Run for your Life.

If the race is over by the time your settle in front of the Telly, it’s a sprint; if it is still on after you have finished the popcorn and beer it’s a marathon or long distance run. For some people life is a jog and others it is a lark. You see them early mornings / evenings with fancy running kits, ears plugged into an iPod. Many of them have never broken into a sweat about mundane things like mortgages / EMI, tuition fees, inflation or recession. Years of living in countries like USA, Canada and Europe, a regular diet of proteins and carbs have built up muscles, and the sprinters with a dash of steroids have build bodies that move like greased lighting. For most people in cities life is one big sprint racing through everything in life – school to B schools, career, work, dropping the children, soccer classes, tuition's, music lessons and the occasional barbecue in the back yard. When we race against the clock there is no time to ruminate or chew the cud, when you decide to smell the zeitgeist, it’s time for antacids and angioplasties. On the Olympic track running is not such a glamorous part time, the marathon is tough business.The Marathon is packed with people from underdeveloped countries like Ethiopia, Kenya, and Morocco………. Athletes who have struggled for a meal, no training facilities, no shoes and literally begged to find sponsors to travel and foot the bill. Slight and wiry men, running the race of their lives, but with the will power, patience, strength and endurance required - an aerobic experience, sprint is an anaerobic one. Gaur Marial knows what it means to run for his life – he spent his childhood being chased by savage battles in north Sudan. Running from soldiers, through deserts without food or shelter, he survived 20 years of civil wars which killed 2 million including 8 of his 10 brothers. He was attacked by Arab nomads and kept as a slave by an Army officer. But today he has secured his place alongside the world’s greatest athletes, the sprint glam boys as he participates in the Olympic marathon – a man without a sponsor or a country. - Excerpts and Cocktail conversations