Half-marathon participants run amid heavy traffic during the marathon in Bangalore on October 19, 2014.
Some of the leading runners in the Bangalore marathon lost their way Sunday and ended up having to borrow money to take a train to the finish line after the vehicle guiding them missed a turn.
Indrajeet Patel and two other runners were making good time and ahead of the thousands of participants in the marathon in India’s technology capital when things went terribly wrong.
Around 15 kilometers into the 21 kilometer half-marathon course they realized the crowd had disappeared. The pace car they had been following had missed a U-turn and they had all gone 4 kilometers in the wrong direction.
“There weren’t enough race marshals to guide us through the course,” he said. “We couldn’t find any event organizers nearby.”
Another runner who got lost, Soji Mathew, said they had to ask people on the street for directions back to the course and money.
“We borrowed 30 rupees from a few morning joggers to take a metro train to reach the station closest to the finishing line,” Mr. Mathew said.
Dharmendra Kumar, head of one of the marathon organizers Protons Sports and Fitness Pvt. said the mistake happened because a medical vehicle that was part of the team leading the race missed the turn.
In a separate incident, a woman who was running the full 42-kilometer marathon ran five kilometers in the wrong direction before she was brought back to the course by the organizers.
Some runners complained that the only way they could stay on the course was by following television news crews.
The marathon was not immune from Bangalore’s chronic traffic problem after drivers, tired of the road closures, drove through barriers, filling a part of the course with honking cars, witnesses said. In one pile up the number of cars outnumbered traffic cops and drivers were heckling the runners, witnesses said.