengaluru and transit through employment at a second company before signing up for the firm he currently works at; a start-up commenced by youngsters fresh out of IIT. Start-ups can be hectic. Kaustubh spoke of his life, one eye on his cell phone. We were at a cafe in Powai.

After the 2013 Asian Championship, Kaustubh decided to focus on sea kayaking with emphasis on surf skis. Back in Goa, he had fallen in love with kayaking for the way it allowed the paddler to experience what he was doing with that sense of being close to the elements. Kaustubh explained his later transition to the surf ski, “ what I experienced in Goa is also why I moved to surf skis. Compared to the surf ski, sea kayaks and leisure kayaks are more stable. They kill the joy in every wave.’’ A precise instrument, the unstable surf ski is the most technical kayak in the larger sea kayaking discipline. He decided to participate in the next edition of the Asian Championship in Thailand on surf skis. He started training for the event’s 22 km-run over December-January at Mumbai’s Marine Drive. With the bay not long enough, he managed the required distance by doing laps. However things went wrong in Thailand. The surf ski issued there was a lot more unstable type than what he had trained on. Realizing the futility in racing in that kayak class, he switched disciplines and raced in sea kayaking. He finished fifth out of 17 participants in the 13km-sea kayak race. After this episode, Kaustubh stopped competing. “ Training for competitions had become difficult given the pressures of office and working life,’’ he said.

Around this time, he read the book, “ Fearless’ by Joe Glickman. It was about German kayaker Freya Hoffmeister’s 2009 journey, paddling around Australia. The book left him wondering if something similar was possible in India. He visualized a long term plan: kayak around the Indian peninsula from Mumbai to West Bengal with the Mumbai-Goa leg as first portion to attempt. On the globe, the ocean is a huge mass of seemingly similar blue. In reality, depending on the scale of one’s expedition, it is a collection of different weather patterns – seasonal and unseasonal, underwater geographical features, dissimilar coastlines and a different culture beyond each shore. As Kaustubh found out, navigating the limited distance of Mumbai-Goa itself entailed consolidating 17 separate maps. Complicating matters, threats to India’s security have robbed the surrounding seas of their innocence. This enhanced the importance of official clearances for kayakers trying to paddle personal dreams to success in the waters around India. Getting approvals and stitching the logistics together as efficiently as possible is half the work done in any expedition.

Sanjeev Kumar (in front) and Dev Dutta; from their 2005 expedition (Photo: courtesy Sanjeev Kumar)

Kaustubh’s idea was not new. Almost ten years before, on December 25, 2005, two kayakers – Sanjeev Kumar and Dev Dutta – had cast off from Mumbai on a voyage around the Indian peninsula to Kolkata. As per their log, they were forced to terminate the trip 28 days later, at Kannur in Kerala. The log mentioned suspicion among the locals of two strangers in a kayak pulling in from the sea. Pestered for two days and worried that the trend could continue along the entire Kerala coast, the duo decided to stop the Kerala leg and resume in Tamil Nadu. However, according to the log, the Tamil Nadu government had just then begun a search for Tamil Tiger operatives, who had earlier clashed at sea with the Indian Coast Guard. Given the circumstances, they concluded, Tamil Nadu waters too may be risky to venture into and wrapped up the expedition for the time being. One thing was clear from this testing of the waters – proper official backing and approvals, make a difference.

With a view to meet an official from the state’s tourism agency, Kaustubh attended a seminar in Navi Mumbai. The Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation (MTDC), which has resorts along the Maharashtra coast, decided to support his kayak trip. According to Kaustubh, the MTDC coming aboard made things easier with others in the approvals-frame. The Maharashtra Maritime Board extended support and soon thereafter, the Indian Coast Guard cleared the trip. A few private sponsors stepped in to support the expedition. As a NGO to support through the expedition, he picked Magic Bus, which uses sports and games to work with underprivileged children. It was an ideal fit; Kaustubh loved this NGO’s work. In October 2014, Kaustubh applied for sabbatical from work. He also ordered a kayak – the EPIC 18X, we saw strapped to the top of the car. It is a hybrid of the sea kayak and the surf ski with chambers to hold gear and supplies. He had thought of a December departure. But that didn’t happen. The kayak reached Mumbai on January 26, 2015.

Kaustubh casting off from near the Gateway of India, Mumbai (Photo: courtesy Kaustubh Khade)

Meanwhile, the expedition’s challenges hit home. Although experienced kayaker, Kaustubh’s experience to date had been in protected waters. The sea off Mumbai’s Marine Drive has a reef that acts as natural breakwater. Compared to the outer sea, the bay is calm. Paddling from Mumbai to Goa, Kaustubh wouldn’t be way out at sea as in a sea crossing but he would definitely be beyond natural protective barriers close to the coast. And he would be on a matchstick of a craft, bobbing out of sight in the slightest of ocean swells. His parents Monita and Kisan Khade had been supportive of his foray into kayaking. For them, anything except football, which would have damaged Kaustubh’s knees further, was welcome. To contain the risk, they stepped in. One of the sponsors had recommended a support vessel accompanying the kayak at sea. He now offered to fund it. Monita elected to be on the support vessel; Kisan would drive along the coast meeting up at every halt. Kaustubh concedes, sponsors and support vessel may have taken off some of the spontaneity otherwise inherent in adventure. Halts weren’t a case of pulling in from the sea and camping self-supported; support vessel additionally meant, searching for a suitable jetty, something a kayaker wouldn’t think of. Further, the easily visible support vessel attracted attention. Kaustubh spoke of the police occasionally coming out to inspect. “ The letter from the Coast Guard, which we had in the support vessel, always worked. What was interesting was how the police would come to check, looking all serious and later, after we had showed them the requisite papers, take photos of the kayaker paddling on,’’ he said.

Kaustubh embarked on his trip from Mumbai’s Gateway of India, on February 14, 2015. Waking up every day at 5.30 AM, he would enjoy a fine spell of kayaking from 6.30 AM to 9.30 AM. Then the sun blazed. His worst hours would follow. The paddling would go on till about 1 PM, when he would draw ashore. The remaining part of the day, he rested and blogged, something he had to do as per the modern paradigm of expedition, sponsors and media. Dinner was at 7.30 PM; lights out by 9 PM. It went on so, relatively smooth except for Day 12.

