Little kids generally have the attention span of a small dog with a belly full of amphetamines. If you can get them to do one thing for more than an hour, you're either a wizard or a skilled hypnotist. Biranchi Das was neither, but he was an amazing coach, and so, after he sort of adopted a young kid named Budhia Singh (after his impoverished mother sold the child to a street hawker), he successfully trained him to be a master marathon runner.
Under Das' tutelage, Budhia completed 48 marathons (not a typo) before he was five (again, not a typo).
The Clymb
In comparison, we're getting winded just looking at this picture.
Now, to give you a better idea of how freaking amazing that is, an average adult runner needs about 4.5 hours to complete a marathon. So between practice, the marathons themselves, and the time he ran 40 miles straight from the city of Puri to Bhubaneswar, Budhia probably spent close to a 1,000 hours running, often in 120-degree heat. Again, all before he was five years old.
Das, who become like a father to Budhia, kept track of the boy's diet and exercise regimen, with the ultimate goal of taking little Budhia to the Olympics. However, tragedy struck when the government stepped in and banned Budhia from marathons, saying his tiny body could not take all that running (in the government's defense, this is probably true). Later, even more tragedy struck when Das was murdered by a local gangster.
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