The Future of the Marathon
A talk by Sri Chinmoy
(Just two days earlier he finished the Orange Bowl Marathon in Miami, Florida)
Often people say they will never run a marathon again. During or after the race they say that this is their last marathon. Then after four days they start thinking about their next marathon.
In ten or twenty years, people will regard the marathon the way we regard a ten-mile race today. People will consider forty miles or seventy miles or a hundred miles as long distance. Long distances will be as popular as the marathon is today. People will pay more attention to fifty-milers and hundred-milers.
Now people are doing so well in the marathon. In four or five years the best runners will run the marathon in under two hours. In twenty or thirty years people will run at a five-minute pace for fifty or a hundred miles. The children of people who are running the marathon now will run at the present marathon pace for thirty or forty miles, and then even farther. They will have such stamina. Sports are like that. Roger Bannister’s four-minute-mile record lasted for years. Then the hundred-metre record stayed for years. Jesse Owens’ long-jump record stayed for twenty years before it was broken by Bob Beamon. But ultimately all records are broken.
Published in Run and Become, Become and Run, part 13
Sri Chinmoy does repetitions with a 50-lb dumbbell in Bandung, Indonesia, as weightlifting assistant Unmilan Howard looks on with an eye to safety.
Earlier in the morning, Sri Chinmoy offers two payers before lifting:
At 4:51 a.m., he lifts 400 lbs. two hundred and eight times with one arm. (108 right, 100 left in five sets).
My Supreme, my Supreme, my Supreme,
May I worship You sleeplessly
And breathlessly
In my love-devotion-surrender-delight-
Temple-heart.
My Supreme, my Supreme, my Supreme!
At 5:05 a.m., using the double-arm machine, he lifts up to 160 lbs. with each arm simultaneously from a standing position.
My Supreme, my Supreme, my Supreme,
Today I am determined
To smash asunder
My mind’s long and strong
Desire-train-chain.
My Supreme, my Supreme, my Supreme!
Published in My Morning Soul-Body Prayers, part 2