Sri Chinmoy Races Blog @ allaboutrunning.net

No teacher of Eastern wisdom has done as much to challenge the stereotype of 'yogi sitting motionless in a cave' than Sri Chinmoy. Over the past forty years, he has been a tireless proponent (and exponent) of the idea that Eastern poise and Western dynamism can and must go together. In particular he has always percieved sports - and in particular running - as a medium that can combine the best of both worlds to tremendous effect.

Many traditional teachers neglected the state of the body, believing that it was of only transitory use compared to the soul. But in today's fast-paced world, a fit and active body can help us considerably in overcoming the lethargy that hinders us so often in pursuit of our life goals. As Sri Chinmoy puts it:

"We have to pay some attention to sports and exercise. Otherwise, we shall be weak and sick all the time. That does not mean that we must be the world’s fastest runners or best athletes. But we must keep the body fit, according to the necessity of our inner development. The body needs proper training so that it will be fit to receive the message of the soul. If the body is strong and healthy, it can receive the message of the soul unreservedly, and we can become a perfect receptacle, a perfect instrument. At that time the soul’s aspiration and the body’s aspiration go together."

Running is also a perfect exemplar of another facet of Sri Chinmoy's philosophy: self-transcendence. Each one of us has an inner yearning to better ourselves and expand our capacities, a yearning many of us push to the back of our priorities as the mountain of daily responsibilities grows. However, sport offers us the chance to go deep within and bring out our finest qualities to overcome the challenge we set ourselves. In particular, long-distance running is noted for the horizon-expanding effect it has on those who participate. Sri Chinmoy advises that we can gain the most inner benefit from our running if our sense of competition is directed not against others but against our own present standard that we are seeking to overcome.

Competition is good,
Provided it is the competition
Of self-transcendence
And not the competition
Of ego-demonstration.
- Sri Chinmoy

Related Links

- About Sri Chinmoy
- Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team

One of the most common kinds of injury is due to a tightening of the iliotibial band (ITB), a ligament which runs all the way from the hips to the feet. When it tightens and contracts due to exercise, the places that tends to feel it is around the outside of the knee. Here are a couple of stretches you can do to loosen up the ITB before and after racing:

Floor stretches

These can be used after a run or in between runs. If doing after a run, it is probably a good idea to start with the lighter standing stretches immediately after the race, and do these floor stretches after 15 minutes or so. Both these stretches affect the right hip area; to . If doing in between runs, make sure to do some warm-up exercise first so the muscles aren't pulled from a state of total inactivity.

Stretch 1:
Lie flat on your back. Bring your right foot over your left leg and place it beside the left knee. Now, with your left hand, pull your right knee . you should feel a stretch in the hip area: this is one of the main areas where the ITB tightens. Gradually pull the right knee until you feel a slight discomfort; then release your knee, place your hand the other side of the knee and push your knee against your hand with twenty percent of your strength. This engages the complementary muscles to the ones you are trying to stretch and makes it easier to push the stretch further. Then do the stretch again, this time pulling your right knee over much further. Go as far into the stretch as you feel comfortable.

Stretch 2:
Again, lie flat on your back, this time with your left knee bent. Place your right ankle on top of your left knee. Grab your right knee with your left hand, and your right ankle with left hand, and pull in a direction 90 degrees to the line if your right leg. Similarly to stretch one, pull until you feel a stretch in the hip area, then place your hands the other side of the leg and push with twenty percent of your strength. Then do the stretch again as far as you can go.

Standing stretches

Stretch 1
This stretch affects the very side of the hip, right at the beginning of the ITB. Stand about a foot away from a post or park bench, holding on to it with your right hand and facing 90 degrees to it. Put your left foot over your right foot Now allow your left knee to bend, and your left leg to slide away from the post, so that your body forms a curve away from the post.

