Nairobi Marathon 2006
In my last post I said I was quite possibly on my last ride in the colonial era train, since Kenya Railways is being purchased by South African Railways and the antique trains are being replaced. Yet, here it is one week later and I’m taking the same night train back to Kisumu again. I brought my laptop with me to work on my poultry project grant, so I’m using the ten minutes or so of battery life this thing has to type a bit and kill time on the trip.
I normally wouldn’t show off the laptop in the train, since it’s four people to a room and I want my computer with me when I wake up the next morning. However, this time around the room is empty except for me, so I’m living the high life. Since I was sitting in a large second class compartment by myself the conductor wanted to move me to a first class room, which is smaller and much nicer. I was enthusiastic about the idea since it’s always been a dream of mine to get a free upgrade, if not in a plane than at least on a train ride. However, when I went to the first class cabin they sent me to and opened the door a plume of cigarette smoke came pouring out, and a mercenary looking guy with beady little eyes and a Steven Segal style mullet emerged from the smoke. I decided that wasn’t my idea of first class, so second class it is with four beds to myself.
So I was back in Nairobi this weekend to run the half marathon. I’ve been training for awhile but I knew no amount of training would prepare me for a race against Kenyans. These guys are insane. Yet another record was broken as a forest guard named Kiprop, from the Kalenjin tribe just like every other non-Ethiopian world record setter, finished a full marathon….that’s over 26 miles….in two hours and ten minutes. No, I’m not making that up. It was the fastest time ever recorded for a marathon in Kenya, and I was able to watch him run by in a road-runner like blur and take first place. The top ten runners all finished the race in under 2:15, and it was amazing to see. After the race the top finishers were so exhausted they couldn’t even stand, and had to be carried by the medical staff to a place where they could pass out on the ground.
The most incredible part was that the guy in first place had never run a marathon before. He lives in Kapsabet, which is less than an hour ride from my site. About six months ago a friend lent him running shoes and he decided to enter a 10k race, where he placed 10th. Now, after only a half year’s worth of training, he won the Nairobi marathon in a record-breaking time against some of the fastest runners in the world. He has become an instant celebrity and I wish I had been there for the party waiting for him when he returned home.
As for my race, 597 people finished ahead of me, but I was in the top five wazungu and I beat the goal I had set for myself and trained for. I wanted to run a half marathon (that’s 13.1 miles) in under one and a half hours. That’s probably important if I’m ever going to break my long-term goal of a three-hour marathon. I wasn’t very optimistic about it since there were thousands of runners and I had to spend my first mile working around the slower ones that had wedged there way to the front of the starting line. Then, once I was passed them and worked up to my normal clip, I found it hard to breathe and was getting chest pains. Nairobi is around 6000 feet above sea level and more than 1000 feet higher than Kakamega, so the altitude was definitely a factor. I kept running and the chest pains faded a bit, so it just became a matter of tuning out the pain for as long as I could and trying to keep up my pace until the race was finished. The problem with that was that I had no idea how long I had run, and there were no mile markers on the track or people to tell me how much further to go. I was dying and it felt like the race would never end, when finally I made it to the finish line and cursed under my breath about how something could be so satisfying and yet so painful at the same time. Completely exhausted and barely able to walk, but at least better off than the half-dead top finishers (1:01:21 for the half!), I finished the run in 1 hour, 29 minutes, and 47 seconds. Next time it’s a full marathon and I hope to break three hours.
I was proud of myself. The only other Peace Corps volunteer to run finished the race in two hours and forty minutes. Of course, she had just been diagnosed with stomach worms just a few days before and had to stop along the way for a toilet break. All in all I think that she and her worms were the real champions of the day and I told her that. I also suggested that if she had really been serious about the run she should have just crapped her pants and kept on going, but given her condition she didn’t find that as funny as I did.
So not much else to say. Still waiting to find out if Peace Corps will fund my poultry project, still waiting for the last of my paperwork to get the wheelchair fundraiser started, and still hoping to find markets for my farmers network where they will not be taken advantage of by middlemen. Some progress is being made with that at least. I finally found a market for the dried sweet potato chips the farmers have been trying to sell, at 10 shilling a kilo. That is an eighth what they were expecting but at least they have a way to sell of what they have instead of letting them all go to waste. Next week should be busy trying to get my proposals submitted, and I’m looking forward to being done with the writing and the research and actually starting the projects themselves.
