Vipin Sharma, 35, from Delhi, was looking forward to doing his first Ironman in Spain this July. “Training from January onwards became the centre of my universe,” says the ultra runner, who has finished a 200k and several 100km runs since 2015. He didn’t know how to swim though, and the last he had cycled was in school. So he learnt swimming last year and had amped up his cycling, just getting into the groove, when the Coronoavirus struck and the lockdown began, making it unlikely for the event to take place.
Since he could not go out, he decided to take part in the challenge that Ironman set out: to do a 21k run, 90k cycling, and another 5k running, all within three days. He decided to do the half marathon on the terrace, a 13-metre stretch that took him 3 hours and 47 minutes. “It was an absolute nightmare,” he says (his personal best is 1:45). “You’re not able to build rhythm and I got blisters, which I never do in a half. The U-turns are hard, and it was mentally very challenging.
Through the process, various thoughts came and went. “I began to question myself, thinking, ‘What am I doing? Why am I doing this?’” He also realised how much the world had shrunk into this little space. “You wonder how we have contributed to all this, how much we are responsible for it. And you think about when it’ll be before we go for a group run or have a drink with a friend at a pub.”
He thought the cycling leg would be difficult, but ironically that, done on an indoor trainer, wasn’t as hard as he’d expected. The hardest part of it all was the 5k that he did on his balcony that took him 2 hours, 15 minutes. “Time would not pass,” says Vipin, who works as Head of Community for a to-be-launched nutrition brand, Habbit. “I knew if I just stepped out onto the street I would finish it off in 22 minutes,” but as tempting as it was, he worked his way though the 4 metre long space.
In the end, he was very happy that he did it. “I could have given up with many rational thoughts – that I could work on my strength instead, or that I was just wasting my time. But the fact that I didn’t felt like I’d accomplished something,” he says. “Perhaps if I’d done the same distances back-to -back on the road, it would have been more physically difficult, but mentally, this was way more of a challenge.”