Paddling on Day 12 (Photo: courtesy Kaustubh Khade)

On Day 12, fresh out from a rest day, Kaustubh was paddling on to Ratnagiri. Two thirds of the Mumbai-Goa journey had been completed. Spirits were up although it was a pretty hot day. The plan was to stop en route at Pawas. But the support vessel wanted to look for a jetty at Purnagad further south. It added another ten kilometres to the day, already trying due to the heat. When the team reached Purnagad, they found that while the place did have a jetty, Purnagad was tucked a bit inward and away from the sea. It raised concerns on how the tide may impact locally. Therefore the team paused for lunch at Purnagad and around 3.30 PM set off again with a plan for the kayak to hit shore at Godavne, with night halt for everyone at Ambolgad. Kisan Khade would come to fetch Kaustubh and take him to Ambolgad, dropping him back at Godavne the next morning, to recommence his paddling. That was the idea. However, after the support vessel pushed off for Ambolgad, the weather turned nasty and the sea became rough. Three to four kilometres out at sea, Kaustubh’s kayak almost capsized. He nevertheless managed to crash-land at Godavne, the culmination of a particularly long day spent paddling. He was exhausted. The wave that crashed him onto the beach had also swept off the contact lens in his right eye leaving him half blind. Godavne turned out to be completely different from what the team had imagined. It was an isolated beach surrounded by steep hills. There was no way Kaustubh could haul the kayak singlehandedly to the road. With no prominent path coming down to the beach, his father wasn’t also around. Bereft of any communication device (the cell phone was on the safety boat), a new worry started – was his father not here because something happened to his mother who had proceeded ahead in the safety boat?

Tired, Kaustubh lashed his kayak to a small tree stump and set out to find a way up. It was late evening; darkness was approaching. Packing up the items he could carry, he walked six kilometres along the beach. He ran into four men high on liquor. Somehow he convinced them that he needed to use their cell phone. Finally, he got through to his girlfriend in Mumbai who assured him that his parents were fine. By then two people on motorbikes came looking for him. They took him to the assigned guest house for the night, where he rejoined his parents. Earlier in the day, Kisan Khade had come to Godavne. He had found a goatherd’s path down to the isolated beach but not finding Kaustubh anywhere went back. It hadn’t seemed a place to land. Meanwhile, the locals informed that leopards frequented the Godavne area. After a brief rest, the team returned to Godavne, somehow scouted a path down to the beach and hauled the kayak up. The following day they rested in Ambolgad. The next leg of the trip was commenced away from Godavne. Tough times persisted. The Tarkarli-Vengurla stretch should have gone smoothly but stiff headwinds slowed progress. Finally after 14 days of paddling (excluding rest days), Kaustubh reached Morjim in Goa, the end of his journey. He had kayaked 413km; the expedition was admitted into India’s Limca Book of Records as the longest ` solo’ kayaking by an Indian paddler in the shortest time.

Reaching Morjim, Goa (Photo: courtesy Kaustubh Khade)

Kaustubh has his eyes on the larger trip around the peninsula. “ This was clearly a pilot,’’ he said of Mumbai-Goa. He imagines that the remaining journey, slated for 2016-2017, would happen in two phases – one to kayak down the west coast and another to kayak up the east coast. The two coasts are different in character. The east can be rougher, not to mention – its capacity for extreme weather. That aside sponsorship will be the biggest challenge. And somewhere amid all this, he also wants to participate “ at least once’’ in Hawai’s Molokai Race. As for that kayak atop the car, still oddity in India’s financial capital surrounded by the sea, it rests when ashore in a garage owned by a friend who stays in the same building as Kaustubh.

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai.)

October 22, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

THE COMRADE

Satish Gujaran (Photo: Shyam G Menon)

Most people reach Shirdi by road or rail.

Some choose to walk.

Sanjay Shankar Shinde, the founder of the running club Ramesh Nair trained with walked every year to the temple town from Mumbai. It is a distance of close to 250km as per the Internet. Curious, Ramesh, an engineer turned businessman, walked to Shirdi with Sanjay’s group in 2012. He did so again in 2013. Thinking of a repeat in 2015, he shared the idea with Satish Gujaran. The two lived close by in Mulund. They hadn’t met before, till running put them in touch. Satish had been training largely alone and mostly on the city’s Eastern Express Highway. What amazed Ramesh was the mileage he piled on daily and the dedication he showed to running. When Satish heard of Shirdi and the walk on Ramesh’s mind, he suggested: why not run from Mumbai to Shirdi?

July 25, 2015, 6AM; three runners – Ramesh, Satish and Nilesh Doshi – supported by a car stocked with essentials and driven by Sanjay Gawade, a driver whose many outings with runners has made him adept at the task, set off for Shirdi from Mumbai. Nilesh elected to return on the second day. He had some work to attend to; he also felt his body temperature was rising unreasonably. Satish and Ramesh pushed on; the former, a bachelor and experienced ultra marathon runner, the latter, a family man, regular runner of marathons and someone who prefers to run respecting the boundaries of well being. “ I run within my comfort zone,’’ Ramesh said. Satish seemed a runner moulded by exploration and experience. Ramesh reposed faith in systems and research. For both runners, it was their first multi-day run. In his mind, Ramesh had studied the distance to Shirdi and worked out how much he should run daily based on his experience at marathons and the annual Mumbai Ultra, a 12 hour-endurance run. He had it all chalked out. Satish was battling a private worry; the classical Indian worry – leave of absence from office. They had started on a Saturday. He had to report for work Wednesday morning. Will they reach Shirdi before that?

Satish and Ramesh during the Mumbai-Shirdi run (Photo: courtesy Ramesh Nair)

Satish (left) and Ramesh during the Mumbai-Shirdi run (Photo: courtesy Ramesh Nair)

“ Satish can keep on going. He is a frugal runner whose needs are few. I am not, ’’ Ramesh said. In tune with their experience in distance running and differing styles, a gap opened up between the two. And proportionate to the widening gap on the road, Satish’s worry about Wednesday grew. Ramesh recalled the situation. “ The car was supposed to halt every three kilometres or so. I was running slowly. After I had reached the car and hydrated, Satish would tell the driver to proceed and wait after the next three kilometres. Then I noticed – he was saying three and indicating four with his fingers!’’ Ramesh said laughing. In the end, it all worked out well. Around 2.30PM on Tuesday, July 28, the two runners reached Shirdi. After a quick visit to the Sai Baba temple, they returned to Mumbai. Satish was back at work, Wednesday morning.

Exactly 100 years before from the day the duo reached Shirdi, an event occurred in Europe that would leave its mark on the world of running as well. On July 28, 1914, a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, officially commencing the First World War. The cascading events that followed sank Europe into one of the bloodiest conflicts of human history. In four years of fighting, more people would die than in the wars of the preceding 100 years. Almost 70 million military personnel were mobilised; of them, over 8 million died. The survivors bore scars in the mind. Happening in the age of empire, the theatre of war exceeded Europe; those fighting and getting killed included many from outside Europe. Among people caught in the tentacles of empire and therefore pushed to fight, were the South Africans. They fought on the side of the Allied forces, in Africa and Europe. The war in Africa, a long distance from the trenches of Europe, was triggered by the German plan to keep the Allied force’s Africa based-military assets engaged in Africa itself.

