IAU 100km World Championships: Meet the Indian contenders
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. At the start of the year, Vipul Kumar started focussing on one particular race—the IAU (International Association of Ultrarunners) 100km World Championships that will be held in Bengaluru on 7 December. It’s a distance he’s been most comfortable running over the last few years, where he holds the national record time of 7 hours 4 minutes 52 seconds.
Last year, at the IAU 100km Asia & Oceania Championships, he missed out on smashing his own mark by less than two minutes, while finishing fourth in the overall standings. He’ll be looking to make amends this time around. “I had trained well for that race and was quite happy with the way it panned out.
I realised that I only needed to work on my racing strategy, which I’ve figured out over the last few months," Kumar, 26, says. The Indian team comprises nine male and three female runners and includes Amar Singh Devanda and Saurav Kumar Ranjan, who alongside Kumar, helped India to a silver medal finish at the 2023 IAU 100km Asia & Oceania Championships. Devanda and Ranjan are in the Indian Air Force (IAF) and have been training together for the last few months in Bengaluru.
Earlier this year, they started working with the performance team of the sports nutrition brand Enerjiva, who’ve designed their training and strength and conditioning plans, and also monitor their nutrition and recovery. It showed results for Devanda at the IAU 24-hour Asia & Oceania Championship in April, where he won the individual gold while registering a new national record distance of 272.537km. “That race was important because I had been looking to breach the 270km mark for a long time.
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