"In running there is the challenging (26.2 miles, say), there is the grueling (the Western States 100-Miler), and there is the clinically insane."
Stumbling upon an online description of the Sri Chinmoy 3,100 Mile Race I immediately stopped and checked the URL to make sure it wasn't an article from The Onion. It also forces me to reconsider just how radical I really was when I began my undergraduate efforts to pioneer Drunken Mathematics for future consideration into the Olympic Games. (not very radical at all in retrospect)
(For full article, click "Spoiler" below
Stumbling upon an online description of the Sri Chinmoy 3,100 Mile Race I immediately stopped and checked the URL to make sure it wasn't an article from The Onion. It also forces me to reconsider just how radical I really was when I began my undergraduate efforts to pioneer Drunken Mathematics for future consideration into the Olympic Games. (not very radical at all in retrospect)
(For full article, click "Spoiler" below
SPOILERS! (Click to view)
DO YOU FEEL THE SUN?
It's up there, an unforgiving explosion of yellow and orange heat, beating down upon Jamaica, Queens, like a Sonny Liston hook to the skull. Do you smell the blacktop? It's to the left on Grand Central Parkway, freshly laid and oozing what may well be the most toxic scent man has ever invented. Do you hear the construction worker's sledgehammer? The duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh that pounds its way into your ears, over and over and over and over again. Do you see the trash--the crumpled Dunkin' Donuts bags and used condoms and shards of glass--spread along your path? Do you sense the hecklers--the high school kids laughing and giggling as you trot by in your wedgie-inducing shorts and tattered running shoes? Do you understand how ludicrous this is? How incredibly, insanely, uniquely ludicrous this is?
Smarana Puntigam hears my questions. At least he acts as if he hears my questions, nodding along with the words, smiling tightly, hmming and hawing as any keen listener would. It is a brutally hot day in New York City's largest borough--easily 95 degrees, with nary a breeze for miles. Puntigam's head is coated in sweat, and his feet--later exposed during a sock change--are a crumpled orgy of alive skin, dead skin, and blood. When he points, Puntigam's hands shake. When he speaks, his voice is frail. Though he is technically running as we speak, Puntigam's knees knock and his feet shuffle like a senior citizen in XXL slippers. Back home in Vienna, Austria, the 35-year-old manages a clothing store--a seemingly benign lifestyle of ringing up items and sorting through stock. "I am a very normal person," he says with a shrug. "But sometimes we all need to break out of normalcy and try something"--he pauses, searching for the ideal word--"different."
Bingo. Different. What better adjective to explain the 10th annual Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, a 51-day run where, last summer, 15 athletes from 10 countries converged upon Queens to log an average of 60 to 70 miles per day on a .5488-mile concrete loop that encircles Thomas Edison High School?
Yes, you read that correctly. Seventy miles per day. A .5488-mile loop. Concrete. Over and over and over again. In running there is the challenging (26.2 miles, say), there is the grueling (the Western States 100-Miler), and there is the clinically insane. Here, in Jamaica, the three mix together into the world s longest foot race (and a distance that equals the trip from New York to Leverkusen). "I understand if people unfamiliar with Sri Chinmoy are confused by what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what in the world we're trying to accomplish," says Rupantar La Russo, the race director. "It's all about self-transcendence--about looking inside, determining what you're capable of and going significantly beyond that. It's about finding a peace and using that to accomplish amazing things. When others say you can't, don't believe them. You can, and this race proves it."
Hokey? Maybe. Silly? Perhaps. Bizarre? No doubt. But starting here in Queens with the Sri Chinmoy harriers and stretching throughout the continent, thousands of men and women feel the need to enter ultramarathons and run 50 miles, 100 miles, 250 miles, 3,100 miles--until there is nothing left. No feeling in your feet. No pump in your arms. No energy in your body. Total, complete drain. "Ultramarathoners are not crazy, although I'm sure many people think we are," says Sibylle Tinsel, head of the Vancouver-based Club Fat Ass, one of North America's larger ultrarunning organizations. "We're a group of people looking for more. A lot of us are type A personalities who want to go on forever and always go hard. Many others I know have been addicted to one substance or another and turn that addiction into real hard-core running. What's undeniable is that we're bonded by a single thing: the desire to go farther and farther."
