Even as the controversy over five-year-old Budhia Singh's marathon exploits continued to rage, a young boy in Orissa has ran 38 kilometres in five and a half hours.

Dilip Rana, who was not known to be a long distance runner, started at around 0330 IST from Pipli and ran till Puri, reaching the lion's gate of the Sri Jagannath temple at around 0900 IST.

Strangely enough, Rana, a class 8 student of a local school at Pipli, began running only about a fortnight ago.

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He practiced 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 his 12-year-old nephew 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 youngsters from Pipli, took only water and grapes on the way as he kept jogging. Zakir said he would now train the boy with all seriousness as he had the potential to do well.

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

The boy's mind-boggling achievement, however, was drowned in a clamour for a ban on such performances.