Two days later and I am still recovering. I feel nauseous, dizzy, my head hurts and my legs only seem capable of an awkward hobble at the moment. On top of this I'm being teased by my Ethiopian Colleagues for my shockingly slow time (90minutes exactly). They reckon they could walk faster!... The sad thing is they are probably right! Despite all this, I am really glad I did it... I definitely think it was worth it.
On Sunday morning I joined 35,000 other participants for the Great Ethiopian Run. The race has been held annually in Addis for the last 10 years. Last year I only saw it in passing so this year I was determined to join in. I did have grand visions of training properly for it but despite joining the early morning running club on a regular basis I still hadn't managed much more than 1km without wanting to call it a day. 10km in the blazing heat was clearly going to be a challenge. Although it wasn't the most convincing training schedule things got worse when I was bitten by the dog and wasn't able to run at all for the two weeks preceding the race!
So I arrived at the race on Thursday morning totally unprepared...the only thing in my favour being that after over a year in Ethiopia I had at least acclimatised to the altitude (2500m). It was such a fantastic pre-race atmosphere...groups of people chanting, singing and dancing as they waited for the race to begin. I joined some of my friends fairly near the front and for a few minutes had a fantastic view of the crowds when Mike offered me a seat on his shoulders. The atmosphere got even more exciting when we took off!
It was a bit of a slow start with lots of pushing, shoving and bumping into each other while everyone worked out their own pace but it was accompanied by such a fantastic load of chanting and cheering...it was electric! Very early on a young man started talking to me as we jogged our way away from the chaos, breaking free from those whose only intention was walking. He turned out to be great company and an excellent pacemaker for me and over the course of the next 9km we kept each other going (sadly I managed to lose him in the final stretch). After just a few minutes we managed to work out we had a common friend as he gives one of my volunteer friends Amharic lessons on a regular basis. Small world!
As well as being an excellent motivator my new friend 'Ize Alem' (This world) also proved to be a very useful translator. Throughout the race groups of people were chanting and Ize Alem was able to explain what the chants were about. Some I could just about work out for myself. For example, near the start of the race, they shouted 'Haili quit but we are still running' (this was in reference to the recent news that Haili had retired after the New York Marathon). But others were much less obvious or needed more explanation. Most of the chants were quite politically charged and negative but also quite entertaining. We passed the Pepsi factory and they shouted, 'coca-cola, coca-cola'. We passed a large grain store and they shouted, 'It is empty, the store is empty'. As we squeezed through a bottleneck created as the road narrowed around a beautiful and quite impressive overpass/ underpass section of highway they shouted very sarcastically, 'we are hungry but at least we have roads!'. For the last 9 years the run has followed the same route past lots of government buildings. However, this year they decided to change the route. The official line is that they changed it for the '10th Anniversary' but the more cynical suggest it was because the chants directed at Government buildings were getting out of control.
Whatever your views about the content of the chants, it was still hard not to be impressed by the fact that these people had enough oxygen left in their lungs to shout as they flew past me! I was struggling for every breath and yet people were singing, chanting and blowing horns throughout the race! Although my pacemaker friend and I were going as fast as our little legs would carry us we still found ourselves being overtaken by people in fancy dress. I knew I really wasn't running too well on an uphill stretch when I found myself using a guy in a wheelchair as a pacemaker!
Although my legs ached it really wasn't the running that was killing me. It was just so very HOT!! Any running I'd done in Ethiopia before had been at about 6am...who starts a race like this at 9am?!! It was also an unusually hot day and the winds less strong than normal for this time of year. It really was scorching. I definitely didn't take the most direct route around the course as I skipped from side to side in search of shade or water. At various points around the course people stood with hoses on the side of the road or chucked buckets of water over balconies. I was so grateful for these moments but did find I sometimes wasted several minutes trying to push my way closer to these infrequent water sources. I'm blaming my poor running time on that, AND at the 3 minutes I stopped to listen to my friends band (ISHI BAKA CAIO) play at the 3K marker. They were playing 'sweet home addisababa'...fantastic!
Sixty minutes into the race an Ethiopian friend, Cherinet rang me (very optimistically) to see if I had finished!! He had finished in 47 minutes and spent almost the same amount of time waiting for me! I was only at the 6K marker but it did inspire me to step up my pace...I was determined to make it back in less than an hour and half. I figured it would probably take me about 3 hours to walk the course at my normal walking pace so if I could make it back in half the time that seemed at least acceptable! Cheri continued to ring me every 10 minutes- I don't think he believed me the first time when I said I was only at 6K! - Surely no one could be that slow?!! I met him just after I got my medal. It was lovely to see a friendly face at the end of the race and he was very kind and didn't make any jokes about my speed.
Although I can accept that 90minutes is not exactly a time to be proud of, I still feel very proud of myself for getting through the race. Having never run more than about 1km at a time I feel it was quite an achievement to have made it 10K- let alone in heat and at altitude! I think it is also worth noting that in order to run this race there was a lot of dodging and weaving required to get mast the hoards of people ambling along with no care in the world. It was definately not the easiest introduction to the world of running! After the race I met an English lady who does quite a lot of running back in the UK. She has done several marathons over the years yet she said she found this race harder than most of them. Perhaps her mind was clouded by post-race fatigue and in the light of day she'll remember the marathons were much harder. Perhaps she was just saying it for my benefit. Perhaps she was simply saying it to justify to herself her unusually slow time (78minutes). Or perhaps she really did mean it. Whatever her reasons for making that comment it has made me feel slightly less pathetic as I hobble around campus today still feeling sick and exhausted!
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