There’s a 1.8 km strip of tar in Chennai that 45-year-old Neville J. Bilimoria knows every inch of. From the twists and turns of the tree branches above, to every pebble and pothole down below, this patch of road from the Madras Boat Club doors to Park Sheraton and back is where he’s run at 3.30 a.m. every alternate morning for at least two hours, for four years now. Neville was a chubby eight-year-old, with cheeks his Parsi family loved to pull, when he first learnt the pleasure running gave him, on a similar loop in Hebron school grounds, Ooty. In the years in between, he’s run 34 ultra, half and full marathons, closed off a rowing career with a National silver medal and become a super randonneur cyclist, completing over a 1,014 km in 73 hours, 20 minutes. For this founder of Chennai’s four-year-old Dawn to Dusk 12-hour cycling and running event, and the forthcoming Dusk to Dawn marathon, his body is a rubber band with boundless stretches.
On his 10th birthday, Neville’s father, a professional oarsman, seated him in a boat specially fit with extra planks to helm him in, and taught him to row the Ooty lake. “I realised I could do this for hours, endlessly...,” says Neville. In Chennai for an undergraduate history degree, Neville joined the Madras Boat Club to continue this love, rose to its Captain in 2005 and then quit the sport while still ahead. An itch to someday return persisted though, and Neville revisited the club in 2010, realised he’d spent too long away and took, instead, to running short distances around the club. He soon joined the Chennai Runners, finished his full first marathon in eight months time, and challenged himself into completing 14 marathons in 14 months, across Singapore, Dubai, Auroville, San Francisco and more nations. “Nothing has ever come easily to me,” he says, “But I was always a determined child. And that streak has stuck into adulthood too.”
It was in his nascent running days that TVS owner, Srinath Rajam, called Neville aside one morning and said, “Stop running like a mad bawa! You’ll hurt your knees; start cycling!” And Neville did. “I’d watch Srinath shoot off into the distance and be determined to catch up with him.” By 2012, Neville had finished the 200 km, 300 km, 400 km and 600 km brevets within a year-long season, thus becoming a ‘super randonneur’.
At the back of Neville’s mind though, was the desire to combine his running and cycling passions into one event that would challenge his limits and also double up as a fundraiser for charity. “There’s nothing to dreaming alone, for yourself. The happiness comes when others benefit too,” he says. In his Boat Club tenure, Neville had tasted the success of using sport for a cause, and the first edition of the Dawn to Dusk marathon in 2012 was founded on those experiences. At dawn on January 8, 2012, Neville and friends ran for six hours across IIT and cycled another six hours to Mahabalipuram, raising seven lakhs for Round Table’s education project. The event has since grown in leaps and bounds, and its last edition rounded up over Rs. 68 lakhs for Bal Sanjeevani’s children with cerebral palsy. In an endeavour to “do something different”, Neville thought up this September’s night marathon, Dusk to Dawn, which flags off at 10 p.m. through Chennai’s Island grounds in support of organ donation.
For all the time that Neville spends in the public eye, he leads a deeply private life in the everyday ten-to-seven rhythms of the immigration consultancy he founded at 26 and has lead for 19 years now. His weeks are peppered with a handful of minimally-15 km runs and 70 km cycling bouts on weekdays, with longer spells on weekends. On the days his morning sessions aren’t fulfilled, he takes off for a few hours at 10 p.m. after his son has gone to bed. “I have no fixed agenda for each day. It’s about listening to your body, and when it feels right, you pull that rubber band.” All through his athletic life though, Neville says he’s been a stickler for precision, perfecting each feather-light step and stride, stance and breath. “That’s something my rowing coach, Barun Chanda, first taught me: ‘Seven correct strokes are better than 700 half-baked ones’.” It’s for this principle too that Neville has resisted participating in marathons when his body hasn’t been whole enough; the upside being that he’s never received the dreaded DNF (did not finish) tag.
His time on the road, Neville says, is in some sense a cleansing of the mind, where the adrenaline of the finish line pumps out the negatives inside. In the solitude of hours alone on a cycle, with fellow Parsi Freddie Mercury singing wisdom in his ears, Neville says his mind goes past the struggles of endurance sport, engages in fun conversation with his bike and dreams up fresh challenges to pursue. “That’s when you realise you need very little materially to be truly happy.”
