My parents didn’t object to my obsession with running, but when I told them that I wanted to be a runner, they flipped. They wanted me to be a doctor. In the first year of med school I suffered from retinal detachment in my right eye. The doctors forbade me to do physical activities. I was completely fine with the idea of becoming blind; it wasn’t an issue with me, but being told that I can’t run was a huge blow. I got operated in 1994 and after that my power jumped to -6.

For the next four years, I’d run for just 30 minutes once a week. And that’s when I decided to study sports medicine in the University of Nottingham in the UK. Peter Gregory, the chief medicine officer of the English cricket team, was my immediate supervisor. He had a huge impact on me. I went to South Africa in 2004 during the World Cup; it was my first on-field exposure. That’s where I realised that the guys behind the scenes really impact the activities on the field.

I also ran my first ultra marathon from Paris to London covering 200 miles. I worked in the UK as a sports medicine doctor before moving to Bangalore in mid 2006 when my wife was expecting our second son.

I conceived La Ultra, the world’s highest ultra marathon, by chance. In 2010, I asked a friend of mine whether he wanted to go to Manali to run in the Rohtang Pass. He agreed. We couldn’t run beyond 30kms in four hours. Luckily, for our egos, there was a landslide! In Manali, we saw an altitude map from Manali to Leh in an internet café. It reminded me of the Badwater ultra marathon in Death Valley, California. Manali to Leh is 500 odd kms. I thought we could run 222 kms because I wanted to do a run that was longer than Badwater (which covered 217 kms). This route is far more difficult than Badwater! On our way back to Delhi, my friend and I charted a plan for La Ultra on the back of a newspaper. But we were told that at high altitude runs, you need to rest at 13,000 feet. But I wanted to do an uninterrupted one.  So I thought, why not descend from a higher altitude to a low altitude so that the body gets acclimatised to that condition. People thought I’d lost it and said it’s not doable because of the lack of oxygen. But we did it! We started the run from Leh. ‘La’ stands for Tibetan mountain passes. The track required us to cross four mountain passes, including the world’s highest pass, Khardung La and that’s where we got the name from. So it’s the Ultra of passes.

There was five of us, two from the UK and two from the US who got to know of the run from Facebook. A lot of strangers from Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore volunteered to help, and not all of them had running backgrounds. But only one person, Mark Cockbain, finished the run. The biggest thing that this run, which has now become an annual event, taught me was discovering human nature. Out in the open, people become unpredictable.

Both my boys (one is six and the other 10) run. The older one started when he was three years old and the younger one did his first mile nonstop when he was 18 months old. I don’t push them; they love it as they find it pretty cool. But I have not been able to convert my wife into a runner, maybe I haven’t tried hard enough. She just goes to the gym. I have been running for the last 28 years and it’s a way of life. It means the life to me. When I don’t run, I am pretty miserable. In hindsight, I am grateful to the man with the stick for giving me a reason to run. It gave me so much more than just that mango drink. 

— As told to Piali Dasgupta