iBlog: Nishit Shah

The spirit of one of the greatest cities in the world was seen on its streets on 20th Jan during what is called as The Greatest Race on Earth. And boy what a wonderful experience it was. The last time I had seen so many people around me on the road was at the time of Mumbai floods on 26th July 2005. My previous attempts to run this race failed as I was too lazy to enroll and last year I signed up too late ! But this year I learnt from my previous blunders and had signed up well in advance and also ran 5kms every day (err.. almost everyday) for almost 3 months to prepare for the event ! I had taken part in the 6km dream run along with my workmates. We had decided to meet @ Bombay Gymkhana near fashion street at around 7:30am. By 8 everyone had gathered and had a gr8 time taking pics and fooling around. I was surprised to see around 95 odd people turning up from 110 registrations from Directi. I hope that we have a much bigger turnout next year ! We had made arrangements for Directi gas balloons and by the time the race began each of us were carrying atleast a dozen balloons and were running with me. It was funny to see small kids coming to me and saying uncle uncle ek balloon do na! I ended up distributing all of them and even took from my friends and gave them away. Did my bit to make some kids happy !

Then we all moved to Azad maidan from where the race was supposed to begin. It was gr8 to see soo many people around running for a cause. There were people all the way on the road cheering us. I can’t write how wonderful that experience was, to see the spectators clapping, motivating and cheering the runners. We completed the race in no time and saw many celebrities on the way ! After completing the race we all gathered near the exit and danced for almost 2 hours on the tunes of DJ Megha from MTV.

Looking back it was a gr8 experience. Will prepare myself to run for half marathon (20km) next year!