The cel­e­bra­tion run at the marathon on Sun­day morn­ing turned out to be the great­est fun! I reached the sta­dium around 8.30 am when the crowds were begin­ning to come in. Some of the full and half marathon folks were just cross­ing the exit line. The full marathon was won by an Indian so that’s some­thing to cheer about! Con­sid­er­ing it took us 1 hour to com­plete the cel­e­bra­tion run and this guy ran 40 some­thing kms in 2 hours some­thing min­utes. Hmm…

The cel­e­bra­tion run @ the Ban­ga­lore marathon

The crowds are the largest for the 7 km run and you land up walk­ing more than run­ning. But it was nice to see peo­ple of all shapes, sizes, ages and cos­tumes get ready for the run. I joined the Bangalorewalks.com gang, some of whom had come dressed in some really inter­est­ing cos­tumes. Two of them were fea­tured in the TOI yes­ter­day, right on the front page — mem­bers of our very cre­atively dressed gang!

As the cel­e­bra­tion run kicked off there was a lot of noise, band bajaa and may­hem and loud drums beat­ing and bal­loons every­where. One lady had a plac­ard say­ing “Youngest gramd­ma” and with her was grand child. Another had one say­ing “Why run when you can walk?” (for which we got quite a few laughs, espe­cially when we were run­ning!) We ran, jogged, walked, gasped… all along the way. I met a few famil­iar faces : Mri­nal, Bipin and Kirti from the office, blog­gers Antara and Sou­vik, pho­tog­ra­phers Rajeev and then Cyber­scor­pion some time later who also took all the pic­tures of our gang.

After the run, with the glam­ourous Ms Ree and lovely Ms Shibs

A girl called Mad­havi from IBM gave me com­pany for most of the way and Tina in her cool pink tur­ban and sign (which she faith­fully car­ried all along!) She too was on the TOI, on one of the inside pages : you can’t miss her : she’s the one wear­ing the cool pink tur­ban! And then I lost Mad­havi towards the end.

The sore mus­cles after were proof enough of the fact that I’m ter­ri­bly unfit, and it was a good thing that I was at a con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, so I didn’t have to do much than sit around the whole day get­ting some much needed rest :)

The whole gang pose for a pic­ture after the run

But Reena and I are aim­ing to do the half marathon next year (okay, I’m seri­ous, so stop laugh­ing). Any­thing is pos­si­ble, I say.

(All pics taken by friend and fel­low pho­tog­ra­pher Cyber­scor­pion)