Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team Honored by International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame

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Rupantar has been the race director of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team since 1985, having been asked by Sri Chinmoy to serve in that capacity. As well as working on the big races the US Marathon Team organise each year - the 3100 Mile Race and the Six and 10 Day Race - he also spends a considerable amount of time archiving the Marathon Team's 40 year history on this website.

"The International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF) is proud to announce the following honorees of its Class of 2012. The honorees will be honored at the 2011 Global Open Water Swimming Conference...."

The Mission of the IMSHOF:

"To nominate and to select outstanding marathon swimmers, and to select officials and administrators who help make the sport possible throughout the world, for induction into the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame. To date over 200 individuals and organizations have been honored...

Sri Chinmoy was an Indian teacher, poet, artist and athlete who inspired many in endurance sports. His Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team organizes many events worldwide including the 26.4K International Self-Transcendence Marathon-Schwimmen.

Members of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, who have received many awards, honors and recognitions, have swum the English Channel at least 38 times.

His followers continue to organize the prestigious and highly popular International Self-Transcendence Marathon-Schwimmen that draws an international crowd and is sold-out year after year.

He founded the Sri Chinmoy Centre and wrote 1,500 books, 115,000 poems and 20,000 songs, created 200,000 paintings and gave almost 800 free peace concerts around the world where he advocated meditation, chanting mantras and prayers, performing dedicated service to God as a way to personal enlightenment.

Inspired by Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), Chinmoy was encouraged to pursue his athletic abilities.

He was a decathlon champion at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, marathons, ultra-marathons, cycling, as well as captain of the soccer and volleyball teams. During his years at the ashram he spent many hours daily in deep meditation.

He competed in endurance events up into his 60's where his knee injury forced him to switch to low impact sports including tennis and weightlifting. Chinmoy has many followers who are inspired by him to run daily for health and physical fitness.

He advocated self-transcendence by expanding one's consciousness to conquer the mind's perceived limitations. In the spirit of self transcendence, his students have completed extraordinary feats of endurance."

The above is an excerpt from the IMSHOF web site at http://www.internationalmarathonswimminghalloffame.com/index.html.

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To commemorate the 31st anniversary of their spiritual teacher's first marathon run, members of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team held a marathon and a marathon relay. On a saturday morning, March 6, with almost ideal temperatures, 17 runners started the marathon with 16 finishing. Arpan was the overall winner at 3:42. Several relay teams also joined in the marathon run.

Boys

Arpan/3:42:45, Deepra/3:49:49, Gabriel/4:08:09, Shashanka/4:09:16, Satyavrata/4:12:20, Misha/4:13:00, Medur/4:31:15, Dhanu/5:11:09

Girls

Prabhala/3:58:38, Keertivati/4:03:06, Kaneenika/4:09:37, Kanala/4:39:07, Boijayanti/4:39:38, Bipula/4:45:26, Antana/4:56:29, Palash/4:58:36

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This video commemorates Sri Chinmoy's first marathon by interspersing actual footage of both the 1979 Chico Marathon and the 2009 Marathon held in New York in honor of that event.

Sri Chinmoy often gave as much significance to the outer life as he did to the inner. As a lifelong athlete he found numerous ways to inspire his students to transcend their perceived limitations in athletics. In so doing he knew that if they set challenging goals for themselves it would also inspire them to make inner progress as well.

In the late 70s he took up the sport of distance running with intense dedication. The running boom was just taking off in America and Sri Chinmoy, at age 47, when most would think of retiring, trained himself to run the most difficult distance of all, the marathon.

On March 3 1979, he completed his first Marathon in Chico California. His time was 4:31 and just 3 weeks later he would run one again. On the 30th anniversary of that event, his students honor him by running the 26 mile distance not just in Queens, New Yorkwhere he lived, but in cities around the world.

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October 25, Slovenia: Congratulations to Natalia Lehonkova of Ukraine who set a new Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team women’s record in the marathon with a time of 2:48:30. She ran in the Lubljana Marathon (Slovenia) which was held on October 25. She placed 10th overall among the women.

For more information contact The Lubljana Marathon.

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Dignatries at Heart Garden Race Oct. 10, 2009, Queens, New York

U.S. Olympic Track champion legend Carl Lewis (9 time gold medalist) opened the inaugural annual “Sri Chinmoy Heart-Garden” 2-mile race on Saturday, October 10 with a soul-stirring call to action - that we must keep Sri Chinmoy alive, and in so doing, keep his message of peace and oneness alive for the world to share.

