An interview with Runners for Life

It’s been a crazy birthday month!

Wow! It feels as if it were just yesterday that I came back from Bangalore and wandered straight into a city which was preparing itself for the annual extravaganza that is the Durga Puja. And although I did get a break of a week from office, there was no shortage of work to be done at home, what with Diwali just around the corner.

The bigger thing, however, which has been keeping me occupied and away from the blog and books has been me joining a running group. Early mornings and rigorous runs and workouts means I’m left with very little energy at the end of the day to be able to do any justice either to my books or to my blog. Thankfully, though, I seem to have identified a pattern and maybe in the next couple of days, my mind and body would both have made the leap required to push for more productive days.

In the meanwhile, the purpose of this post: a strange and wonderful set of circumstances led me to be introduced to the good folks at Runners for Life (also the people who organise the Kaveri Trail Marathon, which I recently ran and wrote about here).

An excerpt:

We interviewed Kolkata based runner Shekhar Ruparelia who has been running since 2013 and is seeing his dream of running the full at the Mumbai Marathon in 2016 coming true. Read about his passion for running

1. Tell us a little about yourself and your reason for running.

Ans : I guess the best word to describe me in the last decade would be ‘wanderer’. I grew up in Calcutta, but after my 2 years of MBA in Ahmedabad, I’ve worked in Calcutta, Bangalore and Mumbai, before moving back home to Calcutta. I’ve been running long-distances only since the last couple of years. I took it up initially to test my discipline and resilience, but slowly it’s become more about challenging myself to improve all the time, both physically and mentally.

2. How did you decide to start running? What made you pick it up?

Ans : I did a 5km run once in an intra- college event during my MBA way back in 2006. The first Mumbai Marathon was just around the corner and I dreamt of running there some day. Nothing materialised after that, but I had always wanted to resume running. I got the chance in 2013 in Mumbai, when a friend told me about a 5km run being organised by an NGO which supports autistic children. Once the love for running got rekindled, I’ve kept it alive and now, I’ve run a 10km, 3 half marathons and a 25km event and am now preparing for my first full marathon at Mumbai. So my running life is kinda coming full circle.

Here’s the link to the full interview.