Dipali Cunningham In The AUTRA Hall of Fame
written by annabel hepworth
For record-holding multi day runner Dipali Cunningham, newly inducted into AUTRA’s Hall of Fame, it’s never really been about winning.
Without a doubt, her triumphs are almost too many to count. Dipali currently holds open Australian records for some of the sport’s most gruelling disciplines -- the 500-mile, 1000-mile and 6-day.
She has a long list of age group feats across all of the benchmark multi-day events.
While living in New York, the Melbourne-raised runner participated in dozens of multi-day races, often winning the women’s race and emerging the overall winner for several.
As a disciple of spiritual teacher and famous ‘running guru’ Sri Chinmoy, she truly hung onto his poem No Unreachable Goal:
If we believe in our own
Self-transcendence-task
Then there can be
No unreachable goal.
Watching legendary names like the US ultra runner Stu Mittleman, Yiannis Kouros and New Zealand’s Sandy Barwick doing fixed loop races in the 1980s, in the early 1990s Dipali decided to have a go herself.
“I came into multi-day running as a little kid not knowing what to do,” she says.
“That poem really helped me because I looked at it and felt deeply that if I was going to run these races and toe the line year after year, that it wasn’t about competing with anyone. Each year I tried to self-transcend my own previous record or whatever I had done.”
Rather than wanting to beat others, running was more in her heart and soul.
“If you compete with someone you just take away your own energy, you don’t run your own race and then, what’s the point?,” she says.
Dipali had started running in Melbourne with her brother Kishore around the city’s Tan Track that encircles the Botanic Gardens, the Kew Boulevard and Ferny Creek in the Dandenong Ranges.
Her idol at the time was ultra running doyenne Dot Browne (unbeknown to Dot), who was the secretary and newsletter editor from the formation of what was then AURA until she retired in 2000, and the two did some running together in a few Melbourne fun runs.
Later, after moving to New York, she started going on longer runs including an annual 47 mile race, winning the womens’ division 27 times, in honour of her teacher’s birthday, and by 1991 started running multi-days.
Over a long career, for multi day races alone she clocked more than 30,000km.
In 1998 Dipali was awarded the IAAF Year of Women in Athletics medal. She was invited by Athletics Australia to participate in the first International Association of Ultrarunners (IAU) IAU International 1000 miles track championship in Queensland’s Nanango in 1998, which she did not attend as she was living in the US.
World’s best road performances were to come, including clocking 504 miles for the six day in 1998 and a 510 miles in 2001.
In the 1990s and 2000s she ran multiple 700 mile and 1000 mile races. Her Australian female open record for the 1000 mile, of 13D:20:18:40 set in 1997, still stands.
At the age of 51, she scored her six-day PB of 513miles. It was a much-anticipated race where two-time Badwater winner Pam Reed was also competing and went on to set a new US road record with 490 miles.
All told, Dipali has won the women’s race in every iteration of the Sri Chinmoy six day she entered since it had started in 1998 – a total of 18 times. She was overall winner in six of those six-day races.
From 2002 the six-day race moved from Ward Island Park in New York to Flushing Meadow Corona Park in the borough of Queens.. Runners are sharing paths with locals, sometimes having to go around families on their way to picnics, rental bikes and sport games. Depending on the year, they are running parallel to motorway traffic for part of the course and exposed to winds through the wetland over the lake.
Meditation was a crucial part of how she managed the feat.
“I felt the power of meditation was coming through,” she says.
While so much of her running has been in New York, where the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team is headquartered, Dipali says her heart is still for Australia.
“Even though I've lived in the US for many years, my heart and soul, I tell you it brings tears … I feel Australian, I always have”.
Congratulations Dipali on being this year's inductee in the AUTRA Hall of Fame.
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