At the Airtel Hyderabad Marathon on Aug 20th 2017, I ran a full Marathon in my favorite outfit, a Sari! It was a 9 yard handloom IKAT sari that I had specially ordered for the occasion and had waited a couple of months for it to arrive. The response to my running a full marathon in a sari with a timing of 4:57:44 has been amazing. I feel really encouraged by it. Thank you all. So here is the story behind what really happened.
The love for sari
I have always loved saris. About eight years ago, I had a goal of owning at least one sari made in each state of India. I was a big fan of the handloom exhibitions at Shilparamam and used to look for different weaves in the saris from different states for a good collection. I was not vegan then. I had got silk saris too. But since turning vegan I had changed to buying minimal new things. I decided that what I had was enough to last me a lifetime :).
Even with that in December 2016, my husband jokingly commented that my clothes use more cupboard space than his (which was true) and it is filled with saris which I hardly wear. I then decided that vegan or not, I am going to wear all the saris I have (even if they were silk since I already had them). That started a new year resolution on January 1, 2017 to wear a sari to work everyday. I have kept this up so far except when I travel to the US offices.
There were days when I had my doubts — especially when I had to do a presentation to a VP visiting from the US. But I decided that, wearing a sari is who I am I there was no need to change that. It was nice to see that visitors were so impressed and awed by the colors and didn't find it strange.
Overall, it was good experience wearing a sari everyday. I liked the way the bright colours in the sari brightened up my day.
Idea of running in a sari
Since January 2016, we had started doing many physical fitness activities as a family. I had written a previous blog about this on how I was able to complete my first marathon. After the Chennai marathon in January my next goal was to run the Airtel Hyderabad Marathon in under 5 hours.
In the meanwhile I saw an article forwarded in one of my running groups about a person creating a world record for fastest half marathon run in business suite. By this time, I had already been wearing a sari everyday to work for almost 3 months. Reading the article about marathon in a business suit, I was thinking, why not a marathon in a sari. I searched on the internet to see if there were any articles of women running a marathon in a sari. I found these: 1, 2, 3.
But none of them had run a full marathon. Given that I was anyway planning to run the full in AHM, there came the idea of running the full marathon in a sari. I searched Guinness world records and was happy to note that they had a category called "fastest marathon dressed in a sari" for which no record had been created. At this time I decided to go for this goal.