(And What | Learned From It)

APE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, (ier 22, 2008—The story I want to tell you is that of my

first ultramarathon: the Two Oceans 56K ultramarathon held in Cape Town, South Africa. Although I ran the race, as

the very first time in my life.

Arthur Ashe once said that “Success is a journey, not a destination,” and I think that the pleasure and joy I felt on that day in Africa cannot be understood unless I tell you about my early running days. After all, you should not be so preoccupied with the destination that you forget to recount the pleasures of the journey.

I am afraid I am getting ahead of myself, so let me start at the very beginning.

Two years after running his first marathon, the author cruises up Chapman’s Peak in the Two Oceans Ultra, itching to run ahead of the pacer group (seen behind him).

© Ark Images /Action Photo

I went to a school in Bombay called Rose Manor Garden School, which had that name even though there was not a single rosebush in the school, and there certainly was no garden! The physical education class involved 60 kids who were required to stand in a driveway measuring 500 square feet and were instructed to march on the spot to military band music, played on a record player. That was my early school experience with phys. ed.

When I was 17, I went off to college. Although there were plenty of opportunities to take up sports, I opted to work for my dad in his business instead.

At 22, I went to the United States. By the end of six years of education there, Thad earned an MBA and an MS in plastics engineering. Considering the volume of studying I had to do, there was absolutely no time left over for sports.

Upon returning to India in 1992, I plunged into the business of earning a living. I started my own company, got married, went back to school in the evenings, got a degree in law, and became a proud father of two kids. So, at the age of 39 I was, like most people, quite settled in life. I had a nice house, a terrific wife, and two wonderful kids, and I was reasonably prosperous.

In addition, I loved all sorts of sports—as long as I was watching them on television with a glass of beer in my hand.

The universal view of exercise—the urge will pass

As far as exercising was concermed, I had the same philosophy as articulated by Robert M. Hutchins, president and chancellor of the University of Chicago, who said, “Whenever I feel like exercise, I lie down until the feeling passes.”

Then, one September Sunday morning in 2005, I read a newspaper article about the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon due to take place in a few months time, and I thought deeply about it all morning. During lunch, I announced to the

was greeted with stunned silence, until my 5-year-old son finally asked, “So, Papa, will you win?”

Monday, September 12, 2005, found me on Juhu Beach, a four-kilometer stretch of lovely sand on the Arabian Sea, just a 10-minute walk from my home. I was ready.

Laotzu said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Mine lasted for about 200 meters. I ran for what must have been three to four minutes, and then I couldn’t run another step! I had to stop. I thought I was about to have a heart attack. I was sweating as if I were in a sauna, my feet trembled, my knees and lower back spasmed in pain, and I thought that I would die right there on the beach and my family would never find me.

As I slowly, dejectedly, made my way home, I thought of all the brave announcements that I had already made to friends and family about the upcoming

marathon, and I remembered the words of a very wise man who had once said, “Try chewing a few prawns before you announce to the world that you intend to eat an entire lobster.”

I realized that I was in trouble and that this was going to be very tough. This would require some sort of a systematic approach, and I remembered the gist of something that I had read back in business school: “To avoid being crushed by the very thought of all difficulties and hazards of the task ahead, divide your target up into a number of much smaller goals, and then think of them only one at a time.”

Over the next few days, I met up with an orthopedic surgeon and a cardiologist. My wife suggested that the only doctor I really needed to visit was a psychiatrist.

I wanted to have a stress test to determine my physical condition. I knew that the stress test would be easy, but the problem would be with the surgeon. I have always had knee and lower-back pain. He made me take X-rays of both and then asked for an MRI of the lower back. He said that my knees were reasonably fine and that I would make a good candidate for knee-replacement surgery in a few years’ time, but my lower back was of concern to him. The last two vertebrae in my back had developed microcracks, and the fluid inside was running out. If they were to dry up, I would be in serious trouble. He opined that running would aggravate these cracks.

The definition of a runner is subjective

I explained to him that I was not a lifelong runner and in fact I had actually run only once in my life, a distance of about 200 meters. I told him that Henrik Ibsen once said that “There is always a risk in being alive, and if you are more alive, there is more risk.” And now that all my body parts were disintegrating anyway, I would not mind the additional risk—if any—brought on by my running.

He advised that if I was hell-bent on running, I needed to strengthen my core muscles and increase my upper-body strength.

