A couple of months ago, I was telling
one of my friends how tired I was from running that morning when he
imparted this brilliant piece of wisdom. In the past few months, I
have learned the incredible truth of this statement. If you love what
you are doing, you almost never become tired, whether it's running or
anything else you choose to do with your life.
The Kigali International Peace Marathon
was founded in 2005 to commemorate the genocide of 1994 and to draw
people from around the world to Rwanda. This year, it also marked the
first anniversary of the first real race I had ever run in unless you
count a Free Tibet 5-K in my freshman year of college that I ended up
having to walk partway because I was so out of shape.
Not having any real distance running
experience, I googled a training regimen to work with. Running turned
out to be a brilliant way to work my way into my community without
ever really even having to carry on a conversation. People were so
amused to see me huffing and puffing up a hill that they didn't care
that I was rarely about to exchange more than a few short greetings
and soon began to call me “the girl who likes sports,” which, if
not my name, is still a step up from muzungu and they did
eventually get it right. That's not
to say that training was easy. Each time I pushed myself to run a
little farther was a new time that I had to re-introduce myself and
deal with being called muzungu all
over again. It was also pretty hard to figure out how far I was
actually running without an accurate map or the assistance of google
(my village doesn't actually show up on google maps). I ended up
asking people in my village approximately how far different landmarks
were and running to them and thought I was running about 20-K every
few days when one of my priests told me he thought it was more like
12-K and I ran my brains out the next day. I think in retrospect that
I was probably right. I didn't always stick to my schedule, but I
worked pretty hard at it, and by the night before race day, I felt
fully prepared and completely entitled to a full pizza all to myself
at one of Kigali's finer Italian restaurants.
The race began at
7:00 in the morning at Kigali's Amahoro Stadium and it was full of
abazungu. In one morning, I saw more white people in that
stadium than I think I have seen in the past eight months, all
wearing under armor, running shorts, sweat bands, and iPods. Most of
these people were connected to an NGO in some way or another. World
Vision, an international Christian development organization was there
in force, wearing bright orange team t-shirts and helping to organize
the event. I was decently relieved to see that the race was also
popular with local Rwandans as well as internationals. Before the
race started, we spotted a group enthusiastically circled around
doing a team warm up and stretch that seemed to be making use of
every part of the body the facilitator could possibly think of. I'm
not sure what some of their exercises were meant to accomplish, but
they were having fun. Not too far from them, tiny, sinewy runners
from Kenya were doing sprints.....as a warmup. The last group was
comprised of kids. Some were there just to watch, but quite a few
were in it to race. A few second year Peace Corps Volunteers had
pulled together a grant to bring students from their school to Kigali
as part of a health and nutrition project and to run the relay, in
which each runner runs approximately 6 miles of the race. They wore
matching t-shirts with their names creatively painted on the back and
were just as happy to cheer on PCVs from the sidelines as they were
to cheer for each other. Ideally, I would like to be running the full
next year, but seeing those kids at race day has inspired quite a few
other volunteers to get their students together to do the same thing
next year.
We had been told to expect the race to
start late, so when it was ready to go at 7:30, only half and hour
after is was supposed to, a friend and I were scrambling to get to
the starting line after searching the stadium for an unlocked
bathroom with toilet paper (there were none, by the way). Once the
runners took off, a good deal of the diversity separated itself out
and turned into a race between Kenyans and a race between everyone
else. It turns out that the sprints I thought the Kenyan team had
been running prior to the race weren't sprints at all. That was the
pace they intended to run the full marathon. Thankfully, the racing
organization was prepared for this. They had hired motorcycles to
lead the pack and honk to get other runners off of the load as they
lapped them. I'm pretty certain that the first Kenyan to finish the
full marathon did so a couple of minutes before I finished running
the half and the second runner-up overtook me literally thirty
seconds from the finish line.
My own race went well by my own
standards. I finished in 2:13.04 and ran the entire way and, for my
first half, that's good enough for me. The people that came to watch
made the race a lot of fun. The race organizers gave out bottled
water, bananas, and some pretty nasty looking sponges to cool off
with at specific checkpoints and they were filled with kids there to
snatch peoples' bottles when they dropped them. They got a pretty big
kick out of the muzungus that could speak to them in
Kinyarwanda. Besides the kids, there were a bunch of World Vision
volunteers there to cheer people on, which was particularly helpful
up one of the larger hills, a group of senior citizens handing out
cups of water by the stadium (a good idea since a lot of the water
checkpoints were running out), a dread-locked and spandex leotard
wearing American there to cheer on his girlfriend, and a few
early-bird PCVs who stood by the sidelines and took pictures for the
runners.
After I finished my race, I hung around
the stadium, waiting for friends to come in and eating the free
bananas and biscuits they were giving out at the finish line on the
ground. Just before the last runners came in, it started to downpour
and they decided to give out the awards. They had a film crew there
to project the event onto the large screen in the stadium, but they
unfortunately had not placed their cameras too well so they ended up
showing the backside of a woman from Sweden for well over 5 minutes
as she gave her address to the crowd. So, it wasn't the best of
closing ceremonies, but we still managed to have fun taking pictures
on top of the podium with a bunch of kids and waiting for the
stragglers that got stuck in the rain.
For the first time in Rwanda, I really
felt like I deserved to treat myself so I ended the day with a buffet
lunch complete with macaroni and cheese, pita chips with guacamole, a
delightful fresh salad bar, french toast, bread rolls, fruit tarts,
and drinks by the poolside at the Mille Collines, the ultimate in PCV
and post-race bliss.
