All eyes were on Venkatesan, he was under
tremendous pressure. At the Friday evening party, Denzil, after a couple of
drinks took a shot on Venkatesan and challenged to run past him at the Sunday
race. The fun committee was having all the fun in putting one against the other
and speculating the challengers and the winners all week long, which I realized
was only to add more entries, so much for what they have learnt from the media.
Leaving all the lazy bums, we had 80+ of the
TL’ers dressed in bright excel white….not excel sheet…I meant Surf excel..TL
T-shirts on time at the Ulsoor Lake.
Prajwala was running around with Red &
Blue ribbons and calling out the runners list, the Blue ribbons for the 1 lap
i.e 3 km + runners and the Red for 2 laps i.e 6 km+ runners. Some of them gave
this surprised look when I sported the Red ribbon, must be wondering if I still
have any energy left after all the screaming I do at office.
Hari, after the on-mark call went off to
sleep….zzzzzzzzz… till some one woke him up asking him to blow the whistle.
Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrr..there goes the stampede, Satish dressed in RED tracks started
off as if there was no tomorrow; his strategy was that since he was anyways not
going to be first at the end of the race he might as well start first!! Good
going Satish. Then we had Bharath, who had prepared for the race for over 2
weeks, was running with Venkatsen. Ashok for some reason decided to ditch Mohit
and me. But trust Mohit on his assessment; he convinced me that we should not
run with Ashok as he would drop-out in-between and we will be drained out at
that speed.
Even before the race began, Manjunath put on
the fun committee badge and decided to be a volunteer. As the run was also to
raise funds for the Rakum school for the blind, we had every one contributing
their bit...so it was FUN run and for a CAUSE.
Denzil started to walk as we reached the MEG
gate, which would be 100 mts from the start, wow!!!! he was conserving energy
to do the final dash…. or maybe looking around for a Temp job to make some
quick bucks for paying off all his bets on the race.
Neeti turned pink after a few yards but
decided her color is red and continued to run; Sangeeta was already in all
pink, looked too happy……for once no one asked her about some pending client
mail.
After the 1st lap we had more
volunteers than runners, Suman, Moses all driving across the lake forcing the
runners to drink water.
Karthik who makes people reach airport 2
hours early…made a late entry…he joined us when we started the 2nd lap;
we had Shabana who smartly took an auto to reach soon and Swetha was asking for
directions at the Gurudwara.
Denzil made “the grand” entry, when all we
could think was breakfast we had to wait till the last one touched the finish
line…and there comes Denzil huffing and puffing for dear life...
Abhinav had the privilege of clocking each
one of us and seemed thrilled doing so, then we had a whole lot of the cheer
leaders (not the IPL types)….
It was time to announce the winner, Bharath
Nair’s (grand old man of TeamLease) happiness was too short lived, when he
realized that Vijay won the race in 24 minutes, clocking 10 minutes less than
what he clocked after sneakily running past Venkatesan.
Rahul, Kannan & Salil surprised most of
us and themselves J taking the winning
spots 1…2….3…..respectively in the 1 lap race, Rahul was seen practicing for
the race all week long running around Fun World….. then we had Vijay, Bharath
& Venkatesan taking the 1…2….3…..spots respectively in the 2 lap race. Its prize
time now, we had the fun committee that has fixed the spots which would get
prizes so we had 1, 5, 10, 15……getting the prizes, Mohit got lucky with his 5th
spot prize, Ashok made faces as he did not get a prize even after beating
Mohit….
Finally we had all “South Indian” breakfast
at Shanti Sagar and left in ‘good shape’.
It’s all for FUN…so……..cheers to our fun
committee and thanks to Mohit who came up with the brilliant run idea….
- Kavitha Reddy