It is day 29 of RED (run every day) January, just three more runs to do to complete the challenge. It’s been a RED of two halves – running in the cold, wet and dark in the UK, then the opposite, warm, sunny and humid weather in India. The latter has been quite tough, firstly finding places to run, then coping with the heat. It’s meant I’ve only managed very short runs here – just enough to keep up with the challenge. 

Our bed and breakfast in Mysore was in a lovely residential area. The street had three small parks running along it, bisected by residential streets. It was lovely and quiet and all the trees in the park made it nice and cool. It was the perfect place to do an early morning run around the three parks.

I was awake yesterday around 6am so had donned my running gear and was out the house by 6.30am. I wasn’t the first up, there were several locals doing their morning walk around the park. At the end of one park was an outdoor gym and a few people were doing their exercise routines. To go between the parks I had to dip out onto the road. It’s a very quiet street so hardly any traffic, but what is still a surprise is that there are cows wandering around freely.

In India, cows are considered sacred and are a symbol of wealth, strength, and abundance. They are revered as givers of life and so are let out to roam freely in the streets during the day. They’re treated with respect so are perfectly safe from the crazy traffic, and for festivals they are decorated with flowers, ribbons and colourful turmeric powder that turns them yellow. Several of the cows we’ve seen have still been adorned from the recent festivals. 

Yesterday I ran with just my watch so wasn’t able to photograph any of the cows. Today I took my phone with me, but typical, there were no cows in sight. They were either having a lay-in or knew I was coming and were feeling camera shy. Fortunately, I took a photo of one yesterday on our walk around Mysuru – and just as we were driving off one appeared so I caught a shot through the car window. I’ll need to keep my eyes out for more cows on the next stage of our journey so I can make a moo-vie next time (sorry, I couldn’t resist!)