Vic Clapham was one of the South Africans who saw action and survived. He was born in London on 16 November 1886 and immigrated to the Cape Colony in South Africa with his parents. When the Anglo-Boer war broke out, Vic aged 13, worked in an ambulance team. Later he moved to Natal and worked as an engine driver with the South African Railways. During the First World War, he signed up with the 8^th South African infantry, fighting and marching long distances through the savannah of eastern Africa. The hardships he and his friends endured left a lasting impression. Above all, he remembered their camaraderie. As peace returned in 1918, he sought a memorial to commemorate the South African soldiers who had died; a memorial that highlighted human endurance.

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

Clapham’s home town was Pietermaritzburg. He visualized a foot race from there to Durban. If soldiers could cover vast distances and endure it as they did in the war, Clapham averred, trained athletes should be able to do the same. This in mind, he approached the athletics administration in Natal for support. They declined. Then he approached The League of Comrades of the Great War, a body representing ex-service persons. Initially turned down, Clapham persisted. In 1921, the league yielded. It gave its assent. Clapham founded The Comrades, the world’s oldest ultra marathon race and now it’s biggest. First run on May 24, 1921, the route links Pietermaritzburg in the mountains with Durban on the coast. Forty eight runners enrolled for the inaugural race. Of that, 34 set off; 16 finished. Many of these runners were earlier infantrymen who had fought in Africa. At present, nearly 20,000 people run this ultra marathon every year. They come from different countries. The race alternates every year between uphill and downhill with the former measuring 87km and the latter, 89km. Founded as a war memorial, over time, The Comrades has acquired the reputation of being a fantastic event, remembered for the bonhomie, crowd support and cheering.

Satish never expected his life to get mixed up with The Comrades. He was born at Udipi in southern India on March 27, 1963, pretty close to the May-June period hosting South Africa’s iconic race (throughout its history The Comrades has been run in either May or June). Coincidentally in May 1963, a record was set at The Comrades. South African runner Jackie Mekler, who at five wins overall is tied with three others for the second highest number of wins at The Comrades in the male category, set a new record (5:51:20) in the ` down’ version of the run. With that he became the first runner since 1954 to hold the record for both the `up’ and `down’ versions. In 1960, Mekler had run the `up’ in 5:56:32. Those days there was no ultra marathon in India, likely no awareness about The Comrades. South Africa existed in the shadow of its apartheid policies. For many years, resultant sanctions denied the country participation in international sporting events. Sanctions prevented other countries from touring South Africa. In cricket crazy-India, once in a while the press published a photo or carried an article about South African cricketers. The names of Barry Richards, Mike Procter and Kepler Wessels floated around. Once in a while, the media mentioned Zola Budd, the legendary runner. Else, compared to what South Africa is in sports today, little was known of sports from Africa’s southern tip. Anything South Africa was usually about its politics. The country however featured prominently in Indian awareness. There was an Indian community in South Africa and the names of South African cities and towns had featured in history text books at Indian schools, especially in the context of Mahatma Gandhi and India’s freedom struggle. Pietermaritzburg was where, in June 1893, Gandhiji was forced off a train; an incident that made him determined to fight the racial discrimination against Indians and played a major role in shaping his future thoughts. Today, long after India’s independence and the end of South Africa’s apartheid laden-policies, a statue of Mahatma Gandhi stands on Church Street in Pietermaritzburg.

Satish (centre) with Dereck Mahadoo and his wife Shereen (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran)

Far away from South Africa and The Comrades, in India, school for Satish was 3-4km distant from home. Neither the distance to school nor the walking conspired to craft the outline for a future story in running. On the other hand, the youngster was more interested in games than running and athletics. Of his three sisters, two played badminton at the district and state level. The years went by largely nondescript. It was a regular life. Satish attended college in Bengaluru (Bangalore) graduating in commerce. “ There was nothing significant in my life, concerning sports then,’’ he said. The eldest child in the family and thereby expected to work, Satish travelled to Mumbai seeking employment. He did odd jobs for a while. Then, still no runner and given to smoking heavily, he moved to South Africa.

The person, who made this shift possible, was a friend – Dereck Mahadoo. He owned a construction company in South Africa and was looking for a supervisor. In due course, Satish joined Dereck’s company. He stayed with Dereck and his family in Durban, one of the two end points linked by The Comrades route. The new supervisor from Mumbai smoked like a chimney. The boss on the other hand, was a runner. Dereck had already run The Comrades six times. “ One day, he asked me to go along and walk with him while he ran. That became my first attempt at running,’’ Satish said. It was difficult. To start with, he hadn’t run before in his life, definitely not with a view to be runner. To complicate matters, he had spoilt his chances of enjoying a run through becoming a chain smoker. The duo persisted. Helping them was the local environment; South Africa had plenty of running events. There was a race every weekend, including several distances in the link category that helped those newly into running, nudge up their ability to cover distances. The year was 2004. Forty one year-old Satish picked up running pretty fast. Encouraged by the progress, he entered for his first formal half marathon. It ended up a DNF – Did Not Finish. “ By the twelfth or thirteenth kilometre, my knees were in utterly bad shape. An ambulance drove up and a lady said: get in, you have your whole life to run,’’ Satish recalled. That DNF was a lesson. It brought home an immediate war to declare in his journey to distance running – Satish had to confront his habit of smoking. “ It was tough giving that up,’’ he said. Dereck it appears, left an impression on Satish. According to Ramesh, when he was struggling on the uphill at Kasara en route to Shirdi, Satish stepped in to help. He broke down the ascent into smaller goals marked by sign boards along the road. “ From here to there, you walk. Then from there to there, you run. So on. When he broke the challenging section into small portions it helped me greatly. Apparently that is something he learnt from Dereck,’’ Ramesh said. Satish’s stint in South Africa also included some crazy contests, which may explain the reservoir of energy, others say, he digs into. For instance, he won a competition that challenged people not to sleep. He didn’t sleep for a few days.

