Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race
Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team
Sri Chinmoy founded the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team in 1977 as a service to the running community and to help promote spiritual growth through sports.
Over the years, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team has become the world's largest sponsor of ultra-distance running and a major organiser of road races, marathons, triathlons,multi-sport events, long-distance swimming events and Master's track-and-field meets. It has hosted several national championships, and numerous world records have been set in its races.
Self-Transcendence
What is Self-Transcendence? Sri Chinmoy writes:
"We are all seekers who wish to transcend our present realities. Why do we want to transcend? We want to achieve something. We want to grow into something which is eternal; In our life of self transcendence, from the lower we grow into the higher. The lower is transformed into the higher, the less perfect is transformed into the more perfect. Things that have to be rejected, we reject; things that have to be transformed, we transform; things that have to be transcended, we transcend. This process of transcendence is beyond the thinking of the mental man. It finds its existence in the self giving of the psychic man. The psychic man becomes part and parcel of reality by identifying with reality itself. The thinking man, the doubting man, finds it extremely difficult or impossible to identify himself with that reality. In our ordinary life we deal with constant possibility, and at the end of our efforts we meet with either success or failure. But in the spiritual life, we do not care for failure or success; we care only for progress. In this way, possibility is transformed into inevitability. Tomorrow's goal will be the starting point for the day after tomorrow. There is no end to our self transcendence. Our aspiration ascends, our realisation transcends, our satisfaction dawns.
When we feed our inner cry, and when we become our inner cry, at that time our song of realisation and transcendence begins."
History
The Self-Transcendence began it's life as the fulfillment of a dream. Sri Chinmoy had been envisioning a race of enormous proportions for several years and in 1996 the pieces finally came together on a .54 mile loop in Jamaica Queens, New York. That first race however was 'only' 2,700 miles long and it was at the award ceremony after the successful completion of that inaugural event that Sri Chinmoy declared that the following year the race would be extended to 3,100 miles. The winner of that 1996 was George Jermolajevs and Suprabha Beckjord was the first lady to complete the distance.
Race Winners
2,700
- 1996 Georges Jermolajevs
3100
- 1997 Ed Kelly
- 1998 Istvan Sipos
- 1999 Ed Kelley
- 2000 Asprihanal Aalto
- 2001 Asprihanal Aalto
- 2002 Madhupran Wolfgang Schwerk
- 2003 Namitabha Arsic
- 2004 Asprihanal Aalto
- 2005 Srdjan Stojanovich
- 2006 Madhupran Wolfgang Schwerk
- 2007 Asprihanal Aalto
- 2008 Asprihanal Aalto
