Through his own sporting activities and through his founding and stewardship of the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, Sri Chinmoy has sought to promote the message of self-transcendence. Born in 1931 in the Bengal area of what was then India but now modern-day Bangladesh, Sri Chinmoy was raised in a traditional Indian family environment where meditation and inner development featured prominently in daily life. After the death of both his parents at the age of 12, Chinmoy and his brother and sisters entered into the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, a spiritual community in the south of India. For the next twenty years the young Chinmoy would stay there developing his inner life. However, the community where he grew up did not advocate isolation from the world in order to meditate; in fact, they took athletic and sporting activity as an integral part of their inner development. Chinmoy practised sports every day in addition to meditation and bacame the leading sportsman in the Ashram, holding the 100m sprint title 17 years in a row (including a P.B of 11.6 seconds for 100m on a cinder track with bare feet).

In 1964 he travelled to America, in the hope that his knowledge of meditation and spirituality might be of service to seekers of truth in the West. His philosophy, like that of many of the great spiritual teachers, is very simple: instead of blaming the world for the difficulties one faces, he encourages people to look within and better themselves - 'according to the way you see yourself, the rest of the world will present itself to you', as he says. In addition to the practice of meditation, which stills the mind and enables one to see past one's limitations, he also encourages his students to expand their own capacity in creative, artistic and athletic fields. Sri Chinmoy advocates running in particular as a way to expand one's capacities, with the emphasis on competing to better one's previous capacities, rather than trying to beat others.

In 1976, Sri Chinmoy encouraged his meditation students to embark upon a torch relay run over all 50 U.S. states to celebrate the American Bicentennial. He saw long-distance running as being a very beneficial complement to meditation, and encouraged his students to exercise daily. In 1977, the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team was set up to cater for the needs of the long-distance running community - ultrarunning at that time was just beginning to take off as a sport. Sri Chinmoy himself switched to long distance running, and at that time could be seen training every day in the early hours of the morning. He ran 22 marathons and 5 ultramarathons before knee injury curtailed his running career.

Undaunted, Sri Chinmoy embarked upon a new means of inspiring people to reach their potential through sport - weightlifting. Beginning with only a 40 pound weight in 1986, he has since increased his capacity to lift many times his own body weight. He sees lifting weights as a perfect matter of how spirit can move matter, and his weightlifting feats affirm his unwavering belief that, after all, age is only in the mind and not in the heart.

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