Stretch 2
This stretch can be felt all along the ITB, but particularly below the knee area, and can be done freestanding. Place the left leg over the right leg, place both hands over each other on the left hip, and bend over at a 45-degree angle. I was told some Kenyan runner was a big fan of this one, I forget who :)

Stretches before running

Before running, your stretches should have a dynamic aspect to them. One good way to stretch the ITB is to stand holding a post or park bench in front of you. Then gently swing one of your legs from right to left like a pendulum. (I saw this one used by someone who does ballet :) ) Repeat with the other leg.

When you begin running, the temptation is to look at long distance and marathon runners and immediately want to jump to their level. We think the challenge will be for our cardiovascular system to take the strain of a sudden increase in mileage, but it is actually the muscles and tendons that will give way first! Put simply, one's body needs to gradually 'learn' how to handle long distances.

So what kind of learning curve are we talking about? Running experts may disagree on different approaches, but as a starting rule there appears to be near-unanimous consensus: each week, the mileage should increase by around 10%, and this should not happen with a concurrent increase in speed. Either the distance or the pace increases, but not both. When training for a race, there are a number of different opinions on when in your training you should aim for speed increase and when to aim for distance increase, a debate allaboutrunning.net hopes to cover shortly.

10% is a good ballpark figure to keep in mind: the actual level, however, will vary slightly from this on what your current weekly mileage is. It is easier (and safer) to increase a 10 mile-per-week schedule to 11 than it would be to increase a 90-mile a week to 99! So you can create a sliding scale of sorts, from 15% at 10 miles per week all the way down to 5% at 100 miles per week.

When increasing your mileage, it is probably best to apply this increase to some of your runs whilst keeping the other 'recovery' runs at the same distance. Many runners have one 'long run' a week which is considerably longer than their other runs and which they view as the focus of their mileage increase; this run invariably gets increased every week by force of habit, but it is no harm every few weeks keeping that run at the same length and putting the mileage increase on the shorter runs.

Also, there should not be a steady linear increase in mileage every week. Some experts recommend increasing the mileage one week, and then running the same mileage for the next couple of weeks to let the body adjust. Others advocate having a 'recovery' week every 3-4 weeks where you perhaps run 2/3 of your current distance on your long run; next week you can then pick up with the mileage increase where you left off. The first approach probably works better for those who are just seeking to work their way up to some base mileage, the second would probably suit someone who has that base mileage under their belt and is training with a race in mind.

Of course, keeping yourself to a percentage weekly increase is no guarantee of injury prevention. Whilst running, listen to your body; through experience you will come to distinguish transient aches and discomforts from pains that suggest something might be badly wrong. In fact, the 10% rule (and all rules like it) are only guidelines that are there to help you until such time as you can successfully implement the golden rule of listening to your body through experience.

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For a special few runners (mainly the good ones), running automatically comes first and foremost . For the rest of is, there's this thing called life which sometimes gets in the way. First one thing happens and then another, and before we know it, it has been a few days or a week since we were last out running. This is nothing to worry about off-season, but it can be enough to disrupt a carefully prepared training schedule if you are in the middle of preparing for an upcoming race.

The first thing to bear in mind is that getting annoyed with yourself doesn't help; if anything, you are just using time which should be better spent on a sincere reexamination of your goals and schedule. This annoyance can also lead to you trying to overcompensate the next time you do pull on your runners , and increasing the risk of injury. Sit down and ask yourself: can I still finish this event in the time I was training for? Set aside half an hour, grab a pen and paper and try to adjust your schedule to attain those goals. Then sincerely ask yourself: is this schedule too much for the body to take? It varies from person to person, but for runners who are just beginning should generally not aim to increase speed or distance by more than 10% from week to week, and they shouldn't do a run which increases both at the same time. The more experienced you get, the more your body 'learns' to cope with long runs, plus you get a better sense of how well your body is able to cope. If you don't have a good feeling about being able to meet your revised schedule, don't be afraid to lower your goal a little bit. As the old saying goes: half the race is about getting to the starting line.

Sometimes training lapses can be as much due to mental factors as external events; very often it is a combination of both. Are you experiencing mental burnout from doing the same thing over and over again every week? Try and add an element of newness and freshness to your training. See if you can insert some races into that schedule - it's impossible to get bored during a race! Vary your weekly schedules between intervals, long runs and tempo runes. Don't run on the same course over and over again - use your running as a chance to explore!

