If you’re having trouble getting yourself out of bed on a cold morning to get out for a walk or a run, you should look to Michelle Kakade for inspiration.
On October 21, this 46-year-old homemaker from Pune set out from Mumbai on a gruelling mission: to run 6,010 km, covering 57 major cities on the Golden Quadrilateral (the national highway network connecting Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata). That’s the equivalent to 143 marathons. Ms. Kakade plans to achieve this goal over 164 stages in 181 days, and get herself into the Guinness Book of World Records. She is doing this with a small support crew (five people, including husband Anil).
She began running after she lost a close friend. “I wondered if I were to die tomorrow, what is it in life that would make me stand out from a regular person. Why not use passion of running and create a different identity for myself?” “I discovered my passion very late in life,” she told The Hindu during a halt in Delhi. “It just happens that it is running. It makes me feel alive and gives me the satisfaction of doing something out of the box.”
She is the only woman to have run 256-kms in the Sahara desert. She also is the only Indian to get a membership of the Four Desert Club, having run the 250-km across Atacama Crossing (Chile), Gobi March (China), Sahara (Egypt) and the last desert in Antarctica.
The distance she is attempting to cover in her epic India run is much longer than her previous efforts, there are some consolations: “Over here, at the end of the day, I have a bed to sleep in and water to shower with.”