According to Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, endurance running is a surprisingly normal--and comfortable--endeavor for human beings. Two years ago, Lieberman and Dennis M. Bramble, a professor at the University of Utah, coauthored a study on endurance running and the evolution of the genus Homo that deemed distance running a specifically human thing to do. "My theory is that humans started doing this 2 million years ago when we started hunting," says Lieberman. "We went from tree climbers to walkers to runners. No other animal does huge amounts of endurance exercise for the heck of it. You have to be a human to do it. So when you hear about endurance running, it's not insane. I believe it's very, very natural."
Even 3,100 miles on a sidewalk? "Well," says Lieberman, "that might border on excessive."
DESPITE THE HEAT, DESPITE THE ENVIRONS, THE RUNners in Queens do not quit. Refuse to quit. Each morning they arrive at the starting line at 6, and each evening they return to their rented apartments around midnight. The 15 competitors are an unremarkable-looking cast of characters who, for the most part, share a spiritual mission and a passion not just for running but for a guru named Sri Chinmoy, a 75-year-old man with a shiny head, excessive nasal hair, piercing brown eyes, and, according to followers, a message and lifestyle straight from the lips of God. Born a Hindu in Bangladesh in 1931, Chinmoy Kumar Chose was orphaned as a young child and entered an ashram days before his 13th birthday. After immigrating to New York in 1964, he started a meditation center in Queens, promoting the virtues of celibacy, vegetarianism, and meditation.
In keeping with the times, by the mid 1970s Chinmoy was drawing attention as a guru to stars like Carlos Santana, Roberta Flack, and Clarence Clemons. He attracted thousands of worldwide followers. "His primary motive is betterment," says La Russo, "and he has a variety of ways to reach such a goal."
First and foremost: implausible acts of athleticism. From the beginning, Chinmoy instructed all followers to run two or three miles per day in the name of physical fitness. But as he gradually discovered the joys of distance running, Chinmoy found an easy bridge to total wellness. "He believes that the more you challenge yourself, the stronger you become," says Trishul Cherns, a massage therapist, ultramarathoner, and Sri Chinmoy follower from Hamilton, Canada. "Well, what's more challenging than a long, hard run?"
In 1976, Chinmoy sponsored his first race, the Liberty Torch Bicentennial Relay, an 8,800-mile sojourn through all 50 states. Within a year, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team (SCMT) was born. Over the past 30 years, no operation in the world has been responsible for more extreme events. Sure, SCMT hosts its fair share of (ho-hum) marathons, biathlons, and triathlons. But how about the Self-Transcendence 48-hour run, where participants keep moving without stopping to sleep? Or the Sri Chinmoy Triple-Triathlon in Canberra, Australia, that asks participants to swim, run, and bike, then swim, run, and bike again, then (egad!) swim, run, and bike one more time? In 1985, the team put on the first 1,000-mile race on this continent, at which, three years later, the legendary ultrarunner Yiannis Kouros of Greece would set a world record. The distance was anted up over the following years, until 1997, when two runners completed the 3,100-miler. To complete the longest certified footrace in the world, runners must average 60.7 miles per day to finish within the 51-day limit. Each year, a few more runners join the lunacy.
It's easy to dismiss ultra-ultradistance runners as nuts. Some people think anyone who runs longer than 26.2 miles is insane. But the criticism for this team runs a little deeper: The well-regarded races are obscured by a group that several organizations, including the French National Assembly's Parliamentary Commission of Investigation on Cults and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, have labeled a cult. Followers of Sri Chinmoy are often asked to paint their houses blue, give their businesses goofy names (La Russo s print shop, for example, is called "The Manifestation Glow"), and dump their birth names for a Bengali one gifted upon them by Sri Chinmoy. While the 5'7", 144-pound Chinmoy gave up running several years ago because of knee problems, he still makes some pretty outrageous athletic claims, including to have military arm-lifted a world record 7,063 3/4 pounds. The guru also boasts that he has composed 6,000 songs, written 1,100 books, and produced many thousands of paintings.