There is another kind of mental obstacle; sometimes after one has missed out on running for one reason or another, it is very easy to listen to the voice of lethargy inside you giving all kinds of reasons not to run. I learnt a nice visualisation exercise from my meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy to get rid of such feelings; it is used for getting rid of any kind of negativity, but it can definitely be used in this case. Just take five minutes, and try and see where these negative voices are located. You will find they are coming from the mind, but also in the emotional part of us which is located around the navel area, the home of such emotions as fear and aggression. From both these places, try and pull the negative feelings towards the heart centre, that place in the middle of your chest where you can feel the core of your being. You can do this as you are breathing in; as you are breathing out, imagine a hole at the crown of your head and push all these feelings out through that hole out of your body. I find this exercise very helpful for realising that these negative feelings aren't really me, and shouldn't be allowed to guide my life choices. If you find the cloud has lifted, pencil in a run as soon as you can; that very day if possible. Don't worry if you don't have time to run as long as you are normally accustomed to - for today, it's getting out there and breaking the 'duck' that counts.

There are many pitfalls one can fall into when one is recovering from an injury, which act to increase the tilme it takes to recover. The adage 'runners always seem to learn the hard way' is often used to describe how runners get injuries in the first place, but it can be equally well applied to how we cope with injuries too.

What affects people most with an injury is ultimately the change in routine. This particularly affects younger runners and those for whom running occupies a substantial part of their life. There can be a real 'itch' to just get back out there, which can lead to you trying to come back too early even when deep inside you know it's just a bit too soon. This 'itch' can take place on quite a few levels - from the physical feeling you get in your muscles from a few days without exercise, right down to missing that feeling of fulfillment that comes from having a good run.

That's why it's important to get an alternative routine in place as quickly as possible. Mental attitude helps here: sure, there might be nothing as satisfying as pulling on your runners and getting outside for a run, but try to be upbeat about the alternatives. Depending on your injury, the elliptic trainer at the gym might be a way for you to keep training in a way that at least remotely resembles running. Swimming is always a safe bet for those with injuries; it's an all over workout and the immersion in water won't do the body any harm. (Those with knee injuries might be advised to choose frontcrawl over breaststroke though; the kicking action of breaststroke can aggravate the injury). Or you can always try cycling if you have a bike, again depending on the type of injury you have. Of course, having to go to all the way to the pool or the gym (and pay into the bargain) might put you off, and you might complain that cycling doesn't push you as much as you wan't to be pushed. Perhaps in that case, you can design a circuit workout that can be done in your own home, putting together push-ups, sit-ups and all kinds of cardiovascular exercises. With circuits you can push yourself as hard or as slow as you like.

There can be an even greater test of self-discipline when instead of rigorous exercise, you have to go through the monotony of the strengthening exercises recommended by your physiotherapist. Again, set a definite time in the day to do these: in the morning before breakfast is ideal as the likelihood of external events distracting you from doing them is less. Try and see is there any way of incorporating them into your alternative exercise routine, perhaps you can do them as part of the warm-down process. Get a firm estimation from your physiotherapist for how long you will have to do these exercises - it is much easier to fix your mind on a finite time limit.

The main thing however is to stay happy. Try to see the silver lining in the cloud - it may be harder to keep up an exercise program during injury, but the extra mental discipline and fortitude you need during this time is a kind of training in itself, and believe me, it will stand you in good stead when you do get back running.

When starting back, remember that no distance is too small. There's nothing worse than coming back after a long absence only for the injury to go again; I learned the hard way that even two miles can sometimes be too much. Try to find a course that is mostly grass for your first few runs. You can even start with a combination of light running and walking, using the walking part to gauge the impact on the affected area.