It has been said that when you truly want something and wish for it with all your heart, the universe conspires to make it happen. And it did. I found a fantastic physical trainer in Mrs. Kala Soni. Under her instructions, I started to exercise twice a week with light weights. I also started researching and reading everything Icould about running. I gathered information about shoes, energy gels, hydration, and dry-fit clothing. I started reading Runner’s World and Marathon & Beyond besides everything I could find on the Internet. I bought biographies and autobiographies of the great runners. I read everything I could find by Hal Higdon, Jeff Galloway, Joe Henderson, Amby Burfoot, and Don Kardong.

Idiscovered a whole new galaxy of heroes and heroines: Kathrine Switzer, Joan Benoit Samuelson, Pam Reed, Sir Roger Bannister, Abebe Bikila, Emil Zatopek, Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Dean Karnazes, Alberto Salazar, and Paula Radcliffe, just to name a few. I read about Oscar Pistorius and Sarah Reinertsen and realized that there were people (without knees) who were doing such incredible feats that Thad no reason to whine about a little knee and back pain.

I finally settled on Hal Higdon’s 18-week novice training program. I started walking and running, and predictably every muscle in my body rebelled. Over the next two months, I visited my physiotherapist so many times that I thought I must have personally financed the entire physiotherapy department of the hospital.

Training for a marathon in Mumbai has its own challenges. First, there is the weather. It gets hot and humid. Even on race day in January, the temperature at the start is usually in the 30s Celcius (mid-80s Fahrenheit), and then it begins to get hotter as the coal-tar pavement heats up. The humidity is in the 70 percent range, so I had to train very early in the morning.

Another problem is the traffic. You must finish a long run—even a 16-miler— by 7:00 a.M., or a million cars, buses, three-wheelers, scooters, cycles, and people will run you over.

A third problem comes from the street dogs. There are hundreds of stray dogs in the streets of Mumbai, and at 5:00 a.m. they have pretensions to being lions. They attack! After being “hounded” a half-dozen times by vicious dogs, I bought an ultrasonic dog-chaser whistle from the United States. It seemed to work, but I was always wary of the odd dog with hearing problems.

Ikept training and came to realize that perhaps the greatest benefit of running the marathon comes not from running the distance of 42.2 kilometers on race day but from the discipline that comes from following the training program.

In our everyday life, we encounter multiple issues at work and home, problems over which we have no control. But I realized that when I ran, I had to deal with just two issues: my heart and my mind. And as I ran more and more, I was gradually able to get more control over them. And slowly I could cope better with the challenges of everyday life.

A passion realized

Cyril Connolly has written: “We must select the illusion which appeals to our temperament and embrace it with passion if we want to be happy.” I had finally found my illusion and my passion. I knew that from now on I was a runner for life. For in those hours of solitude when I ran, I found my space.

Explaining his love for writing and literature, Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk has written: “It is a room where I can be alone with my thoughts. In such a room I can invent beautiful dreams . . . In dreams, of course, everything and everyone

is interesting, captivating, and real .. . 1 make a new world from the stuff of the known world.” Orhan had found his room in reading and writing literature; I had found mine by running.

My life became disciplined in many ways. I started to go to sleep early and wake up early, and I began to watch my diet. I love to drink wine a couple of times a week, and I still do, but now it’s just one glass instead of three or four. I love to eat a piece of chocolate after dinner; I used to eat half a slab, but now it’s just one piece.

And so I kept running and getting healthier. But as ill luck would have it, just six weeks short of the marathon date, as the mileage increased, the almost inevitable happened: I sprained my lower back.

I was unable to get out of bed. I had excruciating pain for almost a week. I underwent physical therapy, first at home and then, when I could get out of bed, at the hospital. I did not run for three weeks and missed the final three long runs planned just before tapering. My physical therapist advised that I should not run the marathon; my family advised that perhaps I should just do the half-marathon; but I decided that if I felt any pain or discomfort during the run, I would drop out. With barely any running in the six weeks before the marathon, I put on almost 3 kilograms of weight.

Finally, it was time. Race day! What can I say about race day? It’s much like your wedding day. Everybody has to be nice to you, including your in-laws.

I stood in the starting enclosure along with perhaps 1,500 other participants. To stand just a few feet away from the greatest athletes in the world! For a few precious minutes, it’s as if the eagles and the sparrows are roosting in the same nest. I remembered my favorite lines from the Bard: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” I had tears in my eyes, I was so grateful to be a part of this grand show.

