Bangalore Midnight Marathon 2007

Rotary Bangalore IT Corridor and Crossover Sports are organizing Bangalore’s first midnight marathon on May 19, 2007. For more details check: http://www.coindia.com

Claims to be the first ever midnight marathon in the world. However a simple google search says otherwise (brought to notice by Charles Haynes of bangalore metblogs). I wonder how they ever came up with the “world’s first” thing.

For the true marathoner/leggers or first timers, you should get in touch with the runnersforlife guys. The article written by Arvind Krishnan is also a useful read before doing the marathon. These guys do regular practice runs in different parts of bangalore. Atleast, they did when I took part in the 2005 Bangalore Marathon. Checked their mailing list, apparantly they still do.

There is also an inter-corporate “relay” marathon contest to be held to get the corporates on-board. No harm in getting some corporate money !!

My blog entry for the 2005 bangalore international marathon:

Yippedee.. I made the finish line..

History was made, the first Bangalore International Marathon. The race began at 9.15am, flagged off by our CM, Mr. Dharam Singh. It all began with loud cheers and thumping of feet, 12000×2 of them. My friends Poon-Poon and Amshu were also doing the run with me. The 12000 leggers took some time to cross the relatively narrow gate of the Kanteerva stadium. The initial 1km on kasturba road was the easiest upto cubbonpark. The crowd on the way was crazy, it was unbelievable, there were few women running in their sarees and salwar-kameezs and more surprisingly making good time. But that went on only till the 1km mark, after that they were irritatingly blocking our way.

After that, the people still running were people like me. All these guys and gals mostly in their teens, twenties were running and sweatin hard and most of all on a sunday morning!! The marathon was being run for different causes: HIV/AIDS patients, street children, environment, old age homes, etc. Some were running for the cause, some just to see if they can make it, some just to lose weight overall it was a challenge.

An inspiring nice thing that I saw, was of a person in a wheelchair on the move. Later I met an old friend named Pushkar and his friend. Its nice when you run with company, you really don’t know the distance then. Later in the course, we were stopped by few women on a jeep with Radiocity tshirts for an interview. It turned out to be Fiona and Basanti. Hmm.. now I have a face for the voices that have been rocking the city.

At around 10.15am, (thats an hour for the course) we were back at the Kanteerva and made the finish line. It was a great feeling to finish the course. Tiring but very Satisfying.. I could do it.

Next time I will do the 42km one, wonder what I would be upto then.