Indians fail to move with the times

MUMBAI: While it was a record-breaking Sunday for the Elite men and women at SCMM 2011, the Indian men didn't had a memorable outing.
Despite the perfect race conditions - the cool breeze keeping the temperatures around the 20-25C mark and the humidity well below tolerable limits - Indian men disappointed, failing to even lower their personal marks. In fact, their timings surprised even themselves.
Lyngkhoi Bining of Army Sports Institute managed to defend his title, but his timing (2:21.16) was more than a minute higher than what he clocked while winning the title in 2010 (2:20.12).Second-placed Angad Kumar, also of ASI, placed second at 2:24.32, which is again higher than his 2010 mark (2:24.03). Ram Singh Yadav, under whose name the SCMM course record stands - 2:18.03 set in 2009 - too couldn't better his 2010 mark (2:21.02) and steamed in third at 2:25.33.
While Ram Singh suffered a hamstring pull before the race which hampered his run, Bining and Angad had no such woes. The ASI had set a target of 2:18 for them to meet in this race.
"It was more mental than physical," said Angad, trying to explain the reason behind his dismal showing. "We had set ourselves a target before the race but lost the plot somewhere in the middle. We perhaps went a bit slow in the first half of the race and that affected us."
Bining agreed: "Our calculations went wrong. We should have covered more distance by the halfway stage." ASI team manager, Prateek Mohil, too felt his boys went too slow in the first past of the race. "What they should have covered in say one hour, they took almost 15 minutes more. There were no fitness issues, and they have all trained really hard," he said.