Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by
people not smart enough to know they were impossible.
[This is dedicated to Madhu from
Mysore, known to me since his childhood, who recently created his own brand of
history by swimming across Lake Ontario in Canada non-stop for over 24 hours
with logistic support from a dedicated band of volunteers. With this he completed a trio of personal
achievements of extraordinary endurance and courage, adding to his earlier
feats of swimming across the English Channel and braving the Moroccan desert in
a six-day ultra- marathon annual challenge.]
The Marathon
Legend has it
that Pheidippedes, a Greek messenger, ran the entire distance of about 42 km between
the battlefield of Marathon to Athens non-stop and at considerable pace to
announce the Greek victory over the Persians in 490 BC. This extraordinary feat of human endurance,
the forerunner of much greater such achievements dotting the history of
civilization, was commemorated in the first modern Olympic Games held at Athens
in 1896 by way of the Marathon road race retracing the actual path of the
messenger. This was appropriately won by
a Greek athlete, Spyridon Louis, in just under three hours. Since then the Marathon race has become the
valedictory event of every Olympic Games, the latest of which has just
concluded in London. It is also one of
the most popular annual athletic events worldwide.
The
term ‘marathon’ has become synonymous with any lengthy and difficult human physical
activity signifying a test of great endurance, persistence, and courage. The human body is being subjected to
increasingly and incredibly tougher tests in numerous ways on land, water, air,
and space. Adventurous men and women of
all ages subject themselves to such tests, more often than not voluntarily, and
for the sheer pleasure of participation, often also in support of a lofty cause. In doing so they are living up to the Olympic
ideals of Baron Pierre de Coubertin who proclaimed: “The most important thing
is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not
the triumph but the struggle. The
essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well...”
Endurance Unlimited
Here
is a sample of some of the greatest feats of endurance and courage in the last
one hundred years: Crossing of the Antarctic by Ernest Shackleton and his team
in 1914-1917, overcoming some of the most incredible hardships ever faced by
humans; Charles Lindbergh’s path breaking solo transatlantic flight from New
York to Paris in a single-engine plane in 1927 that kept him airborne for over
33 hours non-stop; the Le Mans 24 hour annual car rally in France since 1923,
testing the endurance of both car and driver; Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition across the Pacific
Ocean in a primitive raft that lasted over one hundred days and around 7000 km;
the eventual conquest of Mount Everest
by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing Norgay in 1953, a feat that is now being
routinely duplicated every year by numerous ‘ordinary’ people; the grueling
annual 21-day Tour de France cycle race covering about 3200 km, one of the most
physically demanding of athletics events, won by American Lance Armstrong for a
record seven consecutive years from 1999 to 2005 after having survived a
life-threatening testicular cancer; swimming
across the Atlantic Ocean by Frenchman Benoit Lecomte in 1998, a 6000 km
journey that took him 37 days to complete; 195 days of spaceflight by India-born
Sunita Williams in the International Space Station in 2007, the longest by a
woman astronaut. This list can be
stretched to several pages. One thing
they all have in common is the proven capability for human endurance and
courage, bordering on the impossible and infinite.
The Marathon Man from Mysore
Madhusudan
Nagaraja (known to everybody as Madhu) was born in 1970 to middle class parents
in Mysore who were my neighbors in the Manasagangothri campus of the Mysore
University. The father was a university
employee and the mother, whom I have never seen without a smile, a high school
teacher. I can proudly say that I have
known Madhu from his cradle days and as a playmate to my second daughter, who
was born a year later, and a host of other small children. They formed quite a noisy and mischievous
little gang in the neighborhood, often a source of both annoyance and
pleasure. The parents moved to their own
home close to the university swimming pool some years later. This was indeed fortuitous since it gave him
a chance to take to swimming, though not very seriously in those early
days.
Even
as Madhu went through his school and collegiate education in local institutions,
he took to swimming seriously and gained considerable prowess in it. He earned a national sports merit scholarship
for graduate studies at the Mysore University and won the University swimming
championship. Combining other sports
with swimming, particularly tennis, he won the best athlete award of the
university as well as numerous other awards.
Here
is a picture of Madhu at home about this time:
[Some of the pictures shown here are in high resolution and
can be blown up to their full size by clicking on a picture and opening it in a
separate window. However, none of them were
taken by me and I am not able to credit them individually.]
After
obtaining a master’s degree in Biochemistry from the Mysore University, he changed
tack completely and took up employment in the Income Tax department of the
government of India as a stop-gap measure before proceeding to USA for his
higher studies in another field, Information Technology. He then took up residence in California and
when he found himself out of a job temporarily, he decided to spend his time
taking to swimming more seriously than he had ever done before under the guidance
and patronage of the renowned Rinconada Masters Swim Team in Palo Alto. This was to be a turning point in his
life. He began dreaming of exploits that
would rival any professional swimmer and, towards this end, took to strenuous open
water swimming in the San Francisco Bay for long durations to toughen up both
his body and mind. He began to eye the
celebrated and treacherous English Channel (EC), one of the toughest challenges
facing any swimmer and a daunting task even for the best of professionals.
