The barefoot daily sprint between her mud-walled hut and school through the dusty fields was the 11-year-old girl's first date with freedom.

It wasn't merely running, her former coach says.

The year was 2001. A yearning had unconsciously grown on the slim, shy girl to cross the boundaries set by an entrenched patriarchy all around her, say her schoolteachers.

Sixteen years on, when Lalita Babar was leaping over the five barriers in the 3,000-metre steeplechase, the teachers and her family were thinking of the countless and far more challenging hurdles in life that she had to scale to reach the final at the Rio Olympics.

Lalita, 27, failed to win a medal, finishing tenth, behind gold medallist Ruth Jebet of Bahrain by over 22 seconds.

For Mohi village in Maharashtra's Satara, a daughter -not a son - was swivelling the spotlight to a belt that literally stayed trapped in a "rain shadow". Falling on the wrong side of the monsoon divide, Mohi is perennially parched, separating it from the water-guzzling sugarcane fields in the prosperous half of Satara district.

"She tried her best," Lalita's father Shivaji Babar (a Maratha surname) said at their home that the family recently built on their 12-acre farm. "We knew it was going to be tough," he said, "but we had hoped for a medal."

Fifteen years ago, Shivaji's principal worry would not be an Olympic medal but rains and crops. "I would worry about failed rains, fodder scarcity and a bad crop," he said. "Lalita changed our lives."

Her mother Nirmala has neatly preserved every single newspaper clipping that celebrated Lalita's race somewhere. "We haven't met her in a long time," she said, "she'd do well wherever she is."

It's been six years, her mother said, that Lalita has been training in Bangalore to be a better athlete. She has managed to come home rarely during this period.

"She would run, run and run," her uncle Ganesh Babar recalled. "On days she did not practise on the school tracks because of holidays, she would stroke the hand-pump in our farm knowing well that it won't yield water. She would practise in between helping her mother with domestic chores and me or my brothers in the farm."

The bubbly child just wanted to break free and burn the tracks. The village school was not a calling for education but a gateway to the open ground, a shelter from the harsh realities of an impoverished life in Mohi.

The transformation began in 2001 when she took admission in Girls High School, Mohi.

Around the same time, two young men, Bharat Chavan and Dnyanesh Kale, had joined the school as teachers. They would double as physical education coaches, given their sporting background.

Sitting in their school office on Thursday - a holiday for Rakshabandhan- the two teachers laughed, chuckled, joked and then marvelled at the race Lalita ran from Mohi to Rio.

"This school started in 2000 and had no government grant. Lalita came to us in 2001 in the 5th grade, we had no salaries back then," Kale said.

"We had to do something spectacular other than academics to get the government aid and secure our salaries. Sport, athletics at that, was the inevitable option," the teacher added.

A rectangular patch - actually a farm - became the school's track and field. The girls from the poor farming families would be their best bet to get grants, they thought.

"Before and after class every day, we'd exercise here, on this ground - kho-kho, running, and all such games that need no money," Chavan recalled. "It wasn't long before we spotted Lalita. She had exceptional talent and she stood out," he said. She was fast, she had stamina and she had temperament.

The two teachers then changed her event: from kho-kho to long-distance running. That, Kale said, was a decision he would always cherish. The Indian athletics coach changed her event to steeplechase; it was, Kale said, a masterstroke.

The teachers' future was linked with the school team's performance in inter-school events. In a couple of years, the team was getting noticed, which helped the school secure government grants and the teachers a salary.

"We got salaries because of girls," Kale said. "There was something about their struggle," Chavan said. "They didn't know how to give up."

By 2003, the teacher-student partnership was on a firm footing. But some of the parents did not want their daughters to run in shorts and stay at distant places with the teachers.

It wasn't easy to win the trust of the parents and persuade them to allow the girls to wear shorts, Kale said. In the process, many girls dropped out. "Lalita is a milestone for this region," Kale said. "You will not realise that unless you've lived in those farms, slept in dingy mud-littered shanties, gone hungry a few days, unaware that there's a world beyond our own small world."

Lalita had no one to draw inspiration from. She inspired herself, he added.

In order to gauge the enormity of her rise from the dusty farm tracks of Mohi, Kale said, you must understand the social and economic contexts in which she grew up.

Two stories best capture these. The first is of Vidya Jadhav, Lalita's junior by four years. The two teachers felt Vidya had the potential to reach where Lalita is today but could not because of family pressures.