In 2006, Satish returned to Mumbai. The Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon (SCMM) was by then a couple of years old. The spirit of running was catching on in the city. For two to three years, Satish ran the SCMM; he did no other major runs. On the average, he could run a full marathon in about 3 hours 40 minutes. Then in 2009, he picked up talk in Mumbai’s running circles, of The Comrades. Along with his affection for South Africa and memories of good times had there, the idea of running the famous ultra marathon tempted. But he was still a smoker. Between smoking and lessons from the old DNF, smoking had prevailed. The war was far from over. Satish nevertheless registered for the 2010 Comrades. There was a small group of people going. They heard of each other and met up. To train for The Comrades, they followed training regimens found on the Internet. Training started some time after February 2010. In addition to running in Mumbai, they ran in Lonavala, the popular hill station on the way to Pune. As part of preparations, they did two 56km-runs, a full marathon and one run of 65km. Each was apart by 20 days. Some of the runs commenced early; the 65km-run used to start at 2 or 3AM. A car with driver provided support. Satish’s first Comrades in South Africa, was the ` down’ version from Pietermaritzburg to Durban. Around the 65-70km mark, Satish suffered cramps in his calf muscles. He managed to handle it but the problem kept repeating. Life was forcing a decision on him. It was clearer than ever – you run healthy or you don’t run at all. Back in India, following The Comrades, Satish joined the `Inner Engineering Course’ offered by Isha Foundation. “ There I stopped smoking. By November-December 2010, I was free of the habit,’’ he said.

Satish (far right) with fellow Indian runners on the occasion of the 2015 edition of The Comrades. (Photo: courtesy: Satish Gujaran)

Satish (far right) with fellow Indian runners at the 2015 edition of The Comrades (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran)

Since 2010, Satish hasn’t missed a single edition of The Comrades. Every year he flies to South Africa to run the race. Running in 2011, on the heels of his debut at the 2010 edition, he qualified for an additional medal given to those who do two Comrades back-to-back. By October 2015, he had run and finished the iconic race six times becoming in all likelihood, the runner from Mumbai with the most number of finishes at The Comrades. Satish plans to run The Comrades at least 10 times. “ If you run it 10 times, you will get a green number, a bib number that is permanently yours. It is given by that year’s race winner,’’ he said. Satish explained why he loves The Comrades so much. “ The atmosphere is electrifying. The crowd support is fantastic and runners come from everywhere. The event is well organized. It is like a carnival. The route is challenging, it engages the runner. Finally, Durban has a sizable population of Indians and people of Indian origin. Indian runners get cheered,’’ he said. According to him, completing an ultra marathon like The Comrades is as much about strategy as it is about training. He spoke of veterans who have been running the race for years, taking it slow and keeping their energy in reserve for the course’s strenuous sections. “ Planning is important for good timing at The Comrades. To run slowly, you need courage. It comes only with experience and maturity,’’ Satish said. Over time, his training style also changed. In years gone by, he used to train 5-6 days a week. Now he trains 3-4 days. “ Quality matters more than quantity,’’ he said. Ramesh highlighted one more angle – discipline. Each night during the Mumbai-Shirdi run, while Ramesh took his time to get over the day’s exhaustion, Satish would clean up and finish his chores like clockwork.

Satish (right) with Arun Bhardwaj, India's best known ultra marathon runner. (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran. For more on Arun, please click this link: https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/the-connoisseur-of-distances/

Satish (right) with Arun Bhardwaj, India’s best known ultra marathon runner and a pioneer in the genre for the country (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran)

Although he has run The Comrades six times, until the Mumbai-Shirdi run with Ramesh, Satish hadn’t run an ultra marathon in India except the annual Mumbai Ultra and those long training runs for The Comrades. One reason for this was work and the commitments at work, which accompany life as employee. The Indian environment, arguably, has two prominent drawbacks. First, the pressure of high population and rat race is such that appreciation of human existence has narrowed to self worth by position and possessions. In this, sport is easily dismissed as irrelevant unless a person’s position in the sports pecking order is such that he is supremely successful. Life is all about success. Second, growing economies gift busy lifestyles to their citizens. Over the past six decades as various Asian economies gathered momentum, this shift has been documented in their respective populations. In India, the shift has occurred within a matrix already rendered crushing by other factors. The business of survival is too tiring at Indian cities to attempt anything else. “ I don’t think I have exploited my full potential,’’ Satish said, explaining his predicament. He sounded a bit sad. Yet at 52 years of age, he toys with the idea of shifting full time to running. He wonders if he will find supportive sponsors; somebody who would both ensure a certain income for sustenance and back his running. Indian youngsters are beginning to articulate such plans; they are getting support from sponsors eyeing the Indian market qualified by the high dose of young people shaping it. But therein lay another challenge – being middle aged and pursuing one’s dream in an India that is now overwhelmingly young, is no easy task. The old – particularly the old and eccentric as distance runners tend to be – are not a priority for commercial support.

Satish with fellow runners who pitched in to support during the Mumbai-Surat run. (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran)

Satish (back row, near centre, in yellow T-shirt) with fellow runners who pitched in to support during the Mumbai-Surat run (Photo: courtesy Satish Gujaran)

Satish however finds a way. In September 2015, a marathon was held in Surat. Satish approached the organizers with an idea – as an expression of support for the event, why not have him run from Mumbai to Surat? They agreed and provided the required infrastructural assistance. Early morning September 10, with a vehicle carrying essentials trailing him and periodically met up en route by fellow runners, Satish set off for Surat. He reached his destination – the event venue – by the end of the third day, having run an estimated 264km. On the day of the event, he polished off his effort by participating in the half marathon. Now he thinks of a Mumbai-Pune run. Also slated for the future, hopefully with the support of the Isha Foundation, is a run from Mumbai to Coimbatore.

It takes a zone of discomfort to make us aware of our capacity for endurance. Limits explored and the self spent, all is peaceful. Imagined differently, you can keep the peace if you remember to engage and exhaust yourself every once in a while, which is what opportunities to run and ultra marathons are all about. It is about finding peace. “ Running is now a part of me. If I don’t do it, I feel uncomfortable,’’ Satish said.

Update: At the 2015 Vasai-Virar Mayor’s Marathon held in November, Satish finished third in his age category in the full marathon with a timing of 3:49:00.

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai. The story of Vic Clapham and the early history of The Comrades have been collated from various sites on the Internet including the ultra marathon’s official website, Wikipedia and http://www.unogwaja.com/ For more on Arun Bhardwaj, please try this link: https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/06/21/the-connoisseur-of-distances/)

October 19, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

THE SMART LIFE

Illustration: Shyam G Menon

When I was young, the media engaged as access to wider world.

Now it sticks crowded world into everything. No quiet moments of solitude anymore. It is an epidemic of others in your head. My old phone has no Internet; I only text and answer calls. No apps, no Facebook, no anything else I don’t yet know of. Not having a smartphone, my friends assure me, condemns me to oblivion. The world’s business, they warn, is being swept into smartphones by a tsunami of money. Being one with the swarm is the smartest option in life reduced to beehive. It puzzles. `Smart’ owes much to apartness. By which yardstick, thinking independently should be smart. Perhaps there isn’t anything called independence in consumerist world. You go where business goes.