Humans, according to Chinmoy, can accomplish whatever they set their minds to. Here in Queens, few of the 15 participants are better than four-hour marathoners or boast of Derek Jeter-esque athletic backgrounds. Pranab Vladovic is a 29-year-old Slovakian department-store buyer who never participated in athletics before running. Suprabha Beckjord, 50, the race's only woman, who was en route to finishing her 10th 3,100-miler, calls herself "a nonjock" who stumbled upon ultramarathoning via Sri Chinmoy. There are no muscular specimens with bulging forearms or anvil calves; no Frank Shorters or Mary Deckers in hiding. "To me, that's the beauty," says Beckjord, who owns a gift shop in Washington, D.C. "Anyone can do this if they set their mind to it. You don't have to be gifted with great strength or anything. You just have to believe in yourself"
ON THIS EARLY JULY MORNING IN QUEENS, the runners are clocking along in their thirty-something-straight day of running until--Beep! Beep!--a white Grand Cherokee pulls up. In the passenger seat is the one and only Sri Chinmoy, here to distribute bananas and wish the runners well. There is a hushed silence among the seven or eight followers working the race, and as the runners approach, they slow their pace and nod reverentially in the direction of the vehicle. One man, however, pays as much mind to Chinmoy as he does the high schooler in baggy jeans and San Diego Padres cap passing the other way.
Wolfgang Schwerk is not here to salute a guru or find inner zen. No, he is--simply put--the world's greatest 3,100-mile runner; a nonconformist who, despite offering zero loyalty toward Chinmoy, is treated as a bald-headed icon (and dubbed "Madhupran" for the race). In 2002, the German furniture maker shocked the world (well, parts of Queens) by completing the 3,100 miles in a record time of 42 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and three seconds. So dominant was the showing that during the race, Schwerk established 74 new world distance records, ranging from 1,400 miles to 5,000 kilometers.
Now he's back and more determined than ever. Schwerk runs because, while serving in the German army some 30 years ago, he discovered endurance to be one of his two gifts (the other is an operatic singing voice that elicits comparisons to Enrico Caruso). Five years ago he placed sixth in a run across the Australian continent. Two years later he placed third in a race from Lisbon to Moscow. At home in Solingen, he runs 18 miles each way to and from his job as a gardener, never taking a day off for heat or cold or thunder or lightning. At age 51, he has declared his fourth 3,100 marathon to be his last. He will not leave without a new record. "I've run 20,000-K in my life," he says. "You come to a point where you say enough is enough. What more do I have to prove?"
To this crowd--nothing. While the rest of America seems indifferent to (or ignorant of) a 3,100-mile run, to those involved it is everything. So to excel...well, the impact is large. During the course of the race, Schwerk will go through 15 pairs of Adidas Adistar Competitions and Controls, 10 pairs of shorts, and enough shirts and socks to supply the Thomas A. Edison High student body. He survives on a strict vegetarian diet that depends on such staples as sweet potatoes, rice, and soy products. He is sponsored by a rubber company called Lanxess, and travels with a be assistant, 67-year-old Helmut Schieke, who once ran a race from New York to California and seems to have a psychic connection with his client. When Schwerk desires, say, yogurt with buckwheat, Schieke has it ready without in a When a blister burns through his heel, Schieke has a glob of cream on his fingertip. "I know what it is to do this and do it well," says Schieke. "It takes discipline, heart, intelligence, and unbeatable desire. My friend has that."
And with remarkable determination, he also snags the record. Despite chronic stomach pain and some of the hottest weather in race history, Schwerk completes the 3,100 miles in 41 days, eight hours, 16 minutes and 29 seconds--an average of 75.1 miles per day. As he crosses the finish line, the humble, soft-school. Schwerk is greeted with loud applause and a heartwarming nod from Sri Chinmoy. A choir performs a song written in Schwerk's honor as happiness spreads from spectator to spectator. It's been a long you for the German runner; a long, arduous race that drains every ounce of energy from a person's body.
And yet, the joy and relief felt by the worlds greatest 3,100-mile runner is overwhelmed by something else: intensity. After the brief celebration, Schwerk revs up his battered legs and proceeds to log 13 more laps, the number needed to reach 5,000-K. "You can never be satisfied," Schwerk says. "Not in this world, not in this life, on in this sport. There's always another mountain to climb to reach the next level. To do something better than before.