The crowds in Mumbai were fantastic! The support was incredible! Hundreds of thousands of people had lined the entire course. I waved and acknowledged everybody. After about two and a half hours, I was still a few kilometers short of the halfway mark when somebody shouted out that the Africans had finished the race. So much for that gold medal I was going to bring home to my son.

After about 4:45, I was at the 32K mark and I hit “The Wall.” The temperature was by now in the 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) range, and the humidity was close to 75 percent. The heat radiating from the tar-paved road was scorching my eyes, and I felt as if my brain were on fire. My shoulders ached and my neck went stiff. I had no strength left. I felt as if I had weights tied to my legs—as if someone had sneaked up behind me, pulled my shorts out from behind, and poured cement down into my legs. I wanted to throw up but had nothing left in my stomach. I just stood there in the middle of the road, not knowing what to do.

Feeling guilt if | didn’t finish

I thought of the 18 weeks of training. I thought about my kids waiting at the finish line, and I thought that if I didn’t finish this, I would not be able to face myself in the morning. So I decided to put one leg in front of the other, one step at a time. I just started to walk. After some time, I decided to run from one electric pole to another and then walk from one pole to the next.

So on and on I went, walking and running. After six hours, the roads were opened to traffic, and so I moved onto the sidewalk. I kept going. The water stations, which were initially placed at every few kilometers, were now closing down so I had to stop and buy water. Finally, I saw the sign “One km to go,” and I started running, then with a half kilometer left to go, I was flying. I saw my kids, and I raised my hands and ran past the finish line.

By the time I reached the finish line, the clock had been stopped and the timing chip carpet had been removed. The Africans had taken their medals and reached their hotel rooms. In fact, lremember thinking that they must have already checked out of their hotel and would be on their way to the airport to take their flights home. Actually, they must have already been halfway to Africa.

The time on my stopwatch in- — dicated 6 hours and 29 minutes.

But I was delighted, and as far as I was concerned, the words of John “The Penguin” Bingham rang true: “The miracle isn’t that I finished . . . The miracle is that Thad the courage to start.”

T. S. Eliot wrote: “The end is where we start from.” And I truly believed that I was just starting. It never occurred to me that I had just finished, by all accounts, a disastrous marathon. I had no official finisher’s certificate to even prove that I had participated and

The author’s first marathon was the Mumbai Marathon in 2006, which he has run twice since, including in 2008, shown here, when a homemade cap kept the soaring heat off his head during the race.

Courtesy of Amit Sheth

completed the race. And yet I felt like Superman. Six hours and 29 minutes to finish a marathon! And yet I closed my eyes and had the audacity to visualize myself running the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon and the 100-mile Western States ultra.

On to Two Oceans

What had happened to me in those miles? I had developed an alter ego: I was a marathoner. I had gone the distance, and I wanted to go more, do more.

I doubt there has ever been a greater mismatch between desire and ability. And yet in a matter of a little over two years from that day, I stood on the starting line of the famous Two Oceans 56K ultramarathon in South Africa!

The Two Oceans is a 56K/35M ultra run against a backdrop of spectacular scenery through the Cape Peninsula. The race covers an undulating course with two major climbs toward the end: Chapman’s Peak (which gains 180 meters over 5K) and Constantia Nek (which gains 125 meters over 4K).

The race had cutoff times at the 25K, 38K, 42.2K, and 46.1K marks. This meant that the runners who did not reach those specific distances within the allotted time would not be allowed to continue. The completion cutoff was seven hours, which meant that a runner who did not finish 56K in less than seven hours would not get a medal. Another major factor at this race was that the time I would lose in reaching the start line (after being seeded at the back of the field) would not be deducted from the overall time.

Where are the hills | need?

Training in Mumbai for the Cape Town hills presented unique challenges. Mumbai is flat. There are no hills except a couple of 50-meter climbs over a one-kilometer distance. I knew that I had approximately eight weeks after the Mumbai Marathon 2008 to increase my endurance and hill-running ability.

The hills nearest Mumbai are approximately 120 kilometers away, near Lonavala. So for the next eight weeks, every Sunday, I would wake up at 2:00 a.m. and drive the distance to Lonavala. On reaching the town of Lonavala, I would start running at 4:30 a.m. with my driver following me in the car. Running a road through the forest, I would have him trail me so that I could see the road in the headlights. Once the sun came up, I would have him drive in front of me and wait for me every two kilometers. This way I would stop, pick up a water bottle from the car, and walk a bit before starting to run again. This was one way to train for walking breaks.

