MUMBAI: Around 6 am in January, the streets of Mumbai are still dark. Walking through Bandra you can’t hear any birds, not even the roosters that
many people still keep, although a call to prayer comes from a mosque. The only others in the streets are newspaper boys, municipal sweepers and a few old ladies on their way to early morning mass at Mt Carmel’s Church. Quite absent are the runners who have been a constant feature in the past few months, practising for the Mumbai Marathon.
And then you turn the corner at Lilavati Hospital, and there they are. A most unusual traffic jam for this time of the morning announces the presence of the official starting point for the half-marathon in the ground in front of Rang Sharada Hotel. Autos driven by bleary-eyed drivers wrapped in shawls against the (for Mumbai) mild morning chill disgorge runners in skimpy shorts and vests, too charged to feel chilly. Some jog up and down on the spot to warm up, while others pin on their numbers, watched by the traffic police, friends and family and slum dwellers clutching lotas who look morosely at the starting point ground where, in true Mumbai fashion, they were used to relieving themselves a few days back.
In some ways this is the best place to see the impact the marathon has had on Mumbai. Proportionately, the number of runners of the full marathon has increased from 2,500 registrations last year to 3,500 this year, and the dream run always has the most runners, with 22,000 people puffing it out this year. Yet the full marathon remains the preserve of the hard-core runners, including professionals like the Kenyans who everyone knows are going to win, and spoken of with awe, almost like they’re a superior species. And the dream run, while it gets the most people, is really just a Sunday free-for-all.
To run all 21 km of the half-marathon though requires real commitment, yet it is not beyond the reach of most people. Given average health and adequate preparation, many people can finish it, and for the past six months many have been preparing to do just that. Last year, 10,000 ran it, this year 11,000 have signed up, and at these Bandra Reclamation grounds they are ready to start, kicking off with the biggest thrill of all — being the first large group of runners to cross Mumbai’s new Bandra-Worli Sea Link. Some are super fit, but many look just healthy and all look ready to go the whole way.
At 6.45 am, just as the sky starts lightening, the gun goes off, and the runners surge out of the gate. A pack of really serious runners quickly separate themselves, and then come the rest, trying not to push and shove, some running with friends, some striking out on their own. Here, this correspondent did the more regular Mumbai thing and went to the station to take a train to the finish line outside CST station, but a friend who did the run tells me of the exhilaration of getting on the Sea Link: “At one point there’s an incline down and as you look ahead you can see the whole bridge packed with the runners. And the sun is coming up over the city and above there’s a helicopter keeping track and as it went over, all the runners waved out to it!”
Source:economictimes.indiatimes.com/
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