For Hiruni Wijayaratne her native Sri Lanka must be a very small place to live now that she set a Himalayan record of beating a region of over 1.5 billion people by running the marathon and bagging the gold medal making her the first islander to do so at this month’s South Asian Games in Nepal.Unlike the rest of the sports that were contested at the Games that could have fallen below standards, a Marathon is a marathon and the 29-year old Hiruni covered the distance of 42-plus kilo metres in a time of 2 hours, 41 minutes and 24 seconds braving what was said to be a fever and poor air quality showing that she was no ordinary woman.
