Sport and Self-Transcendence

Sri Chinmoy spent much of his childhood and early adulthood in a spiritual community in which athletics and sports was an integral part of daily life; for almost 20 years, he was the fastest sprinter in the ashram, and some of the sporting records he set there still stand to this day.

For Sri Chinmoy, sports and spirituality went hand in hand. As well as keeping the body fit and providing a constructive outlet for emotional energy, it also served as a means to bring people of all different walks of life together in pursuit of a shared goal. This aspect of Sri Chinmoy's philosophy first manifested itself on the occasion of the American Bicentennial 1976, when a group of his students embarked upon the Liberty Torch Relay, carrying a flaming torch throughout all fifty states as a reminder of the eternal ideals of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" espoused by the founding fathers of the United States.

Today, those ideals are still alive and have expanded globally in the form of the World Harmony Run, the world's largest relay event for peace. The Run aims to build bridges of friendship and understanding between people of different countries and cultural backgrounds, and show that the most important things in life are things that we all have in common.

(Video: The Sri Chinmoy Running and Fitness Festival in Australia, one of the largest events organised by the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team)

The Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team was founded in 1977 as a service to the running community; it has since grown into the largest organiser of endurance events in the world, holding running, swimming triathlon and other events in over 20 countries world wide. The Marathon team organises events over all distances from two-mile fun runs upwards, but its speciality is undoubtedly in organising endurance events, and over the years it has gained a reputation for organising some of the most innovative and boundary-pushing athletic events ever staged.

In the early years, Sri Chinmoy was a frequent participant in the early races staged by the team, and his prolific marathon and ultramarathon output inspired his fellow team-members to reach higher and loftier sporting goals themselves. A knee injury has since curtailed Sri Chinmoy's running activities, but in his later years he entered into the field of weightlifting, and accomplished remarkable feats of inner and outer strength well into his seventies.

However, to quote 'What is Enlightenment?' magazine, "Sri Chinmoy's most extraordinary feat of all may be his near miraculous ability to inspire in many of his students the same kind of limitation shattering abilities that have marked his own spiritual odyssey." (link) Inspired by Sri Chinmoy's philosophy of "never give up" and transcending human limitations, a good number of Sri Chinmoy's students have participated in endurance disciplines such as ultradistance running, Channel swimming and triathlons, and in doing so have managed to accomplish feats that perhaps a few years previously they themselves would never have thought possible.

Over forty crossings of the English channel have been undertaken by members of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, the most by any sporting organisation, with eight of those crossings coming from Karteek Clarke from Scotland. In 1979, New Yorker Ashrita Furman broke his first Guinness World record for the most jumping jacks continuously performed; almost thirty years later, he still holds more than twice as many Gunness Records as anyone else on the planet.

In 1996 the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team launched the first edition of the 3100 Mile Self-Transcendence Race, the longest certified race ever held. The race still continues every year to this day. Suprabha Beckjord, a former women's world record holder over 1000 miles, also holds the participation record with 13 completed races. Another Marathon Team member, Dipali Cunningham from Australia, has consistently been one of the best women ultradistance runners in the world for the past fifteen years, and currently holds the women's world road record over 6 days.

Sri Chinmoy and his students strive every day to better their previous capacities, in the hope that they will in turn inspire those who hear about them to persevere in pursuing their own dreams in life. "Inspiration is of paramount importance", writes Sri Chinmoy. "If I can inspire someone, and if that person also can inspire me, then we can do many good things for the betterment of this world."