Hidden Heroes

We meet heroes at Run and Become quite frequently. They're a bit like miracles - they're always there, you just have to look for them. Things and people are not always as they seem, are they?

A while ago, a boy of about five peered around the office door as I was looking through a file. He wore a woollen hat, embroidered with a red spider and lots of webs. I crouched down with the file on my knee.

"Are you the real Spiderman?" I asked, as if trying to seem casual about it but really wanting to know.

"No," he said in a very business-like, matter-of-fact manner.

He pulled off the hat with the look of a conjuror revealing something very unexpected. Beneath the hat was... a boy of about five. He pointed to the hat in his hand. As if explaining simply to a peer - and with a most endearing lisp - he said, "It’s the webs."

"Oh," I said, squinting a little, "Well you could probably still pass for a super-hero without the hat."

* * *

Later a man walked in, seemingly quite ordinary - a blind man and his guide dog. He’d come to buy socks... for his 100th marathon.

The dog splayed out all of its legs, cooling its belly on the tiled floor after a morning run. The man fumbled with his rucksack and brought out a weighty ring binder. I realised I had sold shoes to his training partner a few days earlier, and that I was now faced with the person behind the heroic stories I had heard.

The ring binder and its owner were soon surrounded by admiring members of staff. Neatly catalogued reams of newspaper clippings bulged out, heralding one miraculous tale after another.

My eyes were suddenly aglow as I recognised some of Sri Chinmoy’s students, considerably younger than they are now, peering out from a shot of one of our multi-day races in New York. He told us of his adventures there, and of how he had met Sri Chinmoy. It had made a lasting and happy impression on him.

In turn, the cheerful and dauntless nature of this unassuming character has made a lasting and happy impression on me.

Sumangali Morhall
April 2005