One
of the motivational factors for Madhu to attempt the EC swim was former
president of India Dr Abdul Kalam’s inspirational book “Wings of Fire” in which
he drives home the message that the nation is much larger than the self and national
prestige should be an overriding consideration in any individual effort. He wanted to do it primarily for the country.
English Channel Challenge
The English Channel separates southern England from northern France, and joins the North
Sea to the Atlantic. It
is about 560 km long and varies in width from 240 km at its widest to
34 km in the Strait of Dover (see the Google Map below).
Way
back in August 1875, Matthew Web of England was the first person ever to swim
the English Channel, from Dover to Calais, taking just under 22 hours to do
so. In 1926 the American swimmer
Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to achieve the feat. Mihir Sen became the first Indian to swim the English Channel, from Dover to Calais in
September 1958. Much like climbing Mount
Everest, crossing the English Channel has become an annual feature, though no
less challenging now than in earlier times.
Madhu started rigorous and systematic training
and preparations lasting nearly a year, most of it in California, to take up
the channel challenge and chose to make his attempt in early August 2004. Any such effort is impossible without the
active support of well-organized and highly experienced groups of dedicated
people with specialized skills and Madhu had their full backing.
Though the distance between Dover in England and
Cap Griz-Nez in France is about 37 km, the actual swim distance becomes
considerably longer because of tidal currents which take the swimmer on a
zigzag course. However, the real problem
is not so much the distance as the challenge to swim in bitingly chilly waters
battered by high winds. As Madhu found
out, this required not only superb physical conditioning but also even greater
mental toughness.
On the morning of 10 August 2004, egged on by his
pilot boat crew and others, Madhu hesitantly got into the cold water at Dover
in pouring rain, with some self-doubt as to whether he was up to the
challenge. The weather continued to be
cloudy and rainy for the first six hours and he made slow progress, firmly
pushing aside any thought of giving up. Thereafter
things improved.
Here is a picture of Madhu swimming with powerful
strokes, with a beautiful jellyfish appearing to give him company:
Despite a sharp pain in the right shoulder he
kept going relentlessly, hour after hour, and it was with a great sense of both
elation and relief that he spotted the French shoreline. Finally he got out on the sandy beach of Cap
Griz-Nez to be welcomed by some friendly French people who had gathered there. It had taken him 12 hours and 31 minutes to
accomplish the feat and join the elite band of adventurers who had conquered
the EC. He was one of very few Indians
to do so. He had also become the first
Kannada speaking person from the state of Karnataka to achieve the feat,
something he is greatly proud of. He
held the Indian tricolor high in celebration after returning to Dover. Here is a picture of him at Dover displaying
the national flag and standing next to the statue of Matthew Web, the first man
ever to swim across the channel successfully.
Madhu’s
English Channel crossing happened just a few days before the start of the 2004 Athens
Olympic Games. The media gaze in India
was so much on the games that Madhu’s achievement went almost entirely
unnoticed and unsung back home. The
world’s second most populous country was to finish with just one (silver) medal
in the entire games. It occurred to few
people that Madhu’s achievement was at least as good as that of India’s entire
Olympic contingent.
Marathon des Sables 2010
Madhu’s
next major adventure was participation in the 2010 Marathon des Sables (MDS)
that takes place every year in southern Morocco. First started in 1986, it was a six-day
ultra-marathon foot race in the Sahara desert, the equivalent of six regular marathons
or more and is regarded as the toughest race on Earth and described as a
highway to hell! It is designed to
promote developmental initiatives in favour of children and underprivileged
populations within the health, education, and sustainable development sectors
of this North African country. Held
during 2 – 12 April 2010 and celebrating its 25th anniversary, this event subjected
its hundreds of voluntary participants from many parts of the world to some of
the most torturous physical endurance ever experienced by anyone in a desert
environment and required extraordinary physical conditioning achieved through a
regimen of long and rigorous training. The
risks are perceived to be so great that the entry fee includes the cost of
possible return of the dead body of any participant to his/her kith and kin
back home!
Here
is a picture of Madhu as a fully dressed participant against the background of
the desert. Each participant had to carry all the personal needs, including
food, in a backpack. Only water was made
available to them at intermediate checkpoints that had to be reached before a
specified time each day. Medical aid was
more readily available.
The
following picture shows Madhu amidst a number of other participants all ready
for the next leg of their journey across the desert:
At
the end of the six-day ordeal, everybody would have suffered physically in some
way or other, at the very least with some blisters in the feet and on the
back. Madhu fared much worse as the
following picture so poignantly shows.
Of course it is to his credit that he survived the scare, made light of
the ordeal and completed the full course.
The
following picture shows a triumphant Madhu showing off his well-earned
medallion at the completion of the event:
Across Lake Ontario
Madhu’s
latest, and perhaps the greatest, exploit has been the crossing of the great
Lake Ontario in Canada last month end.
