SEVEN MARATHONS, SEVEN CONTINENTS — ALL IN SEVEN DAYS
Woman going many extra miles in name of education
What started as a way for Pushpa Chandra to buy treats as a little girl will culminate with the Vancouver grandmother running a marathon on every continent, all in one week.
Chandra is running the 2018 World Marathon Challenge, what some call the 777, to celebrate her approaching 60th birthday. The gruelling physical and mental test begins on Jan. 30 in Antarctica before zigzagging to Cape Town, South Africa; Perth, Australia; Dubai, U.A.E.; Lisbon, Portugal and Cartagena, Colombia, before wrapping up in Miami on Feb. 5.
It’s quite the journey for one of 11 siblings who grew up so poor in Fiji she often had to find her own food. When she was old enough to attend school, Chandra ran the eight kilometres to class and back to pocket the few pennies in bus money her parents gave her.
“My grandparents were brought to Fiji as slaves from India and Nepal, and they worked very hard but our family was very poor,” Chandra said, sitting at the dining table in her Point Grey home. “Instead of the bus, I’d buy Popsicles, because we never got Popsicles.
“I didn’t even own a dress. We borrowed clothing.”
Chandra is an ultra-marathon racer, but also a humanitarian who raises money and awareness to help girls in impoverished countries get an education.
It’s a passion that hits home for Chandra, who arrived mid-winter 44 years ago in Vancouver as a 16-year-old in a borrowed miniskirt and little else.
Her eldest sister was pulled out of school in Grade 8 to do chores around the house. Chandra, four or five at the time, was old enough to realize the pain in her sister’s eyes at having an education snatched away.
“It’s still a very sore place for me,” Chandra said, her tears welling. “I wish she had more education because she didn’t make good choices in life.”
Chandra has read studies that show there is a huge transition in terms of decision-making between stopping at Grade 8 and continuing on to high school.
“My sister really wanted to go to school. I remember that,” Chandra said with a catch in her voice. “We had a well, 200 feet deep, and she was the water person. It’s really sad — it’s what girls do in India. It’s what girls are used for, to bring water home.”
For 777, Chandra’s goal is to raise $30,000 to provide a mobile classroom for 60 girls living on the streets in Mumbai for daily school lessons. She’s teamed with Plan International’s Schools on Wheels to carry out the project in hopes of keeping these girls from becoming child labourers or child brides, and plans to follow them through the program year to year.
“The seed will be these 60, and watch them sprout,” she said.
Chandra has run a marathon at the North Pole, held the record time for a woman in the Antarctica 100-kilometre ultra race, suffered life-threatening pulmonary edema (fluid in her lungs) running on Everest and kept going, rushed through crocodileinfested swamps, over open safari plains where lions roamed metres from her tent at night, and through sugar cane wildfires.
One race she’d like to run again is the Moroccan ultra-marathon Marathon des Sables, a foot race that has claimed lives and has been described as the toughest on Earth.
The mother of three has spent off-track nights in the desert of Madagascar where, she said, “if you’re lost, you’re lost. Everybody has machetes, no one will ever know, they’ll take your things and…”
She’s slept on shifting sea ice, in snow, on rocks, and on desert sand.
Why does she do it? Chandra has
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often asked herself that question.
It is not about running, she said — it’s about spirituality, about finding a place of solitude and peace.
“Running for me began as a form of exercise, but I soon realized it has nothing to do with exercise,” she said. “It’s moving meditation. Small things didn’t bother me anymore. It allows me to live a spiritually high life and really not about running, at all.”
Chandra was a longtime nurse at Children’s Hospital, has done missionary nursing work abroad and is now a naturopath.
There are Australians, Britons, Americans, French, Kazakstanis, Chinese, South Africans, Irish and two other Canadians among the 15 women and 40 men entered in the seven-continent grind. The runners will average around four hours per marathon and about eight hours a day flying to the next continent.
How many of these extreme endeavours does Chandra have left in her?
“I will take myself to any place my legs are willing to take me and mind is willing to take me, places no car, no bus, no bike can ever take me,” she said.
“I feel I can’t really answer that until the answer comes to me. So, I would say I don’t know.”