The race was held on Sri Chinmoy Street in Flushing Meadow-Corona Park and began at the Sri Chinmoy Heart-Garden. The international field of runners from over 50 countries first walked with the Harmony Torch held by NYC Councilman Jimmy Gennaro to the gardens where the race began . Participants included Renowned Ray Lumpp, past president of New York Athletics and Olympic Gold Medallist in Basketball, St. John’s University track and field Coach Hurt, Russian Olympian Olesya Zykina, Rich Immarato, long-time head of New York’s Broadway Ultrarunners Club as well as several world record holders in ultra-distance running.

To view The Queens Courier story on the race, please click here.

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Sri Chinmoy participates in the Inspiration Marathon
(Photo: Bhashwar Hart)

Arpan is a veteran of over 300 marathons and ultra-marathons including the world’s longest certified foot race, the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100-Mile Race. He has been a member of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team since its inception in 1977. He shares his recollections of this unique winter marathon in his article - Introduction to the The Inspiration Marathon: A Jewel of the Marathon World.

In 1980 Sri Chinmoy was personally fully immersed in long-distance running, which he had just begun in June of 1978. He had trained seriously for the rest of 1978 and into 1979 to run his first marathon on March 3, 1979 in Chico, California. Even though he had not been running for many years prior to 1978, he had a very good athletic background when he was growing up. He was a top track and field athlete in his youth, excelling in short sprints and track races, and for two years he was decathlon champion in his spiritual community. He was an excellent soccer and volleyball player as well.

But fitness can be lost quite rapidly if an athlete does not keep up the training into middle age. Sri Chinmoy decided to bring back that fitness and even go beyond the endurance and strength he had in his youth by beginning his training seriously again at the age of 46. By doing this he inspired many younger students of his to start getting into shape, whether they had previously been athletic or not.

Training for a marathon was a serious and arduous undertaking which most of the younger students of Sri Chinmoy had not attempted up to this point. Seeing how serious and enthusiastic Sri Chinmoy was in training himself inspired many of those who either had not yet run a marathon or wanted to improve their previous marathon times. In his first year of training Sri Chinmoy ran 7 marathons within 10 months. After his first marathon of 4:31:34 he ran another marathon three weeks later in 3:55:07! That's an improvement of 36 minutes in less than a month. That was not only an inspiration to all of his students, but almost miraculous for a 47-year-old spiritual Master and former sprinter.

More inspiration needed

By 1980 Sri Chinmoy felt that his students needed more inspiration to train and race seriously, especially in the cold winter months of the Northeast when one can easily lose fitness with the excuse that it is too cold out to train or race. That lethargic notion was soon to be shattered when Sri Chinmoy sprang a marathon on his students in January 1980 in the subfreezing weather of Vermont. He travelled up to Vermont from New York to give a concert and decided that everyone could draw much inspiration from running in the beautiful countryside. Many of his students had made the long trip up north and were used to bringing their running clothes on overnight trips. But little did anyone know that they would be running a full 26.2-mile marathon! Those of us who were prepared to run took the challenge and ran the marathon. Others helped with the administration of the race.

It was an incredibly energizing and inspiring experience for those who had not even dreamed of running a marathon in subfreezing weather. Sri Chinmoy was helping the runners conquer not only lethargy but also unfounded fear and apprehension of something as harmless as a little cold weather. It also inspired everyone to also train in the winter and to be in shape for marathons scheduled early in the year, before the summer months.

After that event, Sri Chinmoy instituted this race on a regular basis in the first week of February for the next three years in nearby Hampton, New Hampshire. He himself ran this cold but scenic race twice, in 1981 and 1983, when it followed the beautiful shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean in southern New Hampshire.

For a few years this iconic race was popular among serious local marathoners who wanted to qualify for the famous Boston Marathon. It was one of the last marathons available to potential qualifiers for Boston, which was a difficult race to get into at that time. The Boston Marathon, inaugurated in 1896, was the oldest annual running marathon. It became so popular by the 1970s that runners had to achieve qualifying times for their age groups to get in. Since Boston is always held in April, a serious marathoner has to train throughout the winter months to prepare properly for it. Sri Chinmoy's Inspiration Marathon was a perfect race to encourage and inspire those runners who wanted to compete in Boston, which also was not too far away from Hampton, New Hampshire.

A Jewel of a Race

For many reasons the Inspiration Marathon was truly a jewel of a race and a gift to all those serious runners who, at least during that time in the early ’80s, wanted to derive not only fitness but also inspiring motivation and joy in their marathoning pursuits, and thus in life as well. I am grateful to be one of those runners who still benefit from that experience. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sri Chinmoy for that race as well as many, many other races, short and long, that he inspired over the decades through his involvement in the running world.