He had eyed this years ago and decided on a route from Port Dalhousie
north of the great Niagara Falls to his present hometown of Oakville, northwest
of the starting point (see Google map below), a distance of about 42 km which
also happens to be the land distance for any marathon road event. Curiously, Madhu who is presently employed as
a senior business systems analyst with a Canadian insurance company is aged 42
now.
As
before, Madhu’s meticulous preparations had begun about a year in advance,
helped by a team of expert swimmers and strategists (constituting the Lake
Ontario Swim Team) who had to contend with a situation much more challenging
than the EC swim. By all expectations
this was going to be much harder than the EC and so it turned out to be. The eventual success of the effort has been
beautifully summed up in the following visual taken from the official report on
the swim.
Here
are two pictures of the swim in progress at different times:
The
outside world was kept informed of Madhu’s progress through regular hourly
bulletins on his Facebook page. His
parents and I at Mysore were among thousands of people in many countries
following his progress. Everything
appeared to be going well up to a point, with eleven consecutive hourly bulletins
posted on his Facebook page. We kept
urging him on with frequent messages of encouragement. Then the bulletins stopped mysteriously. We got nervous and when the twelfth bulletin
became long overdue, and it was well past my bedtime (India time), I went to
bed hoping for the best possible news on the morrow. After three hours I woke up from my disturbed
slumber to find a very reassuring comment from Madhu’s wife Suman saying that
the swim was still on despite some strong currents he had to fight against and
more importantly, no further news had come through till then only because of
some communication problems. His pace
had slowed considerably and it was apparent that he would take a lot longer
than the estimated 17-18 hours for the swim.
As Bryan Finlay, the official accompanying Madhu on the boat put it, “the success of the swim revolved around
Madhu’s dogged and calm acceptance of some ten hours of headwind and associated
waves. Ironically, these challenges were
faced under a star-filled clear sky with dazzlingly bright reflections on the
lake from an 80% full moon…”.
I
went back to bed, slept better and woke up very early next morning to read that
Madhu was closing in on his target at Oakville, with the conditions having
improved considerably. Then there was
another long silence, more anxiety and at last the final word that he had
stepped on the Coronation Park beach to some rapturous welcome from his family
and friends. With wife Suman holding
their child and looking on, Madhu’s face in the next picture (published in a
local newspaper) says it all. However,
as Bryan Finlay remarked, “few will ever
know what challenges Madhu and his crew faced during the final two hours, as
they struggled to avoid the northerly push of some strong currents and thereby
maintain the 313-degree heading required to ensure their precision on-the-spot
version of a moon landing...”
Madhu
had taken 24 hours and 26 minutes to complete his swim, about 6-7 hours longer
than he had estimated, but still a record for the course. At this time Madhu’s Facebook page may well
have been jammed with a flood of congratulatory messages, including mine. Coming from someone who is not a
professional, this was a fantastic feat of endurance and athleticism. That this should have been achieved by
someone I have known from his cradle days is all the more wonderful for me.
Perhaps
unintentionally, Madhu’s Ontario swim coincided with the start of this year’s
London Olympic Games, much the same way it happened during the 2004 Athens
Olympic Games. With this very much in my
mind, I had remarked in my congratulatory message to him, “I do not see how this feat
can be less significant than any medal India may win in the ongoing London
Olympics though it may very well go unnoticed and unsung back home.” Considering how the Indian Olympic contingent
has fared in the London games, I feel fully vindicated in what I said. Such achievements by little known and uninfluential
individuals without any government or corporate patronage stand little chance
of the recognition that they really deserve.
In contrast, we find that the Indian media are treating even the few
bronze medal winners of the Olympic Games as demigods and showering hugely
disproportionate largesse on them.
While
the Indian media took no notice of Madhu’s feat, there was however one notable
exception. A Kannada TV channel put out
a well-orchestrated half-hour feature that showed a video interview with Madhu’s
parents and an audio interview with him.
This was indeed some consolation.
Some Reflections
How
does someone like Madhu achieve such extraordinary feats which, as one Ontario
swim support crew member put it, “… require
such sacrifice of mind and body… just to contemplate the challenge, never mind
attack it full on without mercy…”? Perhaps
part of the answer is provided by former American president Calvin Coolidge’s
observation: “Nothing in the world can take the
place of persistence. Talent will not;
nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a
proverb. Education will not; the world
is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are
omnipotent.” Also, as Cherie Carter-Scott
observed, “Ordinary people believe only in the possible. Extraordinary people visualize not what is
possible or probable, but rather what is impossible. And by visualizing the impossible, they begin
to see it as possible.” Perhaps this compliments Doug Larson’s
quote with which I began this
write-up.
When I mentioned Madhu’s exploits to a close
acquaintance of mine he was all admiration but went on to add in a lighter vein
that only crazy people do such things. Yes, perhaps in the insane world of today we need such crazy people to help preserve
some semblance of sanity in humanity.
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