“The biggest challenge I thought, as I looked at the weather forecast is the weather.” We are running together in the pitch darkness of the night. The first tender hours of Sunday have barely begun and for the moment the conditions are still and almost perfect. At this point Dipali has been running for a little more than 36 hours. “It was freezing when we started, and when I came out at 3 am this morning it rained right up until about 2 in the afternoon, and I mean it rained. I think we are doing pretty well,” she says, and laughs lightly.
The course change this year means it is no longer necessary for the runners to somehow navigate a loop that sometimes required great ingenuity on the parts of the crew and runners to make it work at all, and even though it rained heavily yesterday, no pontoon bridges or kayaks were necessary.
She tells me that she will run for 2 more laps and then take a break for a couple of hours. “I have just done 40 miles since lunch time. I didn’t take any break. I just ran the straight 40 miles. It is kind of what I do. I don’t know if I can come out tomorrow morning and do another 40. I already feel fatigued from the cold start and the rain.” She had a bad flu just before the race and says she was concerned that she would even be able to do it. “I was very weak, and decided to do it.” She admits to still feeling some of the weakness of how the flu affected her.
I actually prefer this time of night, after 9 o’clock, when most of the runners go to bed. And I actually indulge in the quietness. Everybody has kind of gone, and there is just a handful of people. I find it very peaceful and I stay out here to about 1am. I probably won’t be resting for very long. Maybe a couple of hours off the track and then I will be back out again. That is just years of practice.”
“It is 20 years to the month, in May, that I did my first 7 day race, 1991 in Flushing Meadow. I was pretty clueless.” At the time she says the furthest she had run was 47 miles. She was so enthusiastic that she says she blasted the first 100 miles. This torrid pace however set her back so much she says that she could barely run for days afterward.
Dipali Cunningham now at age 52 is tremendously knowledgeable about distance running and has achieved numerous victories in her races and on occasion, has not only won the women’s division, but been the leader overall as well. With all her success she ultimately gives credit to her late teacher Sri Chinmoy, who she feels taught her the inner lessons that she could apply not just on the road but in her life as well. “The inner courage, the inner determination, and the wisdom.” The race is incredibly difficult and she tries to always focus on the positive. Use the opportunity of running to not only add up the miles but find the route that will as well lead to her own spiritual progress.
“I always say it is a surrender of the whole being. It is a profound experience on every level. She appreciates so much that when she started running these races 20 years ago there were just a handful of people in them. Now she is amazed that there are more than 70 very enthusiastic runners out here in the race. All of them she says, “finding their dreams and goals.”
“These people inspire me. They are bringing me this newness freshness, that you don’t want to disappear in your own consciousness.” She has after all done 32 multi day events in 20 years. This year, in almost a complete change to her usual schedule, she ran a 24 hour race in Ottawa in the fall. “I was really inspired to try it, and I had a great time. I couldn’t believe how it was so different, and yet I feel that I can improve at it. That next time I can do more.”
Then for a moment she recalls how Sri Chinmoy used to come to this same park and train, often in the middle of the night. She imagines she says, that in her quiet moments she can still envision him out here on the course. Even though it has been 30 years since the park last felt his footsteps, as he ran through the night. “We can’t forget these things, they are immortal.”
Click to play interview
[audio:http://perfectionjourney.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Dipali.mp3|titles=Dipali]
20 miles into her first marathon she was not certain that she could even finish it. If there was anything certain to Grete Waitz at that moment, on a cold October morning, was that most definitely she would never run a marathon again. Yet she did in fact complete the race that day. The second half of her race would turn out to be faster than her first. She not only completed running her first New York city marathon in 1978, she broke the world record as well by running 2:32:30.
