Please start practising right from tomorrow. Now you can run two or three miles each day. Do it! Daily you can run or walk two, three or four miles, and once a week seven miles. Then, after the second month, from seven miles once a week you can try to increase it to ten miles. After another month you can bring it to thirteen miles. Once a week if you can complete thirteen miles, after four months you will be qualified. After thirteen miles you will have the strength, stamina and energy to run fifteen or sixteen miles.
The last four months of the year, you will try to do sixteen miles or seventeen miles once a week. You do not have to run twenty-six miles before the marathon. A maximum of seventeen to eighteen miles if you practise during the last four months, you will be able to do a marathon.
Once a week take rest, either Saturday or Sunday or any day you choose. And one time if you can do twenty-two miles, you will be ready, I assure you.
I am saying this from my personal experience. I may have been slow in running the marathon, but I was able to finish it, except perhaps once or twice. You people are quite young and energetic. Right now you can do this! Two miles, three miles or four miles you can complete daily, and once a week from now on try to run seven miles. If you are capable of running three miles or four miles almost every day, then seven miles easily you can do. I will be very, very happy. It will give me such joy if from seven hundred participants we can eventually go to 1,300 — and at least one thousand next year.
Only very good runners need to think of their timing. So-called bad runners should just think of finishing the race. But remember what your previous time was, and try to make it one minute better. If you did the marathon in seven hours this time, try next year to do it in 6:59.
At least one Indian disciple has to run! And if there are four or five members in a family, I would like at least one member to run the race. To my greatest joy and highest pride, all the members of one big family participated. And in another family, mother, sister and brother ran. I do not know if all the members of any other family ran.
The marathon was so beautiful, so peaceful! Mother Nature was so kind to us. There could not be a better, more ideal situation than this one. It was so nice, absolutely! The weather was super-super-excellent. The servers were super-super-excellent. The organisation was super-super-excellent. Everything was super-super-excellent. I was there for six or seven hours, and I was enjoying the panorama of nature’s beauty immensely. There we saw water. Water means life-energy. And there we saw sky-vastness. Everything gave me absolutely unimaginable joy. Again, this joy came mainly from your participation.
So, dear ones, practise, practise!
OSO 25. 31 August 2002, the day after the inaugural Self-Transcendence Marathon at Rockland Lake State Park, Aspiration-Ground, Jamaica, New York↩
From:Sri Chinmoy,Our sweetest oneness, Agni Press, 2012
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/oso