And smile I did...

42.195km was never a figment of my imagination. On 19 Jan '13 I etched this traversement into my being. The trigger perhaps was when I paused in wonderment on a cold January morning two years ago when that old and frail gentleman moved briskly towards the sea link that I had exhilarated at crossing minutes ago. He had the timing chip tied with a black string around his ankle. Faded, yellowing, white baniyan and an equivalent white shorts framed the bare feet in motion. His smile was a fleeting moment wafting by...

Worli and the runners of half his distance raised raised a cheer and the moment passed into my eternity. Respect. I was a few days away from 35 years of existence. 

I've just wogged his distance and then read today of Walt Whitman...

I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

Hoping to cease not till death.

Wogging is my parlance of 'walking and sometimes jogging' ... For 6 hours and 35 minutes upon a whim. Emily Dickinson has an apt way of summarizing the experience...

PAIN has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

I smiled at the Sunday morning along the way. Glee, cheer, and encouragement beamed back from the people along the way who clapped, offered biscuits and handed out refreshments and beaming countenances. Policemen and women beamed and cheered us on. Old women and young kids ran alongside cheering while I oscillated between the start and end. I started smiling somewhere along my second half marathon. Things got so much better after that...

The Mumbai marathon route feels like a moebius band. You start and end at VT (or CST). Quite magical in between the that sun peeks up over the city on the right and the moon that simultaneously shines bright on the left over the queens necklace and the breezy Arabian sea.

The day gets on with the business of getting hotter around the halfway mark of reclamation. The African runners gazelle by preceded by a meandering BMW holding up a board proclaiming their (ridiculous) timing like a nubile clad lass between boxing rounds and my muscles decide that the owner is definitely daft and start choking on all the random lactic acid in them. 

Not good.

Worli and the sea-face brings the India elite runners and the occasional weeping women elite runner, sitting at the edges of the event hanging their head perhaps in disbelief and the prostrating grief of failure. Each kilometer seems bloody too long by now. Shivaji Park never seems to get over and the sun now has me squinting between furrowing eyebrows at the meandering route that seems to want me to go back home. And sleep. 

It is encouraging to know that I am not alone as others endeavour along side ...

It takes a certain kind of lunacy to think of running a full marathon, it's a completely different kind of fervid madness completing the darned thing. Especially if you haven't really trained for it and have never done anything red oddly   

23 Jan 2014