I normally wouldn’t show off the laptop in the train, since it’s four people to a room and I want my computer with me when I wake up the next morning. However, this time around the room is empty except for me, so I’m living the high life. Since I was sitting in a large second class compartment by myself the conductor wanted to move me to a first class room, which is smaller and much nicer. I was enthusiastic about the idea since it’s always been a dream of mine to get a free upgrade, if not in a plane than at least on a train ride. However, when I went to the first class cabin they sent me to and opened the door a plume of cigarette smoke came pouring out, and a mercenary looking guy with beady little eyes and a Steven Segal style mullet emerged from the smoke. I decided that wasn’t my idea of first class, so second class it is with four beds to myself.
So I was back in Nairobi this weekend to run the half marathon. I’ve been training for awhile but I knew no amount of training would prepare me for a race against Kenyans. These guys are insane. Yet another record was broken as a forest guard named Kiprop, from the Kalenjin tribe just like every other non-Ethiopian world record setter, finished a full marathon….that’s over 26 miles….in two hours and ten minutes. No, I’m not making that up. It was the fastest time ever recorded for a marathon in Kenya, and I was able to watch him run by in a road-runner like blur and take first place. The top ten runners all finished the race in under 2:15, and it was amazing to see. After the race the top finishers were so exhausted they couldn’t even stand, and had to be carried by the medical staff to a place where they could pass out on the ground.
The most incredible part was that the guy in first place had never run a marathon before. He lives in Kapsabet, which is less than an hour ride from my site. About six months ago a friend lent him running shoes and he decided to enter a 10k race, where he placed 10th. Now, after only a half year’s worth of training, he won the Nairobi marathon in a record-breaking time against some of the fastest runners in the world. He has become an instant celebrity and I wish I had been there for the party waiting for him when he returned home.
As for my race, 597 people finished ahead of me, but I was in the top five wazungu and I beat the goal I had set for myself and trained for. I wanted to run a half marathon (that’s 13.1 miles) in under one and a half hours. That’s probably important if I’m ever going to break my long-term goal of a three-hour marathon. I wasn’t very optimistic about it since there were thousands of runners and I had to spend my first mile working around the slower ones that had wedged there way to the front of the starting line. Then, once I was passed them and worked up to my normal clip, I found it hard to breathe and was getting chest pains. Nairobi is around 6000 feet above sea level and more than 1000 feet higher than Kakamega, so the altitude was definitely a factor. I kept running and the chest pains faded a bit, so it just became a matter of tuning out the pain for as long as I could and trying to keep up my pace until the race was finished. The problem with that was that I had no idea how long I had run, and there were no mile markers on the track or people to tell me how much further to go. I was dying and it felt like the race would never end, when finally I made it to the finish line and cursed under my breath about how something could be so satisfying and yet so painful at the same time. Completely exhausted and barely able to walk, but at least better off than the half-dead top finishers (1:01:21 for the half!), I finished the run in 1 hour, 29 minutes, and 47 seconds. Next time it’s a full marathon and I hope to break three hours.
I was proud of myself. The only other Peace Corps volunteer to run finished the race in two hours and forty minutes. Of course, she had just been diagnosed with stomach worms just a few days before and had to stop along the way for a toilet break. All in all I think that she and her worms were the real champions of the day and I told her that. I also suggested that if she had really been serious about the run she should have just crapped her pants and kept on going, but given her condition she didn’t find that as funny as I did.
So not much else to say. Still waiting to find out if Peace Corps will fund my poultry project, still waiting for the last of my paperwork to get the wheelchair fundraiser started, and still hoping to find markets for my farmers network where they will not be taken advantage of by middlemen. Some progress is being made with that at least. I finally found a market for the dried sweet potato chips the farmers have been trying to sell, at 10 shilling a kilo. That is an eighth what they were expecting but at least they have a way to sell of what they have instead of letting them all go to waste. Next week should be busy trying to get my proposals submitted, and I’m looking forward to being done with the writing and the research and actually starting the projects themselves.
posted by KenyaJoe at 4:19 AM
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