The second is of Lalita's youngest sister, who was named "Nakosa" - or the unwanted - before she earned herself a new name recently: Bhagyashree, the one who brings good fortune.

Satara is among the districts in India with a skewed sex ratio. It stands at 906 girls per 1,000 boys today, worse than the 2001 ratio of 912:1000. Many families used to name their third or fourth daughters "Nakosa" or "Nakoshi" - the unwanted.

In 2011, a state government campaign renamed over 200 such girls in Satara alone. Maan tehsil, in which Mohi falls, had some 53 such girls, according to a district administration report.

Asked why they had named their third daughter Nakosa, Lalita's father smiled nervously. It was a grave mistake, he admitted.

"Girls are no less than boys," he said. "Bhagyashree has joined the police force. Jayashree (the second daughter) is in the railways in Mumbai. Lalita too got a job in the railways, and is running in the Olympics, what more can a father ask for?"

Lalita's youngest brother Digambar is finishing his graduation and all her cousins, including five girls, not only study but are in the athletics teams of their schools and colleges.

Until 2007, when Lalita, then 18 years old, was offered a job in the railways, the Babars had struggled to fund her passion. As she began to win races and earn for herself, the financial constraints eased up. Lalita began to fund her own living and training, at times also supporting her family.

The Babars are a close-knit family - three brothers, their wives and 11 children. There is still no pucca road to their home. Lalita is the eldest of all siblings. Her father was mostly outside, working as a truck driver. His younger brother Ganesh would take care of the family and the farm, husband cattle and goats and raise the children.

When Lalita was selected for her first major national event in 2005 at Korba, Chhattisgarh, the family sold goats to fund her trip. She returned with a gold medal.

"I recall one event when we had no money to reach the venue," Kale said. "We asked a close friend to lend money and his tuk-tuk (a vehicle) to take the girls."

When they reached there, the 3000-metre race was about to start. The two coaches had to persuade the organisers to allow Lalita to run.

Quickly, she slipped into her sporting shorts on the ground, and joined the participants, barefoot. When the race ended, she was a lap ahead of the runner-up. "She just ran like a horse that day," Kale said.

Lalita bought her first pair of shoes after she was prevented from running barefoot at a national track event in 2005 in Visakhapatnam.

If lack of money was a problem, so was the threat of early marriage.

"It was Ganesh Babar who backed Lalita, encouraged her to run and convinced her parents not to marry her off early," Kale said.

"I felt she was cut out for something big. I did not know what it was, but I would always think we must support her," Ganesh said. "When differences cropped up in the family over her marriage, I would prevail upon the family to allow Lalita to pursue her sporting career and they'd agree."

That was not the case with Vidya, the girl the teachers felt was cut out for a bigger canvas. Need to find a job - she is still looking for one - forced her to give up sports.

The year was 2005. The venue: Diwad village, a non-descript place in Satara. The event: a 5,000-metre race.

A seventh-grader, slim and short, upon the insistence of her two teachers, decided to challenge her idol, a Class XI senior who was clearly way ahead of the other girl in age, speed and strength.

Memories of that race, which she eventually lost to her senior that day, came rushing to Vidya, now 23, her face glowing as she spoke about it. Challenged by Vidya, Lalita, four years older, had to push hard to win the race. Both ran barefoot.

Vidya had been pitted against Lalita in the under-19 group though the younger teen's usual category was under-15. Vidya had become the star athlete at Girls High School, Mohi, after Lalita passed out and joined a junior college in a neighbouring village.

"Lalita- tai won the race but she was tired," Vidya said in her dimly lit home in Mohi. "I lost the race but I won many hearts that day."

"I felt sad that she did not bring home the medal," Vidya said on Thursday evening, referring to Lalita's Rio final. "But I am very, very proud of her."

Watching Lalita run in Rio she felt as if her own dreams had come true, Vidya said.

Asked if she regretted opting out of a promising sporting career, Vidya said: "Yes, I do."

Vidya won't blame her parents or society for not backing her up, Chavan said. "I won't blame the girl for her decision to give up but I feel sorry for her and many others who had Lalita-like promise but had to discontinue playing."

After Class XII, most girls in this part of rural India either get married or enrol themselves for a diploma course to get jobs in primary schools.

"For every Lalita, there are hundreds of promising girls who give up sports because of family and societal pressures," Kale said. "That may now change with Lalita's inspiring example."