Lemon’s my 5-month old baby boy. The first ever e-mail (for new parents) we received from NHS during my wife’s 1st month of pregnancy said that our baby was the size of a lemon pip. And the name stuck. Ever since that day, I’ve been thinking about what bedtime stories will I telling Lemon. I can always resort to the old classics and stories of heroes and heroines from the Indian mythology. But I also want Lemon to know that not everything that’s heroic is achieved by mythical super beings. I want to tell him of people who lived (and died) during our lifetime and achieved feats of heroic proportions. And for this, I, obviously, I turned to my other love—running.

Long distance running is a weird sport. It mocks conventional wisdom in ways that is supremely baffling. Any trainer would tell you that running 100 miles is a sure way to bring upon some sort of repetitive stress injury and suffer from week knees. Yet, ultramarathoners run 100 miles regularly. And, more routinely, they run double that distance during training. Also, it is one of those sports where women do better than the men. Ledville 100, a 100-mile ultramarathon, sees more than 90% of the women competing actually completing the race. However, less than half the men manage to do it. Ultramarathons are the topsy-turvy equivalents of running—older is faster, training more makes you stronger, there’s no tapering or peaking, it is just weird. And that is why I like it.

Below is a list I’m creating of my favorite characters/incidents from the folklores about endurance running. And I hope that someday, Lemon will find them as interesting as I do.

Emile Zátopek

The Czech’s have no history of running. That makes Zátopek’s story even more interesting. Emile Zátopek’s running style could be best described as someone suffering from a severe cardiac arrest. A sports columnist once wrote that he ran “like a man with a noose around his neck.” He did not glide effortlessly as miles passed by. Nor was he the best looking athlete: gangly, balding, and weird were the terms commonly used to describe him. Zátopek himself would later reflect that he “was not talented enough to run and smile at the same time.” But he loved running. So much so that when he was in the army, he would put in miles during the night, after a full day of army drill, in big, thick clompers of army boots. Sometimes in the freezing cold. His favorite training activity was to carry his wife on his back and run.

During the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Zátopek decided to enter in the 5k, 10k, and marathon races. The Czech track team was very small, so Emile could pick any event he wanted—he chose them all. He won the 5k and 10k gold and then decided that he would aim to win the marathon gold too. He was competing against Jim Peters, then the world-record holder. Peters decided to use Zátopek’s inexperience against him. At the 10-mile mark, Peters was under his own record time by 10 minutes. Zátopek pulled up next to Peters and asked him, “are we going too fast?” Peters replied, “no, too slow.” Zátopek confirmed once again if that was the case and then gave Peters a surprise of his own. He picked up his pace and left Peters behind. Zátopek won the marathon with a record-breaking time of 2:23:02. When he did cross the tape, it was the Jamaican sprinters who lifted Zátopek, even before his own team-mates got to him.

But the story that I find most endearing isn’t even related to running.

When the Soviet forces marched into Prague, Zátopek was given a choice: accept the Communist manifesto and become an ambassador of sports or reject it and become a cleaner at a uranium mine. Zátopek chose the latter. It was during this time that Australian athelete Ron Clarke visited Zátopek. Clarke had everything that Zátopek did not—freedom, an army of trainers shaving seconds off of his performance, and hair. But he had suffered from a string of near misses and had collapsed from altitude sickness during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico city. Zátopek entertained Clarke and played the gracious host that he was known as. When Clarke was leaving, he spotted Zátopek slipping something into his bags. Clarke thought that it must be a note for the outside world and decided to keep it to himself. Once at the airport, when he rummaged through his bags, he found Zátopek’s 1952 10k gold medal. Clarke immediately burst into tears. For Zátopek to give away his medal to the man who would be his biggest rival and replace him in the record books was an act of great compassion. But to do so at that particular moment in his life, when he was losing or had lost everything, was indescribable.

La Bruja

Ann Trason is a now retired American ultramarathoner. More like a super ultramarathoner perhaps. She used to be a community college science teacher. But she took to running as an almost cathartic outlet. She loved running and, in her own words, found it to be romantic! Go figure.

Ann used to run the 9 miles to work every weekeday. And when she realised that the day’s work left her feeling fresh again, she started running all the way back too. On weekeneds, she’d easily put in 20, 30 miles regularly.

The incident, or rather the race, I want to talk about is the 1995 Ledville 100. That particular year, the race was turning out to be a media circus with every newspaper/channel pitting the American woman against the Tarahumara runners. The Tarahumara runners that Ann was up against were Martimano Cervantes, Juan Herera, and Manuel Luna. Ann was determined to beat every racer, man or woman. So she set a blistering pace right from the outset. She was already on time to break the last years record set by another Tarahumara team. She was playing the queens gambit of the ultramarathon world—by giving everything she had and not holding back, right from go. But she was ultimately taken over by Juan Herera in the dying moments.

When asked to comment on her loss, Ann said “sometimes it takes a woman to bring the best out in a man.” Ann’s women’s record set during the 1995 Ledville race (18:06:24) has remained unbeaten.

Side note: When Juan Herrera finally passed Ann at mile 15, Ann was giving it everything. But Juan just smiled and glided past her effortlessly. His joy almost made Ann quit the race. Juan also set the first for the race: he ducked under the tape, rather than through it, because he had never seen one before.

Anders Jenius Smedsvik

He typifies the saying your’re only as old as you think you are. Yes, your body will give up when it’s time comes. But it does not have to be a slow gradual process that keeps you feeling old for a large part of your life. And, as usual, sailing stories are the best. Read more here.