Every time I step into a Mumbai commuter train, I feel disappeared. Everyone has a smartphone. I used a cassette player when train commuters shifted to CD player; a CD player when they moved to MP3 player and now, a MP3 player as they do finger tip-magic on their all-in-one smartphone – it takes calls, types, plays music, screens movies, makes payments, plays games. What doesn’t it do? I hang on to my old phone for the relief of what it doesn’t do. “ What matters is the music and how well you listen to it. Smartphone, MP3, CD or cassette – that’s irrelevant,’’ I argued. My friend was unimpressed. “ How long will you be like this?’’ he asked. Working in a bank, he knows the tsunami has started. They are jamming whole banks into the smart phone. When he speaks so, I picture myself in deep space, waving good bye to planet Earth. You have seen that scene many times in movies – the actor reaches out to you like a drowning individual and then slowly recedes, becoming smaller and smaller (all the while reaching out) till he disappears into inky blackness. I am hurled towards Pluto. Cut! Actually, I should be grateful for having a friend who is concerned. What he told me was for my own good. I was thinking of all this when I boarded the train for my daily rendezvous with fading.

Early evening-trains usually bring a rush of college students. This was a Saturday. The youngsters were there but not many. I took my seat and pulled out my MP3 player from the bag. The young man next to me moved closer to the window; he kept his bag between us. Another of the tech-savvy, keeping distance from the obsolescent, I thought. Relax man, I don’t infect and even if I do it is just this harmless disease called hyposmartivity, entirely curable with a prick to the ego – I wanted to tell him. Then he returned his phone to the bag and pulled out a book. That was when I noticed his phone, very similar to mine. Unable to contain myself, I told him, “ you know I thought I am the only one still walking around with a phone like that.’’ He laughed. “ Yeah, I carry an old one,’’ he said tad sheepishly as nerds do when confronted with their lack of mainstream cool. As he spoke, he glanced around nervously at some of the other seats, where smartphone-totting youngsters sat, glued to their screens.

“ I don’t want a smartphone. I am happy with what I have. But they say I will have to upgrade because our money is going to be managed using smartphones,’’ I said. Despite my guard, my cynicism showed through. It always does, for I feel angry that life is increasingly about swimming with one tide or the other. Those who won’t, should seek exile – that’s the emergent logic. Makes me wonder – what happened to interesting people? You know the sort who felt life by exploring the universe alone. Stay positive, stay positive – I pinched myself. The college student smiled – a sorry you lost but don’t tell me you weren’t warned-smile. “ In my case, I know what smartphones can do. But if I carry one, I won’t study. It is a distraction. So I don’t keep one,’’ the youngster said. What? – I was stunned. For a second, I must have looked like Utpal Dutt’s Bhawani Shankar beholding Amol Palekar’s Ramprasad Dashrathprasad Sharma in Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s wonderful film, Gol Maal. I looked at the young man, eyes open wide in admiration. “ Appreciate that, your ability to know what you want and choose accordingly,’’ I said. It was as much encouragement to the other as it was discreet pat on the back for my own eccentricities. That evening on the train, I didn’t hide my MP3 player. I let myself be.

I think that young man will find his way abroad to a fine university. He seemed studious, hard working and committed enough to do that. Having dodged the smartphone to study well, go overseas and make his mark, what will he do next? Side with the swarm and sell me a smarter smartphone? To uncle with love – free ticket to Pluto. Who knows? A few days after this train journey, a good friend, concerned about my obsolescence, put her foot down and said I am getting her old smartphone as she is upgrading. God bless her. But the eccentric devil in me can’t help feeling amused – a device with so many functions to manage freelance writer’s paltry income? It is overkill. Still, I will go with it; be smart for a change.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai.)

October 16, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

FORGET, REMEMBER

Photo & imaging: Shyam G Menon

The other day I woke up unable to recall the one song I have loved all these years.

It was a frantic moment; almost as if I had lost myself.

The first time I heard that song, I had immediately fallen in love with it for the journeying groove in which it couched its truth. Everything about it moved except for its core; what’s more, everything moved because its core recognized the futility of staying put.

So I thought. So I choose to continue believing for I don’t usually latch on to songs by their lyrics. I don’t read music. The times I memorized lyrics and sang, I felt surrendered to a purpose. Music, for me, has no purpose. It just, is; much like life. You can snuff out life just as you turn off the music. But when you are alive, can you question consciousness? It is what it is. Similarly, you like music. Don’t try explaining why your atoms and molecules rearranged to happiness, hearing the sounds. Don’t try explaining why you swayed to music. Let it be. And from that, some songs stay. Those that stay long, you may opt to work your way back from musical impression to the lyrics. It is a bit like finding a good friend. You know each other with time. You think you explained the other having unravelled the lyrics. Then, just when you thought you had it all explained, a whole new mystery starts! The cosmos is restless.

“ I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ – the line meant little to me when I first heard U2’s song, way back when their album ` The Joshua Tree’ was nominated for the Grammy Awards. The nominated songs and the award presentation used to be telecast as a half-hour capsule on national television those days in India. I fell for the song’s structure and progression right away. For me, its seminal line was merely a name to remember it by. What attracted was the whole thing.

Years passed. Now working away from home and my room with a music system, music transformed to small portable audio player and headphones. Eventually when I failed to keep pace with technology, it transformed to tunes in the head. I even liked returning from a month of self imposed ban on the media, to my music – hearing it with renewed freshness. My affection for the song was perhaps a sign of things to come, for my sense of life as adult has always been out-of-body, as though peering at passing sights from the confines of a self limiting-shape. Every time that procession of passing sights took hold, the song would fill my head. Indeed U2 was especially talented in creating such imagery through their music; many of their songs possess the feeling of travel. Wind in your hair, self on a comet streaking through the cosmos, the clarity in un-belonging. I could go on. Larry Mullen Jr, Adam Clayton and The Edge – that’s a trio of talented rock musicians. They build the musical ambiance, the journeying spirit that bears forth the band’s lyrics and Bono’s vocals.

As the years passed, my affection for their music outgrew the one song I loved, to the many embodying that journeying spirit which the band captured in its work beautifully. But it was when one’s failures in life multiplied amid world inspired by media to worship perfection and success that I really understood (in my own way) why the words ` I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,’ mattered. My daily life had become a clash of two trends – the comet-rider wanted to move on; earthly life, gripped by money, wanted to stagnate so that life’s explained ways can be milked for income.

What is life if it gets explained?

What if we found what we are looking for; what next?

Are we wired to find and settle down or are we wired for the journey?

