The House and the "Marathon"

The House

I am back in Gulu and I couldn’t be happier. I spent a few nights at the Acholi Ber (Yes, it’s spelled “Ber”) Hotel but realized that my budget couldn’t support the 20,000 Shilling Per Night fee so I decided to move into the house that the group has been renting for the past few weeks. I needed to buy a mattress to actually sleep there so I paid about $15 for a thin foam mattress, more or less a glorified ground pad, and headed over. The house is great, besides bright orange color. We have running water that works most days, and electricity that also works the majority of the time. I am in the largest room of the house with three other people. There is a large chain-link fence with barbed wire and a nice big metal gate to keep us safe. It is pretty close to town as well which suits our needs very well. So the settling in process begins again…

The Gulu Corporate Marathon

A few days after I arrived, the group began seeing advertisements for a Marathon. A few of the people in our group have run marathons before so they were intrigued. After inquiring at the main offices we discovered that a marathon in Gulu apparently means a 10 Kilometer run, suddenly a lot more people were interested. The sign-up fee was $5, and since I missed that annual Thanksgiving Day Boulevard Bolt in Nashville, I felt like I had a long run to make up. My fitness regimen in East Africa has been nothing short of abysmal. I ran once in Kampala and once in Kigali. Every once in a while I will do some pushups and sit-ups but besides that I really have not done much. So the thought of a 10-kilometer run was somewhat daunting but I still felt like it was something manageable. Six of our group decided to wake up early on a Sunday morning and head to the Acholi Inn to participate. We soon discovered that not many people in Gulu come to races for fun, especially when there is a 1 million Shilling ($500) prize on the line. Our competition looked fierce, so we decided a slow and steady tactic would be best, let the fast guy run as they will and we would keep our own pace. Before the race started, thirty minutes late naturally, we were told this was the first ever “marathon” in Northern Uganda.

The starting line was marked by a plastic Coke banner and soon enough, we crossed the line and began our run. Because most of the roads here are dirt, they marked the course was with ash, which showed up very well on the reddish roads. Robbie was in it to compete, so he bolted ahead, and we didn’t see him until later in the day. The rest of us stuck together as a group for the first bit. Stephen, David and I pulled ahead about a quarter of the way in, and Hannah and Allie stayed together. We got totally smoked by 85% of the runners. They were kilometers ahead of us within twenty minutes. But we held our own against the rest of the field and we kept a tally of those we passed (24). The run dragged on and on in the day that was slowly becoming sweltering. The three of us encountered a fellow runner along the way, Patrick, who joined us in our suffering for the last half of the race.

The route itself was awesome. We ran on main roads, down little village paths and by Gulu University campus. It was a really great way to see Gulu. There were plenty of Acholi who found us supremely interesting and watched/followed/greeted us during the day.

As I mentioned the race dragged on and on for an hour and a half, our pace was considerably faster than almost twenty minute miles, so our confusion kept growing, if this was indeed a 10k race, we should have been done a long time ago. Our friend Patrick told us about an hour and fifteen minutes in that the race was 15k, but it still felt longer than that. Our main problem was that we forgot a valuable lesson. Much like “Africa Time,” “Africa distance” is also highly fluid and subject to change. Once we finished the course, we were told that it was actually a half marathon, 21k. What!!! The cross country runner in our group decided that it was actually less than that so we decided to call it an even ten miles. From not running for three months, to finishing a ten-mile jaunt in under ten-minute pace, I was pretty content with my performance. I am assuming my legs will hate me tomorrow. We finished pretty far in the rear but we were happy with what we had done and had a good time while at it.

I hope everyone’s Thanksgivings went extremely well! My time in Africa is growing short, thank you for following the blog for as long as you have!

-Muzungu currently in Gulu nursing his blisters and sore legs after a deceptively long run.