What the Mumbai Marathon taught me...

Albeit, a few years back. Read on...

With the 2020 Tata Mumbai Marathon barely a few hours away from flag-off, I thought of sharing a somewhat personal experience and led to a massive professional learning for me. 

Many of our work acquaintances today probably wouldn't know that Vineeta Singh has always been a bit of a runner. 3-time Comrades 89km ultra-marathon finisher + countless other marathons. Here's an old clip: 

Guess it shouldn't have been a complete surprise to me back in Oct'17 when we were expecting the second kid and in parallel having fleeting non-discussions of her running a half-marathon at the upcoming Jan'18 #MumbaiMarathon

Well. It was, for me.

Long story short - given her athletic background over the past decade, both her gynaecologist and running coach were super encouraging and thought that she could totally do an easy pace 21K. 

Which led to a weird situation... 

I had registered for the 42km Full Marathon. She was now doing the 21km Half Marathon and of course, the half marathon race slots had SOLD OUT. There was no way we could run together on race day. Runners know how tough it is to get a sold-out race bib - especially at Asia's largest marathon. ??

After all "influence" and "jacks" failed to produce a spare HM race bib, I was grudgingly reconciling with meeting her at the finish line.

Till, one day, in desperation, a really dumb idea struck me. Why not just email the organizers requesting a change in race bib? ??

And so, in a bid to stand out in the sea of emails that I'm sure the organizing team at Procam International gets every day, I crafted arguably the most ridiculously keyword-optimized subject line and email EVER!

24 hrs passed. No reply.

I sent a reminder.

And suddenly, BOOM!

Miraculously enough, they'd AGREED!

And so on race day, thanks to a kind event photographer we ended up having quite the unexpected pre-pregnancy shoot at the finish line.

Eventually word got around and quite a few papers carried the news the next day - but we never really shared that with anyone back then.

Part of us was somewhat scared of being judged. Part of us just wanted this to be a private moment for us to reflect on in the future.

Till now.

With so many of our friends pinging us in amazement over this past week to find a familiar photograph as the lead image of the official Tata Mumbai Marathon App, I thought maybe it's time we shared a bit of the backstory that led to this day to remember.

And after almost 2 years, when I look back at the way things went down, there's one incredible learning, above everything else, that I took away from all of this.

We'll never know what the chances of getting something are even if we ask for it.

But one thing's for sure...

If we don't even ask for it - then there's 100% certainty that we'll never get it.

That's all. Fin.