One primary aim of the three top army runners taking part in the Mumbai Marathon on Sunday is to set a time that will earn them a direct entry into the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi.
One primary aim of the three top army runners taking part in the Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon on Sunday is to set a time that will earn them a direct entry into the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, according to their coach.
"Our aim is to dip under the Beijing qualifying time of 2 hours, 18 minutes and 20 seconds. Ram Singh Yadav, the best Indian here last year, missed it by three seconds," said coach KS Mathew of the Army Sports Training Institute in Pune.
"A time close to this would definitely get us a clear entry in the Commonwealth Games. That's the aim," he told reporters here on Saturday.
Mathew said he has high hopes on not only Yadav, who will be running his third marathon in less than two months time, but also on half marathon-turned-full marathoner Deep Chand and Narendra Singh to clock close to 2 hours and 16 minutes.
"I'm confident that all the three runners can do so and I'm sure if they do they will make it to the Commonwealth Games in Delhi," Mathew told reporters.
Ram Singh, who ran the Allahabad Marathon on November 19 in 2:22.53 and improved on it in less than twenty days by clocking 2:22.39 in the Singapore Marathon held on December 7, sounded confident of clipping six minutes off those times.
"I'm targeting 2:16 and finishing overall in the top five or six tomorrow. I'm fully confident of doing it", he said.
Narendra Singh is also keen to shave off six minutes from his previous year's time of 2:24 in the Mumbai event.
Mathew informed that in the absence of a national camp for marathoners, the army runners are training under him and another Cuban coach. "We had a 55-day stint at Wellington near Ooty this season", he said.
He also said that the marathon scene has shown a dramatic improvement after a long lull since the days of the great Shivnath Singh whose national mark of 2 hours and 12 minutes which fetched him the 11th position at the 1976 Montreal Olympics still stands.
"There was a huge drop between 1982 and 2005, but with more and more marathons run in the country there's more enthusiasm. In fact we have marathons scheduled in Nagpur and Kolkata on February 1 and 8 after this. The timings clocked have also improved over the last three years", he said.
The best Indian runner in tomorrow's event will take home Rs one lakh.
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