I remember the first proper length of time I spent camped on a glacier surrounded by snow clad peaks. The remoteness of Zanskar, the whiteness of the peaks in the dark of the night – all stayed in mind. I am a very average climber. Rest assured, if I can do something, anybody can. I hiked, climbed rock, ran and cycled – in everything I did, I was very average. But I came off understanding why I liked doing those things or being in remote places away from people. Life is a quest; I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. Equally, if I found what I am looking for, what happens to the quest? It ends? Even the idea that there is no quest and only this life to endure as the wise love to tell you – how would you like it delivered; as a truism at start that denies the journey or as discovery in life lived as a quest?

A lot of people these days emphasize the importance of looking inward.

They have a point. It is augmented by the fact that the ancients advised so, which suggestion I am not a fan of for I like being alive to my times. I am not a yogi to feel rested and peaceful within the walls of my being, universe internalized.

Photo & imaging: Shyam G Menon

I like my journey.

I felt alarmed when I couldn’t remember U2’s song.

My comet seemed stalled.

I spent the next couple of hours listening to U2’s songs and concerts; and in that, my old song.

I shed tears of joy.

Middle aged engine restarted.

I felt a gentle breeze kiss my face as journey recommenced.

So we traveled, till one day something else happened.

Out of the blue, a tune surfaced in my head and kept going on and on.

It wasn’t a song that latched on to my mind the first time I heard it years ago.

But the way it resurfaced, I could sense urgency.

As with U2, I got on to the Internet and spent much time listening to Sting, possibly the most gifted singer-musician out there. The song in question was ` If I Ever Lose My Faith in You’ from his 1993 album ` Ten Summoner’s Tales.’ The funny thing about suddenly having this song in my head is that it wasn’t as imprinted in my brain as some of Sting’s other compositions. But that day, the song about losing faith wouldn’t leave the head. It wasn’t totally surprising for I had been experiencing a sense of loss, something slowly vanishing. I don’t know exactly what I am losing faith in. Like I said before the precise cause for a song’s lyrics don’t engage me. Over analyzed and over articulated, world by technical mind has become boring. Often a song strikes a chord for no better reason than that it did. It is like finding curves in world made monotonous by grids and pixels. I know I am losing faith in something. Don’t ask me to describe it as if my saying so will help you fix it. How can the problem find the solution? In bits and pieces, the song offered imperfect words for the predicament. Above all, it swept me with its swaying music, hinting in its moments of wordless fluidity a refuge for the un-belonging I know is mine.

Un-belonging and universe are the same.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. This article is the expanded version of a piece that appeared in The Economic & Political Weekly.)

September 28, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

THE SPECTATOR

File photo of Rigzen Angmo: by arrangement. Photo of Leh: Shyam G Menon. Imaging of both: Shyam G Menon

Meeting Rigzen Angmo

Early morning September 13, as the fourth edition of the Ladakh Marathon got underway in Leh, Rigzen Angmo couldn’t help calling up those she knew to find out how the run was progressing.

She had to work that day and wasn’t in a position to participate even for fun. In fact, it wasn’t just 2015; the Ladakh Marathon has been on since 2012 but a combination of commitment to work, reluctance and maybe a desire not to revisit a chapter in her life put firmly behind, kept Rigzen away from participating.

Sometime after she confirmed that the race was on, she left her house and reached the roadside to have a glimpse of the runners. “ By the time I got there, those in the lead had already gone past. You can make out a good runner from how he or she uses the feet. The ones I saw must have been the recreational lot,’’ she said, tad disappointed. Later, she switched on the radio to listen to the race report. This September (2015), Ladakhis once again dominated the marathon. Rigzen however, wasn’t happy with the timings she heard. “ Ladakhis can do better than this,’’ she said, adding, “ my respect is more for the timing reported from the Khardunga La Challenge. I thought that was good.’’ The annual event is a composite of four sub-events – a seven kilometre-run for fun, a half marathon, a full marathon and a 72 km-ultra over the high Khardunga La pass called the Khardung La Challenge (for more on the 2015 Ladakh Marathon and the region’s quest to have a good running team, please visit this link: https://shyamgopan.wordpress.com/2015/08/07/ladakhs-running-team/).

This September when I reached Leh, all I knew was that Rigzen Angmo was now a senior officer with the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). Paramilitary personnel can be posted anywhere in India. Even if she was elsewhere in the state of Jammu & Kashmir, it would be difficult for freelance journalist on tight budget to pursue. That’s what journalism has become – a race judged by strength of resources. Media organizations have tons of it; freelancers, none. Where is Rigzen Angmo? – I thought.

When in doubt, have a cup of tea – that’s my recipe for clarity in the mountains. Kunzes served a cup of hot ginger tea. I rolled out my query, explained it. She stopped the work she was doing at the cafe in Changspa and listened carefully. “ Yes, I have heard of her. I think she has a house in Leh. Perhaps if you go there and ask, you may be able to locate her,’’ she said. To my luck, at the said house, I learnt that Rigzen had just been moved on work from Srinagar to Leh. When I finally met her, Rigzen Angmo wasn’t the talkative type. It was obvious that the chance to revisit running as a topic of discussion, made her happy. But her own past, it appeared, was something she had retired from. In 2004, she exited the central athletics team of the CRPF. Thereafter it has been regular office work.

“ Why don’t you come back to running?’’ I asked. For a second or two, Rigzen seemed undecided like somebody on a threshold. Then she replied, “ for years I pushed myself to settle for nothing but the best I can be. It is too deeply ingrained. At the same time, my body is no longer what it used to be, all that running has taken a toll.’’ It was the classic dilemma of erstwhile high performer. Over the couple of times we met to discuss her life in running, Rigzen Angmo hovered around that threshold.

Rigzen Angmo after winning the Kuala Lumpur Marathon in 1994 (photo: by arrangement).

She gave freelance journalist a file of old paper clippings to read and glean her story.

This is a compilation of that and a few rounds of conversation had.

Rigzen was born in March 1969 at Skarbuchan village, roughly 125 kilometres away from Leh. She was the third child of her parents; they were in all five brothers and four sisters. Her parents were farmers. Her mother died when Rigzen was still young. Life changed with the Indian government’s Special Area Games (SAG) scheme under which, talent from remote areas was spotted and groomed. The website of the Sports Authority of India (SAI) describes SAG currently as follows: Special Area Games (SAG) Scheme aims at scouting natural talent for modern competitive sports and games from inaccessible tribal, rural and coastal areas of the country and nurturing them scientifically for achieving excellence in sports. The Scheme also envisages tapping of talent from indigenous games and martial arts and also from regions/ communities, which are either genetically or geographically advantageous for excellence in a particular sports discipline. The main objective of the Scheme is to train meritorious sports persons in the age group of 12-18 years, with age being relaxed in exceptional cases. The disciplines covered include archery, athletics, badminton, basketball, boxing, canoeing, cycling, fencing, football, gymnastics, handball, hockey, judo, kabaddi, karate, kayaking, netball, rowing, sepaktakraw, shooting, swimming, taekwondo, volleyball, weightlifting, wrestling & wushu.