"To..." Schwerk pauses. "... self-transcend."
DO YOU FEEL THE SUN?
It's up there, an unforgiving explosion of yellow and orange heat, beating down upon Jamaica, Queens, like a Sonny Liston hook to the skull. Do you smell the blacktop? It's to the left on Grand Central Parkway, freshly laid and oozing what may well be the most toxic scent man has ever invented. Do you hear the construction worker's sledgehammer? The duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh that pounds its way into your ears, over and over and over and over again. Do you see the trash--the crumpled Dunkin' Donuts bags and used condoms and shards of glass--spread along your path? Do you sense the hecklers--the high school kids laughing and giggling as you trot by in your wedgie-inducing shorts and tattered running shoes? Do you understand how ludicrous this is? How incredibly, insanely, uniquely ludicrous this is?
Smarana Puntigam hears my questions. At least he acts as if he hears my questions, nodding along with the words, smiling tightly, hmming and hawing as any keen listener would. It is a brutally hot day in New York City's largest borough--easily 95 degrees, with nary a breeze for miles. Puntigam's head is coated in sweat, and his feet--later exposed during a sock change--are a crumpled orgy of alive skin, dead skin, and blood. When he points, Puntigam's hands shake. When he speaks, his voice is frail. Though he is technically running as we speak, Puntigam's knees knock and his feet shuffle like a senior citizen in XXL slippers. Back home in Vienna, Austria, the 35-year-old manages a clothing store--a seemingly benign lifestyle of ringing up items and sorting through stock. "I am a very normal person," he says with a shrug. "But sometimes we all need to break out of normalcy and try something"--he pauses, searching for the ideal word--"different."
Bingo. Different. What better adjective to explain the 10th annual Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3,100 Mile Race, a 51-day run where, last summer, 15 athletes from 10 countries converged upon Queens to log an average of 60 to 70 miles per day on a .5488-mile concrete loop that encircles Thomas Edison High School?
Yes, you read that correctly. Seventy miles per day. A .5488-mile loop. Concrete. Over and over and over again. In running there is the challenging (26.2 miles, say), there is the grueling (the Western States 100-Miler), and there is the clinically insane. Here, in Jamaica, the three mix together into the world s longest foot race (and a distance that equals the trip from New York to Leverkusen). "I understand if people unfamiliar with Sri Chinmoy are confused by what we're doing, why we're doing it, and what in the world we're trying to accomplish," says Rupantar La Russo, the race director. "It's all about self-transcendence--about looking inside, determining what you're capable of and going significantly beyond that. It's about finding a peace and using that to accomplish amazing things. When others say you can't, don't believe them. You can, and this race proves it."
Hokey? Maybe. Silly? Perhaps. Bizarre? No doubt. But starting here in Queens with the Sri Chinmoy harriers and stretching throughout the continent, thousands of men and women feel the need to enter ultramarathons and run 50 miles, 100 miles, 250 miles, 3,100 miles--until there is nothing left. No feeling in your feet. No pump in your arms. No energy in your body. Total, complete drain. "Ultramarathoners are not crazy, although I'm sure many people think we are," says Sibylle Tinsel, head of the Vancouver-based Club Fat Ass, one of North America's larger ultrarunning organizations. "We're a group of people looking for more. A lot of us are type A personalities who want to go on forever and always go hard. Many others I know have been addicted to one substance or another and turn that addiction into real hard-core running. What's undeniable is that we're bonded by a single thing: the desire to go farther and farther."
According to Daniel E. Lieberman, a professor of biological anthropology at Harvard, endurance running is a surprisingly normal--and comfortable--endeavor for human beings. Two years ago, Lieberman and Dennis M. Bramble, a professor at the University of Utah, coauthored a study on endurance running and the evolution of the genus Homo that deemed distance running a specifically human thing to do. "My theory is that humans started doing this 2 million years ago when we started hunting," says Lieberman. "We went from tree climbers to walkers to runners. No other animal does huge amounts of endurance exercise for the heck of it. You have to be a human to do it. So when you hear about endurance running, it's not insane. I believe it's very, very natural."
