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Profile
Hi,
I'm Ranitendranath Tagore (aka Rani, Ranit, Ronnie, Roni, etc.), a volunteer with the Yale Chapter of Asha for Education (AfE) for about 3 years now. I'm going to run the Hartford marathon on October 8th to raise awareness and funds for AfE. In these few years with AfE, I have come to learn, if only a little, about the hurdles faced by millions and millions of children in their pursuit of things that the more fortunate amongst us take for granted (for example, basic education - the aspect that AfE is most directly involved with). Moreover, I learnt about how these children have the will and the talent to overcome these hurdles in the quest of a broader horizon. And last but not least, I learnt about the dedication and compassion of men and women who made the cause of these children their own, and worked tirelessly for them. Thus, the difficulty of running a marathon seemed utterly small in this context, even for a non-athlete like me.
Now, of course, it helps that the one athletic activity in which humans compare well with the best in the rest of the animal world is long distance running (I found this to my pleasant surprise in the November 18 th , 2004 issue of Nature magazine). It also helps that many other AfE volunteers, many of them starting out as non-runners like myself, have shown the way to marathon running. So I started to run for short distances, first on the treadmill, and then on the road in the end of 2003, with the aim of running a marathon in 2004. However, my legs were not too happy with this sudden change in lifestyle, and started complaining; sometimes it would be the knee, sometimes the hamstrings, and sometimes some other part which I did not know existed! As a result, I had to drop the idea of a 2004 marathon.
But no effort is wasted, as they say, and sure enough, my initial stint with running seems to have prepared me for embarking on the first-time runner's marathon training program. I plan to run the Hartford marathon on October 8th this year, and my longest run so far has been 8 miles (in 59 minutes and 55 seconds). This is less than a third of the marathon distance (26.2 miles), but when I think of the time I started off by running 2 miles on the treadmill in 2003, I feel hopeful, because 8 miles would have been quite beyond imagination at that time, given the huffing and puffing I was doing by the end of those 2 miles. Yet, here I am, still in one piece after running 4 miles from New Haven into Hamden , and back again. And I managed to enjoy the blue skies, and the water-supply lake, and the semi-woods by it's banks. See, that's one (of the) good thing(s) I like about running; it let's me be under the sky, as opposed to being under a roof. I never run on the treadmill anymore. Yesterday (18th September) i crested the training hill, running 20 miles in 2 hours 44 minutes. From here the training tapers down till the marathon.
So there it is. That's my running story so far. I will update the story as it progresses. And please donate generously to support the cause I'm running for. My goal is to raise $2620, or $100 per mile. You can find information on the wonderful projects that the Yale chapter of AfE supports at www.ashanet.org/yale , and information on AfE at www.ashanet.org .
But to summarize the basic points (an adaptation of the 5- minute 'power-talk' that is often given to new volunteers at our chapter): AfE is an all-volunteer, flat-structured (no heirarchy whithin the organization), apolitical, secular, zero-overhead (every dollar donated for projects goes directly to the projects on the ground) action group dedicated to promoting socio-economic change, primarily through the basic education of underpriviledged children in India.
Thank you!
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