Picked up under this scheme when she was in the ninth standard, Rigzen moved to Leh’s Lamdon School for her matriculation. SAG selected her for running middle and long distance races. In the file, there was an old newspaper photograph from the district level selection race that placed her with SAG. It showed a young Rigzen racing, clad in salwar kameez and wearing normal footwear. She finished first. Rigzen said she owed a lot to SAG, in particular its director B.V.P. Rao. “ Whatever I am today is because of him,’’ she said. Years later, Rao would be one of the founders of Clean Sports India, a movement for corruption free-sports in the country. Amarnath K Menon, writing in a May 1988 issue of India Today (available on the Internet), described Rao as “ an IAS officer who stays at the Nehru Stadium and is building up a pool of sports medicine specialists, social anthropologists, ex-international sports competitors and sports promoters. The article said, “ the greatest advantage of the Special Area Games Programme (SAGP) is that it takes all round care of the trainees, including their schooling, unlike other government supported schemes. Its provisions of food, clothing and education, besides the prospects of winning a medal, are its main attraction.’’ Rigzen’s visit to Delhi happened “ one August,’’ as part of a team of 18 trainees from Ladakh. They received coaching for 15 days at the capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru stadium. It was her first taste of formal training. Following this, on return to Ladakh, she was coached regularly as part of the SAG scheme. She trained in the morning and in the evening, attending school in between. After matriculation, Rigzen completed her twelfth standard through open school. Later she graduated with a degree in physical education.

According to Rigzen, nobody pushed her towards the marathon. The shift was something she decided more or less on her own by observing how she performed. A high altitude dwelling-Ladakhi, she seemed to do well in long distance runs requiring endurance. In 1987, she ran the 10,000m race at the senior nationals, winning a silver medal. “ I felt I could do better at still longer distances,’’ she said. In 1989 she ran her first half marathon at the Rath India Open Marathon in Delhi, finishing fourth. In 1990-91 she ran her first full marathon at the same event. P.K. Mahanand, writing in the Economic Times in February 1995, said this of Rigzen’s performance, “ when she took part in the Rath Marathon in 1991, she became the first Indian woman to return a time of under three hours for an athlete on a marathon debut – she clocked 2 hours, 53 minutes.’’ From these beginnings, Rigzen Angmo went on to be among India’s top woman marathon runners, in the same league as Asha Agarwal (the first Indian woman to win an international marathon – the Hong Kong marathon), Sunita Godara and Suman Rawat. The highlights of her career would include podium finishes in international marathons at Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Kathmandu. Rigzen believes that she could have done more had it not been for the problem of talent in India restricted by the politics at the country’s sports organizations.

Rigzen Angmo after winning the 1995 Bangkok Marathon (photo: by arrangement).

In her time, India’s woman marathon runners were a force to reckon with on the Asian stage. “ If there was enough encouragement, we could have made a mark at the global level,’’ she said. But that was not to be. To start with – the discipline wasn’t any of the fast and powerful sprint events which captivate audiences, it was the marathon, that too, women’s marathon in an India awash in male chauvinism. Second, sports bodies, usually manned by politicians and the politicking types, never backed talent fully. Rigzen recalled how after being permitted to run a race overseas, the Indian sports body in question declined any kind of support. They approved her participation but how was she to fly abroad if they won’t give her an airline ticket? She wasn’t a rich person. Somebody then pointed out that a gentleman she kept passing by at a park in Delhi during her regular training runs was a Member of Parliament. She sought his help. He arranged free airline tickets. She flew overseas, participated in the event and earned a podium finish. That was merely one example. In the file, a magazine article by Ranjit Bhatia dwelt on Rigzen’s participation at the London Marathon (consequent to her impressive showing at the Rath Indian Open Marathon) not being cleared by authorities. “ Her recent selection to represent the country in the IAAF World Marathon Cup in London on April 21, came almost simultaneously as the rejection of her trip was announced,’’ he wrote.

Rigzen wasn’t the only one navigating choppy waters.

A February 1997 article in the Hindustan Times by R.M.S. Atwal on India’s woman marathon runners (Rigzen among them) mentioned Asha Agarwal’s predicament. Asha, often deemed the first lady of women’s marathon in India, had quit her job with the Railways on an assurance that she would be appointed as an Assistant Director (Sports) in the Delhi administration after three months spent in a junior position. That didn’t happen. Result – she not only stagnated career-wise but got demoted, the report said. It quoted her, “ I have got nothing on assurances from successive governments while people (other athletes) with top connections are rising and rising. I think nothing materializes without a godfather in this country.’’ In India, athletes are on their own in more ways than just the motivation to excel and the commitment to train.

This general trend of navigating a politics ridden, rat race-ambience was besides the issue of being a woman training for the marathon, in the India of those days. For Rigzen, hailing from the closely knit, mountain community of Ladakh, training at home was challenging. Driven, she maintained a rigorous training schedule. Very few in the mountains could fathom the eccentricity of it all. Why would a woman want to run 42km? Why would a woman log close to 200km a week as training in an attempt to run 42km at a race? You stood out as an odd ball pretty easily. “ The problem wasn’t so much in my village where I was known; it was more towards town. Being a woman it was difficult to practise. I used to avoid being seen practising in public, preferring instead, places where people were few,’’ she said. When away from Ladakh, the bulk of Rigzen’s training happened in Delhi, Patiala and Bengaluru (Bangalore). Athletics was better known in the cities and for the girl from the mountains, training here made more sense. “ Everything outside Ladakh was new and different for me. I looked at it as encouragement. I still miss the stadiums I trained in,’’ she said. There was one thing though about ` outside.’ People in the plains and cities therein, knew nothing about Ladakh. “ They would ask: where is Leh?’’ she said laughing. There were other valid reasons for Rigzen training outside Ladakh. The training window in Ladakh is small; no more than four months a year given the region’s reputation as cold desert. The training window is bigger in the plains. She feels Ladakh is too high an altitude to develop all that goes into the making of a competitive endurance athlete. She found mid-altitudes like Shimla, better suited for the purpose. Further, back in her days, a good, consistently available diet for the competitive athlete was more possible at training centres in the plains or well established towns in the hills, than in Leh.

Rigzen Angmo (photo: by arrangement).