Even 3,100 miles on a sidewalk? "Well," says Lieberman, "that might border on excessive."
DESPITE THE HEAT, DESPITE THE ENVIRONS, THE RUNners in Queens do not quit. Refuse to quit. Each morning they arrive at the starting line at 6, and each evening they return to their rented apartments around midnight. The 15 competitors are an unremarkable-looking cast of characters who, for the most part, share a spiritual mission and a passion not just for running but for a guru named Sri Chinmoy, a 75-year-old man with a shiny head, excessive nasal hair, piercing brown eyes, and, according to followers, a message and lifestyle straight from the lips of God. Born a Hindu in Bangladesh in 1931, Chinmoy Kumar Chose was orphaned as a young child and entered an ashram days before his 13th birthday. After immigrating to New York in 1964, he started a meditation center in Queens, promoting the virtues of celibacy, vegetarianism, and meditation.
In keeping with the times, by the mid 1970s Chinmoy was drawing attention as a guru to stars like Carlos Santana, Roberta Flack, and Clarence Clemons. He attracted thousands of worldwide followers. "His primary motive is betterment," says La Russo, "and he has a variety of ways to reach such a goal."
First and foremost: implausible acts of athleticism. From the beginning, Chinmoy instructed all followers to run two or three miles per day in the name of physical fitness. But as he gradually discovered the joys of distance running, Chinmoy found an easy bridge to total wellness. "He believes that the more you challenge yourself, the stronger you become," says Trishul Cherns, a massage therapist, ultramarathoner, and Sri Chinmoy follower from Hamilton, Canada. "Well, what's more challenging than a long, hard run?"
In 1976, Chinmoy sponsored his first race, the Liberty Torch Bicentennial Relay, an 8,800-mile sojourn through all 50 states. Within a year, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team (SCMT) was born. Over the past 30 years, no operation in the world has been responsible for more extreme events. Sure, SCMT hosts its fair share of (ho-hum) marathons, biathlons, and triathlons. But how about the Self-Transcendence 48-hour run, where participants keep moving without stopping to sleep? Or the Sri Chinmoy Triple-Triathlon in Canberra, Australia, that asks participants to swim, run, and bike, then swim, run, and bike again, then (egad!) swim, run, and bike one more time? In 1985, the team put on the first 1,000-mile race on this continent, at which, three years later, the legendary ultrarunner Yiannis Kouros of Greece would set a world record. The distance was anted up over the following years, until 1997, when two runners completed the 3,100-miler. To complete the longest certified footrace in the world, runners must average 60.7 miles per day to finish within the 51-day limit. Each year, a few more runners join the lunacy.
It's easy to dismiss ultra-ultradistance runners as nuts. Some people think anyone who runs longer than 26.2 miles is insane. But the criticism for this team runs a little deeper: The well-regarded races are obscured by a group that several organizations, including the French National Assembly's Parliamentary Commission of Investigation on Cults and the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, have labeled a cult. Followers of Sri Chinmoy are often asked to paint their houses blue, give their businesses goofy names (La Russo s print shop, for example, is called "The Manifestation Glow"), and dump their birth names for a Bengali one gifted upon them by Sri Chinmoy. While the 5'7", 144-pound Chinmoy gave up running several years ago because of knee problems, he still makes some pretty outrageous athletic claims, including to have military arm-lifted a world record 7,063 3/4 pounds. The guru also boasts that he has composed 6,000 songs, written 1,100 books, and produced many thousands of paintings.
