RftC - Making Wellness Count

2015 found me an unhealthy 128 kg (282 pounds). This was a result of a completely unhealthy lifestyle which involved binge drinking on weekends with the standard accompaniments of potato chips and loads of fried meats. Couple this with almost no exercise, I was a disaster waiting to happen. Around this time, I decided to start walking in a bid to reduce my weight. That became boring very soon. Everything I read about running told me that it wasn't a good idea to run when I weighed as much as I did. So I picked up cycling.

That turned out to be an inspired choice since I have always been someone who liked long drives and rides (on the motorcycle). As the distances of my rides grew, I began to consider a ride to Bengaluru from Hyderabad, where I am based. This is a distance of 550 km (342 miles). Once I decided on that I just needed a reason to justify the crazy endeavor.

I have always felt deeply about children and issues related to keeping them safe and giving them opportunities to thrive. So I decided to use my ride as a trigger to get my friends, family, and colleagues to contribute to an organization that does good work in this space. Creatively, I called it Ride for the Children.

In 2014, Leena Kejariwal put up her first Missing public art work. Since then, the larger-than-life silhouette of a girl has come to stand for the 16 million women who are trafficked each year. To put that in perspective, that's 200 cricket stadiums full of screaming fans. Here, however, its girls screaming to be saved. The Missing Link trust (savemissinggirls.com) takes a multi-pronged approach to attack this problem.

- Educating girls: This includes informing them of the dangers of trafficking and how they can be trafficked along with helping them be financially independent.

- Educating the larger population: This is aimed at reducing the demand which will in turn make this a less lucrative trade.

- Spreading awareness: This includes online seminars and in-person sessions at schools and corporates, apart from using the Missing art work as a conversation starter. They have even developed a mobile game that helps people understand and empathize with the victims of this barbaric trade.

2020 has been anything but an ordinary year. The COVID pandemic threw life off its rails and all over the world, humankind struggled to come to terms with a virus that we knew very little about, except that it spreads quickly and silently. As the country went into lockdown, I began to consider my options for the 2020 edition of Ride for the Children. Riding to Bangalore was out of the question. Apart from the risk to me, I would also be putting my support team at risk. Every year, friends of mine would take turns on each of the ride days, driving along with me. I cannot begin to imagine how boring it must be to drive at 20 km/hour on one of the country's finest highways.

For this year's ride, I decided to stay close to home. The conditions I had to work with were:

• I should be able to take my breaks at home, to avoid having to eat at unknown places.

• I should not need anyone to drive with me, but at the same time people should be able to reach me quickly if I needed help.

Keeping these two conditions front and center, I set about finding a route that would at once challenge me but also keep the ride safe. I was pretty sure that it would end up as some sort of loop that I would have to do multiple times. Finally, after many weekends of riding different combinations of loops, I settled on a 30 km loop. The farthest it would take me from home was around 10 km. I decided I would take a break at home every 60 km. The first one for breakfast and the second one for lunch.

I would do five loops each day for three days, which would make it a total of 450 km. It was something I could live with while also being able to capture the imagination of my supporters.

Even before I joined Zenoti, I knew it was a special organization. I mean where else does your manager call you during your notice period at your current organization and chat you up for no other reason than to get to know you better? After I joined, I came to truly understand just how different the culture was. When I approached the Chief Wellness Office (yes, that is a real designation) with my idea to do the ride. She jumped at it and suggested we make it a company-wide event. Of course, we had very modest aims, given that everyone was working from home. Many of our colleagues had moved to their home towns too. So it would be an interesting challenge to pull off something like this.

She called the event Wave of Goodness. The idea was to get employees to do kms or miles, in exchange for which the company would contribute money to my ride. The management gave us a commitment of INR 200,000. Based on what we thought would be a modestly difficult target to achieve, it was broken up as:

$ 0.5 for a km cycled

$ 1 for a km walked/run

$ 5 for a km swum/hiked

After the event was announced, a very interesting thing took place. Teams began to set themselves targets, which almost immediately became a competition between teams. It was at this point, that I got a clue that things had slipped out of our hands and this was now like an SUV that had hit black ice. Once the trash talking was done, teams went about consolidating by merging. The next step was, what I would like to call, the acquisition stage. Teams reached out to free agents who were known for doing a lot of miles and asked them to join them. These free agents, seeing the demand, put themselves up for auction. All proceeds to go to my fund raiser.

Didn't I tell you that this is an amazing company made up of amazing people!

When the dust settled and we tallied up the kilometers, we had done 6900 kilometers. I know! Crazy! But more importantly, way more that the money committed by the management. But they were seriously cool about it and paid out in full. In one stroke, I reached 95% or my target amount.

So come September 24th, I found myself in two events. The Wave of Goodness, which needed me to start counting my distance early and then RftC which was planned for Oct 2, 3, & 4.

Of course, amidst all this, I was bombarding my social media wall with announcements about the ride, the Missing Link trust, and the fundraiser. In past years, I would put together some posters using Paint. But this year, I reached out to my cousin, Gabriella, to help me with it. She not only made some amazing posters, she also designed a really cool logo for the event. All very professional looking now.

On the first day of RftC 2020, Oct 2, one of the directors in the company joined me for the first 90 km. After two weeks of rains and cloudy weather, it turned out that the sun decided to put in an appearance. Riding with Anand, I was having so much fun, I didn't realize how much salt I was losing through perspiration. At my lunch break, I felt my head spin. When I checked my BP, it was dangerously low at 70/50. After eating something and drinking a lot of lemon juice laced with copious amounts of salt and sugar, I took a nap. After the nap, I felt better and the BP was back to levels I was comfortable with. At that point, I still had 30 km to do for the day. So I headed back out with salt pills in my cheek.

Day 2 and Day 3 were better. Although the BP wasn't back up all the way, I felt good enough to ride. I continued to keep the salt pills in my mouth all through the ride. An ex-colleague from my Microsoft days joined me on the last day and rode a bit with me. It was really nice to have some ride along with. More importantly, it gave me someone to talk to on breaks, which is a big help on these long, lonely rides.

Parallelly, I had an eye on the collections. It seemed to be going well. Given the COVID situation, I was actually expecting it to be low. But my friends and family stepped up big time and made sure I was getting closer to the target figure of INR 500,000. There was, of course, the money to come from Zenoti, so I was quite relaxed. This was before we realized that the 200,000 was going to be 450,000.

As I rode the last kilometer, a couple of cycling friends picked up my wife in their car and drove along with me. It felt good to get off the cycle after a week of cycling. In total, from September 24 to Oct 4, I had covered around 650 km. But the best was yet to come. Including Zenoti's contribution, my colleagues, friends and family helped me raise a whopping INR 1,300,000. In one ride, I had raised more than I did in the three previous rides put together. It would help Missing Link make a real difference in the lives of the children who depend on it.

What had started off as a way to get fit had morphed into a trigger that got people contributing for a cause in such a big way that it actually made a difference. Any pride I might have felt quickly dissolved into humility at knowing that I have so many caring people as friends.

Another installment done. Next year will be another year and another challenge.