As other articles in the file showed, those days it wasn’t easy anywhere in India for a woman marathon runner. In February 1995, The Pioneer published an article by Neena Gupta on India’s woman marathon runners. It quoted Sunita Godara, “ mind you, every outing, each road-run for me is a lesson in the cultural heritage of India and women’s place in it.’’ The article added that in small towns, Sunita had an escort with her while running. In Patiala, she had an army subedar accompany her. It also quoted Asha Agarwal, “ since I could not run alone, I had to be accompanied by my father or brother on a cycle.’’ This report mentioned that Asha had sought a transfer from being Welfare Inspector in the Railways to being Supervisor (Physical Education) in the Delhi Administration so that she can stay around the Delhi University campus where the atmosphere was more congenial for her practice. “ However she was reportedly demoted to the non-gazetted post of a senior sports teacher. The discrimination did not end there. The post was abolished in July 1994 and consequently, her salary stopped,’’ the article said. More than one report cited women having to prove that they are capable of marathon distances before being taken note of. As if that wasn’t enough, they witnessed their races shortened to smaller distance owing to low participation or pressured to conclude early for taking longer time than men. Such practices wouldn’t be tolerated overseas where a discipline is a discipline. Of interest for freelance journalist reading these articles in 2015 was that 15 years after they were published at least one of the officials quoted therein defending the sports federation’s side in allegations related to inadequate support for women’s marathon, became an accused in India’s Commonwealth Games scam. In such time span, athletes come and go. Officials, stay forever. That is India’s sports. “ After the SAG phase, I reached wherever I did on the strength of my personal effort. My husband Tsewang Morup supported me,’’ Rigzen said.

On September 13, barring some of the runners from Ladakh, it is unlikely anyone running the Ladakh Marathon would have recognized the small woman watching them from the side of the road. Fewer still would know the times in which she ran for India or the fact that she is the only runner from Ladakh so far to earn podium finishes at international level. Born to the mountains and focussed on her job as a Deputy Commandant, Rigzen Angmo has not been in touch with any of her contemporaries from the pioneering lot in India’s women’s marathon. She admitted that staying away from each other may also have much to do with the competitive environment in which they all originally met and raced. As the topic of running revisited her life – even if only as discussion – she said, there was a question she had often asked herself: why hasn’t Ladakh produced another Rigzen Angmo despite greater interest in sports and improved prospects for youngsters?

“ What do you think is the reason for that?’’ I asked.

“ I don’t know. There is ample talent in Ladakh. Further, these days, more young people travel out from Leh for studies than used to before. So it is not lack of exposure. Perhaps they should appreciate that good education isn’t all about studies. It includes sports too. You need to be sufficiently interested and committed to practising. You must also aim high. Only then will you reach at least half way. If you don’t aim at all, then where will you reach? To succeed in the marathon, you need perseverance, hard work and will power. Anyway the fact is – I haven’t been able to spend a lot of time with Ladakh’s young people and those among them, who like running. Only if I do that can I say anything for sure,’’ she said. Then she dropped a hint; a SAG-sort of hint, one that is known in Indian sports: “ we must go to the villages…it is in the villages that you will find good runners.’’

Rigzen said she would like to help train young runners. But she has zero appetite for politics and given her past knowledge of the politics at India’s sports bodies, she fears that engagement with sports may reopen the Pandora’s Box. “ I don’t want to go into any situation that entails politics,’’ she said. According to her, she has thought of starting a running club or something similar in Leh, after retiring from the paramilitary. “ I can’t do that alone. I will need help. I also can’t do it alongside my work, which is why it will have to be after retirement. In the meantime, it is good that Rimo Expeditions has begun work on grooming a team of competent, young Ladakhi runners,’’ she said.

(The author, Shyam G Menon, is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai. Please note: the dates of events and timings at races are as provided by the interviewee. Where photo credit says `by arrangement,’ the photo concerned has been sourced from Rigzen Angmo.)

September 25, 2015 by Shyam G Menon

BRIDGING THE GAP

Everybody likes a supported event.

A run with adequate water stations en route attracts us all.

A supported event is however different from an event that is supportive.

Photo & imaging: Shyam G Menon

While ` supported’ sails strong courtesy its natural drift to commercial format, ` supportive’ rings of relevance that is more central to what you set out to do. The idea of a supportive run acquires dimensions of aiding passage in a way that is directly related to the act you are engaged in. All the support – from gear and facilities to human encouragement – dovetails to enabling the chosen challenge comprehensively. A good mountaineering expedition exceeds being merely supported to being supportive of the quest. `Supportive’ has a touch of attempting experiment; it empathizes with the core pursuit.

From a participant’s point of view, the annual Mumbai Ultra, for instance, could be called a supportive run. Even as it is supported with water stations and snacks like regular organized events, it is additionally set up so that it supports runners seeking to experience an ultra marathon. With medical teams at hand and mandatory check-up after every loop, it provides you a relatively safe environment in which you can conduct the personal experiment of discovering how far you can push your body. And should the ego override common sense and the fool in you take over, somebody assigned the job of remaining sensible stops you. The Mumbai Ultra is thus useful hand-holder. It provides people already into running, an idea of what it means to run for a long time covering long distances. Critically, it does not subject you to stage cut-off times or prefixed ultra distance. Apart from an overall 12 hour-duration, it leaves you to explore.

One good question doing the rounds in the context of ` supportive’ is the relevance of having supported runs across distances other than the regularly heard 10km, half marathon and full marathon. The 10km is a tidy distance; the half and full marathon are known, defined entities. But from 10km to 21km is a leap; it is another leap from 21km to 42km. While purists may have it no other way, are these prefixed distances the only respectable way to graduate from short distance to long? Won’t intermediate distances be a fine way of hand holding aspiring runners in their progression of choice?

Well known ultra runner, Satish Gujaran mentioned this during a recent conversation. According to him, when he was introduced to running in South Africa and starting out as a distance runner, the context he found himself in was rich in a variety of distance races. There were plenty of organized outings offering intermediate distances bridging the gap between the better known, established distances. Further, many events in running also featured an associated event in walking. Back in Mumbai, Satish felt, such bridges were missing or at the very least, not adequately represented in the races / events / simple outings the running community has. While training for long distance runs, Mumbai’s runners have evolved private runs in which atypical, odd distances, which are suitable stepping stones to an eventual long distance in mind, are run with support. However as organized events, these odd distances – or bridge distances – rarely find fancy despite their relevance to the running community. Some events exist but they are a minority compared to the twenty ones and forty twos.

How about some bridges?

(The authors, Latha Venkatraman and Shyam G Menon, are independent journalists based in Mumbai.)

Outrigger

In Search of Interesting

Author: Shyam G Menon

THE FISH SAID IT ALL

RUNNING THE SAHARA

A FARMER’S DREAM

AN IMPRINT FOR NOVEMBER

MUMBAI-GOA ON A KAYAK

THE COMRADE

THE SMART LIFE

FORGET, REMEMBER

THE SPECTATOR

BRIDGING THE GAP