Jewellery unit staffer eyes ultramarathon

MUMBAI: A pair of worn-out running shoes aren't quite the sort of equipment you would expect to find, lying by the window-sill of a jewellery-polishing unit in central Mumbai.

The shoes in question belong to 30-year-old jewellery-polisher Abbas Shaikh, who spends 12 hours each day putting the sheen on bits of jewellery, and the rest of his time training for marathons. On Independence Day, Shaikh is set to test his limits at Mumbai's first ultramarathon.

He hopes to run 100km during the 12-hour race organized by the Shivaji Park Marathon Club, which will see runners doing 12-km loops between Shivaji Park and Worli from 5am to 5pm.

That Shaikh won first prize at the Bangalore half-marathon last December, completing a distance of 75km in 7.23 hours may well have emboldened him to attempt 100 km. He currently shares space each night with dozens of workers at the cramped jewellery unit where he once worked. While his workshop is in central Mumbai, he prefers to spend the night at his former employer's unit in Kalbadevi, as it is closer to Marine Drive where he goes running in the wee hours of the morning. On days when he runs for four or five hours, he barely catches a couple of hours sleep.

It's near impossible to imagine that running was something Shaikh had never attempted until four years ago. "I was walking along Marine Drive at night with a friend when we saw people running by the sea. We laughed as it looked like such a funny thing to do. Then we tried running too," says Shaikh, who gradually began running 20km without knowing the distances he ran. He would first run up and down Marine Drive. He once ran behind a couple of runners belonging to international marathoner Savio D'Souza's running group to see where they were headed. He was invited to join them. Over time, the runner's group became a family of sorts for Shaikh, the young man from an impoverished village in West Bengal, alone in Mumbai.

He had left his village at the age of 14 to work as a jewellery polisher in Gujarat and later moved to Mumbai, a city where he knew no one. Today, he says his running group provides him with more support than his family ever could, and have bought him running gear and paid for his tickets to various cities where he runs marathons. D'Souza, who helped train Shaikh, says the young man is now like his assistant, and even conducts running classes when D'Souza is on a break.