Pune Chapter — Loop 24

Seven o’clock, and twenty-four hours are done. The morning came in gently: a smooth breeze, the haze lifting off the hills, the kind of weather a runner spends a whole night hoping for. Bibs 7 and 10 came home together at 53:28, 6 minutes 32 seconds to spare. Twenty-four yards, 160.9 km.

Then Jagan (Soma Jagan Mohan Reddy) said he was not going out again. Half joking, he said he had only packed socks for twenty-four hours, and the twenty-four hours were done. He wasn’t enjoying it anymore. He and Umesh had come here to train for next year’s Satellite Team Championship, and they wanted to save their bodies for it. No cut-off caught him. The weather could not have been kinder. He simply chose to stop.

Umesh Kumar Shukla tried to talk him round. When that didn’t work he asked for less: just walk the loop beside me, so I can push it further. Nobody here was challenging anybody. Two people were only trying, purely, to find out where the limits go. It is one of the loveliest things this race has shown us.

That is the strange, exact nature of a last-one-standing race. There is no distance printed on it and no finish arch waiting at a known kilometre; it runs on a single question, asked once an hour, and the answer is never the same twice. About this time yesterday there were forty-three people at a start line. Nobody could have said how it would end, or when, or who would decide it. It is not settled by the weather or by the course. It is settled by a person who, a few minutes earlier, was planning something else: another hour, another yard, another sunrise. Then one sentence, and the curtain falls. That is why there is no race quite like it.

The man about to have a win written against his name is not ready to accept it, because he knows the real win is not the result. It is the limit pushed past. Umesh, in his own words: “वैसे तो मैं प्रयागराज से हूं, बट मैं रहता हूं बदलापुर में, और अब शुक्ला जी आ गए हैं बैकयार्ड में, तो देखते हैं हिंदुस्तान कहां जाता है.” (I’m originally from Prayagraj, but I live in Badlapur, and now Shukla-ji has arrived at the backyard, so let’s see how far Hindustan goes.)

He is out on loop 25 now, alone. In this format, that last loop is the only one that cannot be shared.