When I asked Vamini, “What drives you?”
She reflected and said, “I think we are all about the choices we make in life. I made a choice in 2011 and started following my passion and today I feel that was the best decision I made for myself. Nothing compares to the feeling of being happy and satisfied with your own self. I was wasting my life before these years”.
Her love of cycling connects her to her inner self, giving her a sense of fulfilment that she can’t really express in words. She has been cycling ever since she was a kid, but when she came second in a 35km mountain bike race few years back, she got serious about things.
Since then there has been no looking back.
She contemplates, “Biking gives me a reason to experience the roads less travelled. Some of the most beautiful places that I have seen while I rode my bike would not have been possible on foot or in the car. And there’s a lot more to explore. I ride a mountain bike that’s designed to be reliable on rocky terrain and mountains. It’s appropriate that my car costs just a bit more than my bike; a sign that I’m nurturing my passion.”
A self confessed sports and adventure junkie, besides being an award winning mountain biker she is also an champion at trekking and car rallying; here she came second in the interstate competition, free falling, scuba diving, bungee jumping and wildlife photography. With all this she manages a demanding corporate job with Royal Bank of Scotland in the Resilience department, family commitments and a marriage.
She says, “All women have many roles to play, especially if they are married and working at the same time. Balancing it all with just 24 hours in a day is always a task and that's where being clear about your priorities and pursuing them with dedication, commitment and discipline is absolutely essential.”
Hero MTB Himalaya is Asia’s toughest multi-stage mountain biking race. In 2013 she participated in this race. After six days of a gruelling ride and despite a life-threatening accident, she came fourth in the women’s solo category.
On day five, riding through a steep, slushy and narrow path, she met with a fatal accident. She slid off a cliff and landed on the ledge; with her bike falling on top of her, injuring her neck and back. With no one around or any help in sight she dragged herself out and pushed her bike back on the track. Crawling onto the path and limping back to the finish line, this is when she realised, “To continue the race that day and eventually finish it gave me confidence, that I can handle anything life throws my way. I learnt that our mind and body is capable of achieving a lot more than we think it can. We just have to believe in ourselves.”
The next challenge she decided to take on was for the longest cycling in a foreign country (Woman) and break all records. Her colleagues’ became her great support system; especially her boss and team member, Mr Venkatesh Sriraman and Satish Chaudhary. During her extensive training period building up to the challenge, she worked flexible hours and used the other time to get up at 4 am to train for hours. She tells, “RBS is one place that encourages employees to have a life outside the bank.”
All this strenuous effort paid off and today this 31 years old is a Limca Book of Records holder in “Longest cycling in a foreign country (Woman); she covered 1,111 km in nine days in Sri Lanka, making it the longest bicycle journey by a woman in a foreign country. Setting out from Colombo on June 14, 2015, she passed through Batticaloa, Trincomalee, and Puttalam and returned to Colombo on June 22, 2015.”
On completion she told Sportskeeda, “Time will pass anyway. You can either spend it creating the life you want or spend it living the life you don't – the choice is yours”
This year, Indian Express reported, “Vamini Sethi, was one of the few civilian participants to successfully complete the annual Siachen Civilian trek 2016 held in September this year.”She told Indian Express, “This is the scariest thing. You can be physically very fit, but medical conditions are not under your control. You can be sent back for this. I remember Colonel Hariharan telling us at the beginning that if we control our medical conditions, the Army will take care of our physical fitness. I didn’t come all this way here to go back home.”
It is tough being an Indian sports woman, but when she decided to make her dreams come true, everyone else around her started supporting her, seeing her resilience, confidence and spirit.
Her mentor Mr. Rajesh Kalra has been giving her the confidence to go as far as she can. Very often she has told him that she won’t give up on her own self, till he doesn’t do so.
Without doubt she attributes her success to the strength that she draws from her family. Her father made her believe in her own self and told her that “dreams don't work out on their own, until we make them come true for own self.”
Her husband is her biggest support system and he helped her get where she is now. He supports her selflessly, is extremely secure about her being independent and successful. He equally takes pride in her achievements. She shares, “Our life partners play a huge role in our successes in life and I consider myself lucky to have Vinod as my life partner.”
Encouraging other women to go and make their dreams come true, Vamini urges them, “Give it all that you have and then give it some more. Start believing in yourself and even the sky will not be the limit then. Always finish what you have started. Fear is nothing but a state of mind.”