About the author:
Tejvan organises short-distance running and cycling races for the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team in his home city of Oxford. He is also a very good cyclist, having won the National hill climb championships in 2013 and finished 3rd in the National 100 Mile Time Trials in 2014.
Day 40 of the longest race showed another surprise, as Andrea Marcato ran 66.9 miles, revealing 248.29 miles left to run before his journey is over. The surprise was that Wei-Ming Lo and Tsai Wen-Ya, the two fast runners from Taiwan, each ran 132 laps- 72.4 miles. It is very rare to see a woman run over 70+ miles so late in a multiday event- especially when the day is the 40th in a race. Wei-Ming Lo had run +70 miles the previous 11 days and had become the day leader for those individual days. Today, Wei-Ming had company, as Wen-Ya equalled Wei-Ming. She also passed another milestone, reaching 2700 miles in 39 days +16:20:20 (August 30- to October 8, 2023). The previous best was 42 days +11:00:01 by Kaneenika Janakova from Slovakia (18 June to 30 July, 2017).
Before stepping onto the start line of the Sri Chinmoy 3100 mile race with its potential 52 days cut off, Mahasatya had never run further than a 10-day race. His 20-year running journey has evolved slowly, and led him to run a few 24-hour races before tackling the Sri Chinmoy 6-day race in 2015. He seemed to enjoy it as the following year, he ran the Sri Chinmoy 10-day race. One more six day and one more ten day would follow before he felt his body was adapting to the long multi-day events, and he knew that he was ready for an attempt at the 3,100. Having said that, the step up from a 10-day and running 1035 km to an event almost five times as long, both in distance and duration, does require a slight leap of faith.
He is now 40 days into the 3100 and has reached over 2431 miles/3,913 kilometres, nearly four times as far as he has covered in a race before and maybe further than he ever imagined possible a few years ago. The 48-year-old, originally from Lublin in Poland, looks pretty much in control the whole race, feeling his way through the early days, knowing what he had to do to keep above the cut-off line. He seems to have worked out what his own “red lines” are. Although he still has work to do, with less than 700 miles to go, he can sense the end is now in sight.
(Reports by Sahishnu and Tarit)
Video Ananda-Lahari
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