PTI
 
Bhubaneswar, May 23: Even as the controversy over five-year-old Budhia Singh's marathon exploits continued to smoulder, yet another child in Orissa provided an awesome exhibition of his talent by running 38 km in five and a half hours.

Dilip Rana, who was not known to be a long distance runner, started at around 3.30 a.m. from Pipli on Monday and ran towards Puri reaching the lion's gate of the Sri Jagannath temple at around 9 a.m.

Strangely enough, Rana, a class eight student of a local school at Pipli, began running only about a fortnight ago.

He practised for about seven hours daily. "He showed good stamina and I was sure he would complete the distance," his uncle cum coach Shaikh Zakir said.

Zakir said that finding that his 12-year-old nephew was wasting time after school examinations, he asked him to start running.

He came off rather well. The boy was not fatigued when completing the race, he claimed.

Dilip, accompanied by about ten youths from Pipli, took only water and grapes on the way as he kept jogging.

Zakir said he would train the boy now with all seriousness as he had the potential to do well.

Budhia, who burst on the scene last year, had already traversed the distance between Bhubaneswar and Puri 11 times, the last being on May 2 when the tiny boy ran a distance of 65 km in 7.02 hours to enter the Limca Book of Records.

The boy's mindboggling achievement, however, was drowned in a clamour for a ban on such performances keeping the age of the child.

The boy was sent by the government for a medical examination with doctors opposing his running such long distances at a tender age which could lead to physical complications.

The matter was now pending before the Orissa High Court with the government pleading before the court that he should be restrained from running.

Meanwhile, a Cuttack-based veteran surgeon has expressed the view that Budhia might be suffering from "adrenal cortex hyperplasia" which required immediate treatment.

The disease is linked to excessive secretion of plasma cortisol, said DN Tripathy, former principal and head of the surgery department of the SCB medical college hospital.

This had contributed to development of immense muscle strength in Budhia which has been enabling to run such long distances, the 82-year-old Tripathy said.

A bio-chemical test could ascertain whether his contention was correct or not, he said.