100 Days of Running – 2015 Edition

2015 was an amazing journey for the 100 Days of Running participants. 187 runners from across India started this journey together on May 1st. 48 runners were still running on the 100th day on Aug 8th. Together, they ran 47,000km combined. In all, there were 28 CHAMPIONS who ran all 100 days. There were runners who did miss a few runs, but that did not stop them continuing.

Read more of the 2015 story after the below leaderboards and participant lists.

100 Day Leaderboard

Participant List

The 2015 Story

The first edition of the 100 Days Of Running started off by my thought about just trying to repeat my wonderfully motivating 2014 experience of 100 days. I shared that with a couple of my fellow runners, and they decided they were in for 2015. A couple of days before the 2015 edition started, I thought lets share this publicly, and within a couple of days, we had 187 runners from across India ready to take on the Edocbd company challenge.

The event started with enthusiastic runners posting their daily run details on Facebook, a big motivation for everyone else. IPR (Indirapuram Runners) were initially one of the bigger groups to start off on this. There were several folks who took lead in driving this forward with their daily motivational messages. Sangeeta Saikia, Sundreysh Sarup, Christine Pemberton, Harminder Singh, and our big motivational hero Sumit Juneja, actually there are just too many names to mention here.

A special mention here for our tech expert Mayank Gupta, who put in a lot of thankless hours in getting the 2015 100 day website up and running, and cleaning up the huge volume of data which was being generated daily. It will be difficult for the participants to imagine how much tougher than running 100 days this activity was 🙂

I would like to specially mention the very enthusiastic bunch of runners from Surat, who were piling on the miles like there was no tomorrow, and heading the leaderboards. Delhi boy Nischint Katoch kept the national capital in the limelight. But it was not really the big milers who made all the headlines at this event.

This event was all about consistency, and not really about the miles run. And that’s where a dedicated set of runners continued to push forward, day after day, making sure not to miss a single day’s run. Whether they were traveling on vacation, leaving early or returning late from work, a stressful day at work, they managed to take out the those 15 mins or so needed to run those 2 km needed everyday. At the end of the day, when all was said and run, it was down to 28 runners who had managed to overcome all challenges, ran every one of those 100 days, and were the true 100 day finishers!

The 100th day run on Aug 8th was going to be one big celebration. It was all arranged in a hurry. We got the finisher certificates printed, Sundreysh coordinated the route we will be running on the 100th day, a wonderful stretch along the India Gate – Rajpath – Rashtrapati Bhavan. He also surprised us with some really delicious cakes. Impromptu speeches from the participants post the run, and the obligatory celebration breakfast together at Sarvana Bhawan at CP. The Surti Runners celebrated the finish as well with a huge group run at Surat.

The 100 day story would be incomplete without a special mention. Harminder Singh from Delhi started his 100 days on May 1st, finished it, and carried on. His daily runs did not stop, and he continues to run, day after day, and as I write today, he has completed day 353 of his running and so close to an year of daily running. What a story 🙂