The marathon has become one of those things which many of us dream of accomplishing at least once in our lifetime. In the marathon, the highs, the lows, the adversity, the despair, the euphoria come one after another - it really is like living an entire lifetime in the space of a few hours! Here are a few tips on making the marathon a more enjoyable experience:

Rein yourself in at the start. The most common marathon mistake is to run out too fast. If you have trained well and tapered well, your body will be naturally full of energy and raring to go, and it can be very tempting to cover the first few miles in faster than the planned race distance. Some experienced runners recommend actually starting slightly slower than race pace and gradually building up to race pace over three or four miles; this has the advantage in that altering race pace over the distance spreads the strain over disfferent leg muscles. Other runners prefer to just start at race pace because they feel that if they start slow they will 'settle' into that pace. Either way the main thing is not to go out faster; however, if you do notice that for the first mile you have gone out too fast (this happens absolutely everyone at one time or another), not to worry, just adjust your pace for the next mile.

During the first half of the marathon, stay in the present moment, and enjoy yourself. Many times during a long race we can ruin the experience we are having now by thinking of how hard it will be near the end of the race. Why let tomorrow ruin today's joy, as my meditation teacher and athletics coach Sri Chinmoy always says, and I find this nugget of wisdom coming to mind every time my mind starts thinking with trepidation about what it will be like during the twenty-mile mark. You've trained properly for the marathon (please tell me you have :) ), and at least during the first half of it you shouldn't have too many major problems, so you should spend that time enjoying the experience, the crowds, and the shared experience of with all your fellow runners, people from all walks of life all aiming to overcome the same challenge - you don't get to run a marathon every day!

When that twenty-mile mark does hit and physically you feel the worse for wear, you can try a couple of things. Try and focus on what is going on around you; if you are running through somewhere scenic try and connect with nature instead of with your flagging body. You can even look up at the sky and try to connect with the peace, vastness and infinity it embodies; this can definitely help your own sufferings feel rather small in comparison. Alternatively, instead of looking outside yourself, you can go deep within and focus on the heart centre - that place in the middle of your chest where you can feel the core of your existence. Try and feel that you are not the body or the mind; you are only the heart and you are running from the heart.

This may sound funny, but one thing that has really helped me over tough times during marathons is actually feeling grateful. Many people live their entire lives in a comfort zone, never pushing their boundaries or finding out what they are truly capable of. In every marathon, you come across a challenge which you have to go beyond, and you really do become a bigger and better person as a result. Try and evoke a feeling of gratitude form the heart - this will in turn make you focus less of the hardships and more on the unique experience of running. In fact you may feel part of you doesn't want the race to end!

Behind every good race, there is a band of unsung heroes quietly working away behind the scenes to put everyhting together. In most cases this is done on a completely voluntary basis. What makes people come out in wind and rain, hail and snow to give their time in this way? For those of you who have run a big race like a city marathon, you have no doubt felt this tremendous sense of community and oneness, of being all in it together. This applies just as much to those who volunteer as those who. We all know that how running races helps expand your capacities and personal qualities by pushing them to the limit; similarly volunteering to put a race together and take it apart (often in an extremely limited time frame) can really provide an amazing challenge that will will leave you a bigger person after the race than before it.

There are many ways you can help volunteer, and we list just a few of the ways below:

Race setup and takedown.

For the major city marathons and races of similar size, this job is usually contracted out to a professional outfit, but smaller races still rely on the doodwill of dedicated helpers. In particularly, races over marathon distance tend to attract fewer and better trained athletes than the marathon itself, and need bigger setup operations to accommodate athletes over a longer time. Race setup tends to confront you with all sorts of challenges you never expected would happen on the day, and just as runners say no two races are ever the same, setup volunteers would say no two race setups are ever the same! The night before you could find yourself trying to empty huge puddles that have appeared on the track after a torrential downpour, or improvising some way to keep a race tent stable against the wind.

Race setup can really push your ingenuity and patience to the limit: no matter how tedious or frustrating the task you are doing, try and tie it in to how important doing this job will be for the runners and how much it will help them. If you are a runner or a former runner yourself, you will already know the trials runners go through in the course of a race and how much they appreciate any effort to help them.

