BackRunning is moving meditation, says Spoorthi Muruvanda
The Bengaluru-based ultra runner on how she started running, her latest ultra marathon from Bengaluru to Chennai and more
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Bengaluru: A train takes five hours to cover the 300-odd kilometre between Chennai and Bengaluru; If you were driving it would be around six; and if you took a flight, around forty minutes.
So, how long does it take someone to run?
“Six days," says Bengaluru-based ultra runner Spoorthi Seethamma Muruvanda, who began running on 29 May and reached Chennai on 3 June.
This is the third such ultra for the 29-year-old runner who started running 2 years ago. “I was overweight at 71 kilos. So I started running on the treadmill at my office gym," says Muruvanda, who works at EMC Corp.
In a year and a half, she was close to twenty kilos lighter, and hooked to running, “I started running because of a weight issue," she laughs, adding that she hated it as a child, “Then I did the TCS 10 k run and I fell in love with it. Even after I lost weight, I continued because I was addicted to the high of it."
In October 2015, she completed her first full marathon—42km of grit and sweat in 4 hours 43 min, “I don’t know how it happened," says Muruvanda, who has trained herself, using information culled from the internet.
Her first ultra was part of a Pinkathon (a multi-city run for women to spread awareness about breast cancer) promotion campaign when she, along with a few men including former model and Pinkathon Founder Milind Soman, ran the 160km distance between Bangalore and Mysore in two days.
This was followed by a 11-day-run between Bangalore and Hyderabad, to kick off the Hyderabad chapter of Pinkathon. And most recently, the Chennai-Bangalore one.
She runs almost 60km a day, when she embarks on an Ultra, she says, “We start running at around 4 and end run by 5.30 in the evening with breaks for food and water. There is a support car that follows us with supplies," she adds.
Running long distances is not easy—lack of bathrooms, locals who stare at you, swollen limbs, chafing thighs and the oppressive heat are part of the game but Muruvanda is oblivious to most of it. “I’m at a point where I don’t care. The first 10km are the hardest; once you get past that, you slip into a trance. It is almost a moving meditation."
“We have ambassadors, like Spoorthi, in every city to spread the cause and inspire people. People, often say they cannot run even 2km. But the human body is capable of so much: if people can run 60km a day for several days anyone can run. The whole thing is to inspire by example." says Soman.
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