Humans, according to Chinmoy, can accomplish whatever they set their minds to. Here in Queens, few of the 15 participants are better than four-hour marathoners or boast of Derek Jeter-esque athletic backgrounds. Pranab Vladovic is a 29-year-old Slovakian department-store buyer who never participated in athletics before running. Suprabha Beckjord, 50, the race's only woman, who was en route to finishing her 10th 3,100-miler, calls herself "a nonjock" who stumbled upon ultramarathoning via Sri Chinmoy. There are no muscular specimens with bulging forearms or anvil calves; no Frank Shorters or Mary Deckers in hiding. "To me, that's the beauty," says Beckjord, who owns a gift shop in Washington, D.C. "Anyone can do this if they set their mind to it. You don't have to be gifted with great strength or anything. You just have to believe in yourself"
ON THIS EARLY JULY MORNING IN QUEENS, the runners are clocking along in their thirty-something-straight day of running until--Beep! Beep!--a white Grand Cherokee pulls up. In the passenger seat is the one and only Sri Chinmoy, here to distribute bananas and wish the runners well. There is a hushed silence among the seven or eight followers working the race, and as the runners approach, they slow their pace and nod reverentially in the direction of the vehicle. One man, however, pays as much mind to Chinmoy as he does the high schooler in baggy jeans and San Diego Padres cap passing the other way.
Wolfgang Schwerk is not here to salute a guru or find inner zen. No, he is--simply put--the world's greatest 3,100-mile runner; a nonconformist who, despite offering zero loyalty toward Chinmoy, is treated as a bald-headed icon (and dubbed "Madhupran" for the race). In 2002, the German furniture maker shocked the world (well, parts of Queens) by completing the 3,100 miles in a record time of 42 days, 13 hours, 24 minutes, and three seconds. So dominant was the showing that during the race, Schwerk established 74 new world distance records, ranging from 1,400 miles to 5,000 kilometers.
Now he's back and more determined than ever. Schwerk runs because, while serving in the German army some 30 years ago, he discovered endurance to be one of his two gifts (the other is an operatic singing voice that elicits comparisons to Enrico Caruso). Five years ago he placed sixth in a run across the Australian continent. Two years later he placed third in a race from Lisbon to Moscow. At home in Solingen, he runs 18 miles each way to and from his job as a gardener, never taking a day off for heat or cold or thunder or lightning. At age 51, he has declared his fourth 3,100 marathon to be his last. He will not leave without a new record. "I've run 20,000-K in my life," he says. "You come to a point where you say enough is enough. What more do I have to prove?"
To this crowd--nothing. While the rest of America seems indifferent to (or ignorant of) a 3,100-mile run, to those involved it is everything. So to excel...well, the impact is large. During the course of the race, Schwerk will go through 15 pairs of Adidas Adistar Competitions and Controls, 10 pairs of shorts, and enough shirts and socks to supply the Thomas A. Edison High student body. He survives on a strict vegetarian diet that depends on such staples as sweet potatoes, rice, and soy products. He is sponsored by a rubber company called Lanxess, and travels with a be assistant, 67-year-old Helmut Schieke, who once ran a race from New York to California and seems to have a psychic connection with his client. When Schwerk desires, say, yogurt with buckwheat, Schieke has it ready without in a When a blister burns through his heel, Schieke has a glob of cream on his fingertip. "I know what it is to do this and do it well," says Schieke. "It takes discipline, heart, intelligence, and unbeatable desire. My friend has that."
And with remarkable determination, he also snags the record. Despite chronic stomach pain and some of the hottest weather in race history, Schwerk completes the 3,100 miles in 41 days, eight hours, 16 minutes and 29 seconds--an average of 75.1 miles per day. As he crosses the finish line, the humble, soft-school. Schwerk is greeted with loud applause and a heartwarming nod from Sri Chinmoy. A choir performs a song written in Schwerk's honor as happiness spreads from spectator to spectator. It's been a long you for the German runner; a long, arduous race that drains every ounce of energy from a person's body.
And yet, the joy and relief felt by the worlds greatest 3,100-mile runner is overwhelmed by something else: intensity. After the brief celebration, Schwerk revs up his battered legs and proceeds to log 13 more laps, the number needed to reach 5,000-K. "You can never be satisfied," Schwerk says. "Not in this world, not in this life, on in this sport. There's always another mountain to climb to reach the next level. To do something better than before.
"To..." Schwerk pauses. "... self-transcend."
For the short version:
1,300 miles, and a half-mile concrete track circling High School somewhere in Queens
2. Thanks for enjoying my writing... just speaking from my heart
3. 3100 miles sounds awesome. I just find it odd that it takes place on a 1/2 mile concrete track... blah! I would much prefer it if it were on miles of trails across the country. If that were the case I would sign up