Helping during the race

However big and professional a race gets, there are very few of them that would survive without voluntary help in some shape or form. For the most part, this will consist of stewarding the runners around the race course. Usually there are groups of stewards manning a particular place in a race and it is very unlikely you will find yourself on your own. If you have nothing in particular to do at any given time, you can always cheer the runners around the course. There is of course a mental barrier to cheering on one total stranger after another, but if you can sincerely offer goodwill from your heart as you are cheering them on, you will find after a while that you are definitely contributing something to make the runners lives better. Don't get too discouraged if some runners ont respond or smile;

Many distance races - especially those longer than the marathon - are held around a small loop. In that case, people to count the number of laps a runner has done are required, and indeed the size of the race field can be curtailed in some cases by the nmber of available race counters. Counters are usually assigned two to three runners apiece - any more and the possibility of writing down one runners time on another runner's sheet begins to increase exponentially. When counting, one is only noting times a small fraction of the time, which leaves open the temptation to fill the rest of the time with chatting and having fun with your fellow counters. Have fun by all means, but make sure you stay focused on the job and dont miss any of your runners going by!

Race entertainment

For large courses such as city marathons - providing some race entertainment is a perfect way to contribute to the race without any prior organisation. Just pick a spot on the route and start performing. Dynamic music performances such as samba or drumming are always welcome, and really add to the carnival atmosphere. You could try other things like juggling or acrobatics - anything that gives the runners joy even for 30 seconds is certainly appreciated by them! You can turn it into your own personal marathon attempt, as you try and keep up your performance for a certain number of hours.

And finally...

This is by no means an exhaustive list; the bigger the race, the wider the variety of skills needed. Medical people are of course much in demand, as are people for post race massage. If youve never done massage before you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly from those around you. Perhaps you can contribute in an admin capacity by registering phone entries or designing a website. You just have to find your own way of slotting into the team, that's all. Good luck!

Here are some of the links that have given us great inspiration in our running over the years - and we hope they give you inspiration too!

Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team Homepage

Our official site - with race listings and reports from all over the world.

World Harmony Run

A global relay event, in which teams of runners traverse over 100 countries linking communities in a spirit of friendship and understanding.

World Run site

World Run 2 site

In 2005, Jesper Olsen became the first person to achieve a fully documented run around the world. You can read about his journey here, including. Now with Irish runner Tony Mangan, he is attempting to do the same in 2008, this time from north to south! This website is a work in progress.

Multidays.com

The authoritative resource on multiday running. Be sure to check out the 'Journey Runners' section, which lists many inspiring running and walking feats.

At some stage we've all made grand resolutions and failed to stick to them, and running is no exception. Training for a race is a long-term commitment that requires a gradual increase of effort over time.

• Make sure your training plan is realistic to start with. Be sincere with yourself: sit down and write down your other commitments and come to an idea of how much time you're prepared to spend training, and then decide on what kind of goal you're aiming for in that race you have your eye on. Most people do it the other way around, setting the goal and then commanding their body to adjust whether it's ready or not. It's no harm to visualise some time to inspire you, but just be honest with yourself when you do it.
• Write out a weekly running plan, which gradually increases your running capacity in the weeks leading up to the race and allows sufficient time for tapering. Make sure that you schedule your runs at a time where you will not be easily distracted - missing one or two runs due to 'unavoidable events' can often lead to the whole running plan falling apart. The morning is the best time: it's the time when you are less likely to be distracted, and also it's when many races take place too, allowing your body to get into a kind of rhythm.
• If discipline is not your thing, perhaps teaming up with a friend can help. Company makes the road shorter, so the Irish saying goes, and this is certainly true of running. But also the knowledge that you bear a certain amount of responsibility for someone elses training program as well as your own can be an extra spur to action that you need.
• Be aware of mental burnout. Don't treat your training as some torturous necessity to that has to be gone through; depending on your race goals, training will probably occupy some sizeable part of your week, and if that time is spent doing something you don't enjoy, then there's something badly wrong somewhere. Varying your workout between short and long runs is just as important for the mind as it is for race preparation. Try different courses, explore different parts of town; think of new ways to bring freshness into your running.