Running has the potential to develop character and sporting spirit among the individuals. People stay healthy and adopt healthier life-styles if they are into it when young.
Mighty Runners program's objective is to instill the sport of running at a young age and provide a common platform to the children. By engaging school children and providing them with systematic training and online tools for training, we plan to bring together children across different schools. Such program has the potential to develop and give the country some of the best distance runners and marathon runners.
Sports and physical education is an important aspect of character building. With more children and youth engaged in sports and related activity, the more they learn about winning and losing and more about life.
India is rapidly urbanizing. More than 68 cities in India will have more than million population by 2030. The tier II and tier III cities in India will be the locus of this rapid urbanization in India.
With rapid urbanization and industrialization, increasing number of population is living a sedentary lifestyle. Chronic diseases today, contribute more to the overall burden of disease in India and have overtaken infectious diseases as the major burden of disease in India. One of the major risk factors, for chronic diseases is the lack of physical activity. These diseases already pose a major burden on the current health system in India and to the overall economy of a country like India. It is estimated that the India loses billions of dollars due to chronic diseases and the resulting loss of productivity.
Obesity levels in the school students are rising. The reasons for this rise are multi-factorial like lack of physical activity and rise in consumption of refined foods. The rise of obesity among the young Indian population is not just limited to the affluent and the richer class, it has become a major issue among the poor too due to lack of physical activity and exposure to cheap refined foods.
These problems need to be addressed at grass-root level.
Running is the most natural activity known to the human body. Human body is engineered by the nature to run, we are born to run! Humans may not be the fastest runners on the planet but we are built to run very long distances which other animals do not have the capacity. Running has been identified as one of the reasons why human species was able to cross the continent of Africa and spread across the entire planet.
Running is the basic foundation of all other sports and running is a sport in itself. Promotion of running in fact is promotion of other sports. It is a very basic sport and requires minimal equipment. It requires a pair of shoes, short and a t-shirt. It can be done anywhere in places like, playgrounds, parks, mud-tracks and roads. Running as a sport is very much affordable for people across different socio-economic strata’s and hence running has the potential to bring people together for a common cause and at a least cost.
Running as a sport is very inclusive and is very much accessible to people across any age-groups. People can be involved with the sport of running for rest of their life’s and can achieve their physical potentials with long term commitment to the sport. It is a also very much a mental sport, since it requires patience and discipline to develop as a better runner.
Benefit to the individual
The project will actively involve with school children and youth and introduce them to the sport of running and physical training.
We plan to implement School Running Program in 50 schools of Nagpur on a pilot basis. This project will be implemented in partnership with the school administration. With this program, Aayush intends to provide training, coaching and mentoring to the school students in partnership with school administration, teachers and parents to develop their skills in the sport of running.
We will engage with school authorities of 50 schools of Nagpur to implement the school running program. The schools engaged in this program will range from government, government-aided and private schools. Aayush will make presentation to school authorities and parents to provide information and educate them on sport of running and its benefits and importance for the school children. Aayush will enroll interested students from the respective schools in the 12 week program. The program will develop overall physical fitness and running skills among the students. We aim to enroll around 50 students from every school and hence intend to train around 2500 children in running. A physical fitness check-up will be administered to the school students before starting the program.
We will train the physical fitness coaches and school staff to implement the program. The students will be provided with resources and information on running and training. We will develop an online website/database for monitoring the program. The students and the school staff will be provided with log-in ID’s and password to the online database for logging information on their training. The coaches will only be able to enter details of the training completed by the students of the respective schools. The students will be able to understand and visualize the amount of training they have completed and monitor their progress. The coach in every school will responsible to enter amount of training completed by each student at the end of every week.
We will continuously provide support and oversee the program implementation. The program will train the school students to run 5 kilometers (km). At the end of 20 week program, Aayush will organize a 5 km race for the school students. Certificate and medal will be issued to all the students successfully completing the 5 km run at the end of program.
We do not have any competitors. We plan to support the program by charging a small fees from the students of private schools and develop CSR model to support running among the students of Government school. This will make the program self-sustainable year on year. We need seed funding to start up the work and once the model is piloted, it can be scaled up to more number of schools. The program will also provide jobs to many of the physical education graduates in the region.
We plan to partner with other NGOs who are working in the area of child development, school health and nutrition.
One of the major challenge could be to embed the program in the annual curriculum of the schools. We plan to start the preparation for launch of the program as soon as possible so that we introduce it successfully in the next academic year starting from the month of June. We also plan to hire the coaches/trainers a month in advance so that they are trained properly to do the job.
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