I have good news and bad news.

First, the good news. You can have a coaching conversation with me on your Fitness here.

Now, the bad news. It is about the pace-setters at the TMM 2024.

Dealing with failure in an important and challenging task is rarely easy. An important outcome of any failure should be the learning from that failure that prevents future failures. The foolish rarely seem to learn from their own mistakes. [more]

In a race, a pace-setter is someone who runs (with others joining their “bus”) to cross the finish line within a narrow time band before their advertised “target time”. I have “driven the 2-hour bus” at the Mumbai (Half) Marathon for many years. Anyone who ran with me all the way would have finished in “just under 2 hours”.

I woke up in Goa on 21^st January 2024 excited because it was cooler in Goa than the previous days and, I found out later, in Mumbai too.  It was perfect for the Tata Mumbai Marathon (TMM 2024) the flagship marathon event of India that was being held that morning. I had not registered to run in this year’s edition as I was hoping to be living in heaven (aka Goa) and did not want to tempt fate by registering for the Mumbai race.

I was excited when I woke up that morning because my expectation was that the pacers in India’s most prestigious recreational race would all have easy success in hitting their targets. Warnings from both yogic and Stoic philosophies – do not have expectations of others.

A few hours later as I ploughed through the data from the race, collected perfectly by Gaurav Bhardwaj, I was horrified with how the pacers had performed as a group! My prayers for being in Goa were answered, but my prayers for resounding success by the pace-setters in the Mumbai races were not! Please continue to read below to appreciate the seriousness of the failure.

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Contents

Pacing Results
123410Km
12345678Gender Equality Destruction
1234Half Marathon
1234Full Marathon
Tight Finishes
Previous Years’ Results
123456782023 Report
123456782020 Report
123456782019 Report
123456782018 Report
123456782017 Report
123456782016 Report
123456782015 Report
Parting Message

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Pacing Results [top]

The graph above showing the number of pacing failures in each race event gives us a clear message – in aggregate, the results are dismal. Ideally, we should have seen only green and no red. Ouch, ouch!

I present in tables the results for each pacer for the 3 events. I will try to comment a little based on what we can observe.

10 Km [top]

Gender Equality Destruction [top]

I was informed that a decision was made for all the pacers in the 10 Km event to be females. I don’t know why such intent existed or was publicized. It does nothing particularly useful for empowering women. In fact, it works against them. Positions of responsibility should be given to those most capable of carrying out a task, regardless of gender. Or where will it end? You want first-aid during a race in New York or London to be given by a competent healthcare worker, right? Not someone incompetent who scraped through medical school because their original admission was based on a seat reserved for their minority ethnic status!

The pacers in the 10 km event who had failed had failed not because they were women. None of the many pacers in the 3 races who failed had failed because they were of a particular gender. Opportunities to pace should be given to everyone. By placing an emphasis on gender during selection we send a host of wrong messages to everyone – men and women. I hope this never happens again in any race event in India, a country where females continue to make significant progress relative to males in many domains.

I won’t discuss the myriad ways to encourage more women to use recreational distance running for better health. Instead, I present the gender-wise split of participants in the 3 races for this year (2024) and last year (2023). It is only FYI – we cannot draw any firm conclusions about why there are fewer women in the longer races. I cannot even say they are wiser because they may not have chosen to run less out of wisdom.

Half Marathon [top]

Full Marathon [top]

Tight Finishes [top]

Any pacer with a “Gap” of less than 30 seconds should be careful to finish a little bit faster next time. Although they received a yaay! there is a distinct possibility that a participant who started off a few metres ahead of them in the crowd and finished a few metres behind them will have missed the target by a few seconds.

Previous Years’ Results [top]

Mumbai Marathon Pacing Failures:

2023 Report
2020 Report
2019 Report
2018 Report
2017 Report
2016 Report
2015 Report

Parting Message [top]

I am only the messenger. Do not shoot me for making the effort to collect all the information (with Gaurav Bhardwaj’s help) and present it in an easily digestible format. It has not been easy for me to digest the fact that with India now the most populous country in the world (since April ‘23) the flagship, highly publicized race, cannot get some things right, year after year! We needed only 45 competent citizens from a population of 1.4 bn.  You cannot blame your government for that.

If everything you do is consistent with your core beliefs and desires, then a long and healthy life of joy is pretty much guaranteed to be yours. If you want to be guided in detail, you know how to reach me, and if you found this useful, please do share it with others.

Puru

Dr Purnendu Nath spends his waking hours focusing on helping individuals and organizations reach their goals, to make the world a better place. He speaks, writes and advises on topics such as finance, investment management, discipline, education, self-improvement, exercise, nutrition, health and fitness, leadership and parenting.