Fairfax reporter Kevin Nguyen returned from a three month sabbatical in India with ultra-marathoner Pat Farmer. He shares his experience in this multi-part series.
Pat Farmer was emotional. He was in tears.
We were in Kanyakumari, the southern-most point of India where the three seas – the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal – met, for the launch of the Spirit of India Run. Pat pulled our crew manager Katie closer to him and pointed down the highway where we would be spending most of the 64 days.
“See up that road?” he said. “Somewhere up there is my destiny.”
The 53-year-old was a seasoned endurance runner. In 2001 he ran across Australia as part of the centenary anniversary; a feat which lead him to become a Federal MP for Macarthur for nine years. In 2011, he took a Russian helicopter to the North Pole and ran down through Canada, the Americas and to the South Pole for almost 21,000 kilometres over 10 months and 13 days.
Now he was running across the span of India to raise money for girls’ education. But at the end of the first day, after covering 67km through 80 per cent humidity and 36 degree heat, he was nearly broken.
He always said the first week would be the hardest and so he was lying on a bed of ice – like a prawn – with a wet cloth over his eyes. I asked him why he was crying that morning.
“Because I knew what I was about to do to myself,” he said.
“I am afraid of being a failure, I’m afraid of letting down all those people, who are depending on me.”
The next 63 days would be the most challenging experience of my life, both as a journalist and as a person.
To call India and our experience strange would be an understatement. Since returning to Sydney, I don’t talk about it much because much of it was unbelievable. I would show up to our office in Bella Vista at 9am but three weeks ago I would have been up for five hours and would have jumped out of a moving car a dozen times.
The run was the single biggest PR event between Australia and India – Pat transcended celebrity status. He was on billboards, on trucks, on the radio and television; people were blessing themselves against his feet and wrote songs about him. It was my job to to push for media coverage of the run, but I spent more time herding the press than facilitating them.
People thought I was on holiday, but no holidays I know of involved bomb squads, running across a landslide through a swarm of bees and driving people off the road with a moving toilet.
More in coming weeks. Go to patfarmer.com to donate to girls’ education.
