Who needs Stark when we have our own Ironman?

What once took him 15 hours a few years ago, Raghul Sankara Narayanan completed a few weeks ago in approximately 10 hours and 57 minutes, becoming the first resident Indian to complete the full Ironman Triathalon in record time. It consisted of swimming 3.8 km in the ocean, 180 km of running and 42 km of cycling (approx. figures). His family and friends couldn’t be prouder; this is the first victory in the path of many for him. 

“The month-long training I took under an able coach in Johannesburg really paid off. We were at an elevation of 1500 metres so it helped build my resistance, strengthen my legs and increase the haemoglobin count in my body given the decreased levels of oxygen in the air. This way, when I came back to the plains for the triathlon, my body was pumping more oxygen than that of a normal person’s making and it seemed like I had more energy and stamina,” Raghul explains.

Fitness wasn’t his motive to achieve this though; it was because he wanted to become a champion. “I am still trying to find out why I chose to participate in triathlons but the closest explanation I can give you is that I wanted to be a winner and I wanted to be fast. Sports was the only arena where I found this could happen,” he says. This marine engineer-turned-software engineer found out that he wasn’t the best and quite dissatisfied in his areas of profession, so by the time he participated in his second Ironman, he had quit his job and started training people for such events after that. 

“Back in 2012 when I took part in my first ever triathlon — until the morning of it I didn’t even know that the order was swim, cycle and run — I hadn’t trained or wasn’t very fit. I eventually went for a six-month swimming class, began training under a coach over the years and started following a structured regime,” explains Raghul. He began performing certain workouts and increased the distances he ran or swam over time. “My coach and I gradually increased the intensity of the training until two weeks before a triathlon — at that point, the distances taper but the intensity increases, rendering us fit to participate.” 

Since he was in South Africa for the Ironman event, we ask if he got to do a bit of sight-seeing. “It was mostly just me running or cycling through different places but I did visit Sterkfontein Caves. It’s also known as the Cradle of Humankind because it was where human life supposedly originated — traces that the Australopithecus lived here indicate so because the species’ hands and feet are similar to that of homosapiens.”