I knew that if I was fortunate enough to enjoy a magical day, I would finish with just a few minutes to spare. But I was also determined that I was not going

to fly halfway across the globe and come back empty handed. So, although I fully understood that the odds of finishing in time were against me, I decided that I was going to ignore them.

During the course of training, I came to realize that we create our own glass ceilings. I realized that when I trained for a 42.2-kilometer marathon, the distance held its fear for me. For three months of training, the distance of 42.2K held me in awe, yet when I raised the bar to 56K, 42.2K became just another long training run. I ran distances of 42K or more four weeks in a row. My last long run, before tapering, was 55K in 7:45. And it made me wonder whether we must always keep stretched targets in life for all our endeavors.

At Two Oceans I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and sent a text message to all my friends in India:

It is time Seize the road Run up the mountain, like a goat © Ark Images /Action Photo Seize the day, my mountain calls Take the bull by its horns

It is time

My mountain calls.

And, boy, was it time! Perhaps the best decision I made that day was to join the Runner’s World pacing team that was going for the seven-hour finish. Starting the race at the back end of the field, we had lost about two minutes in reaching the start line. I wondered how significant those two minutes would be at the end of the day. We experienced a very strong head wind, but fortunately it was not very sunny. We reached 15K in 1:43; the crowds were great, but I swear, the only thought I had on my mind was that no matter what happens, I needed to stay in step with my pacer, Clem Simpson.

After passing Constantia Nek, the author knew he would finish, having left the 7-hour pacing team behind.

We reached the halfway point (28K) in 3:15. Oftentimes I felt that I could run ahead, but I was unsure about my ability to sustain a faster pace over the hills that were to follow, so I stayed in line.

As we started up Chapman’s Peak (the first major climb), I was ready to run up the next 5K. But 100 meters into the climb, Clem started to walk and I thought, Wow, I would have never thought of walking up the hill. After all, I had trained hard to run up the hills. But again, I decided to hold back. And so on and on we went, walking some and running some.

We reached the marathon marker in 5:01 and then, again, I felt the urge to run ahead at a faster pace, but I figured that all I wanted from this race was to finish and get the blue medal. There was no way that I could finish in less than six hours to get a bronze medal, so I felt that it was an unnecessary risk to run hard and then break down later in the race. At Constantia Nek (which is the second major climb), we ran up 2K and walked up the other two. We made it to the SOK mark in 6:03. Now I knew I had it in the bag, so I thanked Clem and said I was now ready to go. I cannot really describe the feelings of euphoria and achievement that I experienced as I ran those last 6K, all the time passing runners who were either

© Ark Images/Action Photo

Happier perhaps than the race’s champion, the author finishes Two Oceans.

walking or running even slower than I was. I ran negative splits. I did 6K in 41 minutes and finished in an overall time of 6:44:51. Thank you, Clem Simpson. Thank you to all the pacers in the world.

And with that, the Two Oceans Ultramarathon became for me, for the time being, my most unforgettable ultramarathon.

And what | learned from it

Let me tell you what I learned from running Two Oceans, or perhaps what I learned in these two and a half years of running, having so far run a total of four marathons and one ultra.

Ihave learned that in running, just as in life, there are no short cuts. You get out of it what you put into it. If you have not worked hard, there is going to be no magic day.

I learned that there is no limit to what you can achieve if you put your heart, mind, and soul into it. Just about two and a half years ago, it had taken me 6 hours and 29 minutes to finish a marathon, and here I was at the finish line of an ultra.

The Seabees, of the U.S. Navy construction battalions, had a motto during the Second World War: “The difficult we can do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.” And I have come to believe that if we strive to accomplish impossible tasks, the merely difficult ones will automatically become easy to achieve. So perhaps we must always set ourselves “stretched” targets in life. At the same time, I have also come to realize that like all glory, fitness is transient and fleeting. A single injury can end all your dreams.

I have often thought whether during the race I should have reevaluated my strategy and tried to earn a bronze medal. I have come to the conclusion that unless you are an exceptionally talented athlete, it is perhaps wise to stick to your original race-day plan. I will never know if I could have finished the ultra much faster than in 6:44, but I know that I am delighted with the blue medal that hangs on my bedroom wall.

And finally, having read the biographies and autobiographies of many runners, I have become aware of the fact that I am no athlete, just a very determined, middle-aged runner who has an incredibly supportive and loving family.