Every Thursday, a group of teenagers walk along Sarjapur Road to a nearby school. There, they train a group of pre-teen marathon aspirants. So, what is different about this?

The teenagers come from The Ananya Trust, a local residential school for slum children and their students are from Snehadhaan, a school for HIV-positive children. The man behind this effort is Santosh Padmanabhan and you are likely to spot him early on a Saturday morning, if you are passing through Cubbon Park, training his community of runners.

Once an IT professional like so many others in the city, Santosh began to feel that he just was not doing enough for the world we live in. Working with disadvantaged children was a cause he had always held close to his heart, a dream he had kept alive by volunteering for various organisations. That apart, running was a passion he found he just could not ignore. So he broke away from the corporate rat race to follow his heart instead. “I just found I’d had enough of it all,” he said. “I knew I wanted to work with children from disadvantaged backgrounds and be a part of their lives.”

Santosh started out with training aspiring runners, using the sport as a community-building exercise. “It wasn’t an organisation, but a community in itself,” he said. He found that he could raise funds by running, which he could donate to his various causes. Philanthropy is a grand idea, but sustaining it is something we just can’t ignore. “I had to make a living, there was no escape,” he said.

With a few of his best students who volunteered to be coaches, they started Runners High, where they trained aspiring marathoners. “The coaches come from different backgrounds and have daytime jobs, so they are with me on a purely voluntary basis,” said Santosh, who trains his runners over the weekends.

It all began when they were running in Dharmapuri raising funds for a school for tribal children. “We found the children were running along with us and what’s more, they were very good at it”! Their enthusiasm convinced the school authorities to bring Santosh in as a regular trainer. That got the ball rolling pretty quick and before long, Santosh was devoting his weekdays to the various schools he visited.

Santosh now spends two days a week at the Sita School, which teaches children from rural backgrounds, along with the Ananya Trust, Snehadhaan and a weekly visit to the Spastic Society. “I go to schools that are not part of the mainstream education system,” Santosh remarked. And it soon became clear why. “Running is what I can do and I wanted to bring my passions together,” he said. So, while he trained aspiring runners in schools, there was no escaping the fact that running a marathon is still looked at as a distraction from academics. “That’s why I pick schools that believe in integrated learning, so they will understand just how useful this can be.” Now, he teaches subjects like Maths and English too, using the method he knows best —running.

But how? “I found you can approach various concepts through just running. It’s as simple as drawing shapes on the ground and making children run to the shape I call out, so they have fun and understand concepts as well,” he explains. There is no real distinction between subjects, there is no established method, everything is focused on imparting knowledge and doing so in a way that will help the children internalise it.

“It teaches the children a lot of other things as well, because long-distance running requires so much discipline and organisation”, says Santosh. To set a goal and achieve it by moving past all the hurdles and all the frustration can do a lot for a person. “You need to be patient and there’s a lot of teamwork involved”.

The children took to the sport at once and the sense of satisfaction and achievement they feel at the end of it all boosts their confidence tremendously. Runners from his community pitch in as well, contributing financially and otherwise, to the schools he is part of.

It’s one thing to teach the children that there are people out there who will give, but a whole other thing to help them understand just how much they have to give, too.