The First Competition
by Sri Chinmoy
I started my life of competition in Santa Barbara on 5 June 1979 with a three-mile race. My pace was 7:43. For the first four hundred metres, I was running with excellent runners at a six-minute pace. Then everything went blank; I couldn’t see anything. After that I started walking for a while.
Published in Run and Become, Become and Run, part 8
Sri Chinmoy plays tennis with the great Ecuadorian star of the 1940s and ’50s Pancho Segura in California.
Remarks before the first 700 – 1,000 – 1,300-mile race
A talk by Sri Chinmoy
at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, New York
Brave runners, my heart is all gratitude to you. The English dictionary houses the word 'impossibility', but your life-history book does not include the word 'impossibility'. You live not only in the world of possibility, but also in the world of inevitability. This race is new, unique and unprecedented. Only your heroic hearts can accept the challenge and become victorious in every possible way, inwardly and outwardly.
When we think of 700, 1,000 or 1,300 miles, we are reminded of Eternity. We are all running along Eternity's Road, which is at once birthless and deathless. You are the pioneer-hero-runners who will be running along Eternity's Road. Today humanity is loving your hearts and treasuring your lives with utmost joy and utmost pride.
Once more, to each runner, on behalf of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, I wish to offer my most humble and most soulful gratitude and gratitude. Each runner is marking the beginning of a new dawn that transcends at every moment its beauty, its light and its divinity. This divinity is embodying world-joy and world-peace. You are the true and perfect embodiments of world-peace. For that, to each of you my heart bows with boundless love and gratitude.
Published in Pioneer-Runners of Tomorrow’s World-Peace-Dawn: Ultramarathon Running and Self-Transcendence
Sri Chinmoy competes in the 200-metre event at the Metropolitan Athletics Congress (MAC) Masters Meet, recording an official electronic time of 31.39 seconds, at St. Johns University in Queens, New York.