tito-miTho

            It’s been a little while since I’ve written. It’s not that I’ve been super preoccupied, just busy getting into a real fluid rhythm here.

            Let me give a re-cap of the Kathmandu Half Marathon. It took place two Saturdays ago – October 2^nd. After much deliberation (perhaps not enough), I decided to register for it. My family didn’t quite understand the idea of paying to run in a race – “They should pay you!” – and they found the idea of me running 21 kms very entertaining. As I mentioned before, there are very few women who run in Nepal, or exercise at all.

            During the week leading up to the race I began to reconsider whether or not it was actually a good idea and how realistic it was that I’d survive the distance, not having run in over a month and not having run more than six miles at a time during the summer. But Friday night came around and I decided I was still committed and thus set my alarm for 4:45am and hit the hay early.            

            There were universal forces working against me however. I woke on my own in the morning and pushed the indigo light on my alarm clock. It was 5:23am! My alarm had not gone off. I was supposed to be at the national stadium before 6:00am! I scrambled out of bed, pulled on my shorts and t-shirt, grabbed my race number bibs (534) and some cab money, and ran downstairs just as my host father was coming up the stairs to my room to wake me. As I laced up my footwear for the race, a pair of barely worn Teva hiking trail shoes, I again wondered if this was a foolish endeavor and if the fact that my alarm had malfunctioned was a sign that I should go back to sleep and forget about the run.

            But, no. I was awake and was going to at least try to get to the start before the races commenced. My host father and I started the ten-minute walk from our house to the chowk (the intersection of my road and the major Ring Road). He was more awake than I and thus more concerned about getting me to the stadium on time so began to pick up the pace to a slow jog. As we approached the chowk, my father hailed the first microbus (more like a minivan) he saw and gave specific directions to the driver. A petite woman sitting by the door glanced up and held up her sneakers (real running shoes) and said she was running as well. My father told me to stick with her just as the door slide closed at the engine started.

            If the alarm failure was a bad omen, happening upon a bus with a woman running in the race was definitely a good sign. She was Nepali (up until that point I didn’t know that Nepali women runners existed) and running the full marathon – her third. As we ate our granola bars, she babbled on in Nepali about running. I think she was as excited as I was to discover a fellow runner on route to the race. I caught parts of it and was actually able to converse a little. She asked me how long I had been training. I said I hadn’t trained. I asked her, she said she had been training for a month. I wasn’t sure if that should make me feel better or worse.

            I was lucky to have found her due to the fact that we had to switch microbuses at one point and then encountered a traffic jam near the stadium and had to disembark and jog the rest of the way. When we arrived at the start, we discovered we had arrived in plenty of time. The run wouldn’t begin for another half hour. I tracked down the other kids from my group running the 5k and wished my new friend good luck in the marathon as I went over to meet up with them. As we did minimal stretching, I checked out my competition. There weren’t nearly as many runners for the half and full marathon as I had been expecting. There seemed to be an even mix of bideshis (foreigners) and Nepalis, but only about seventy people total.

            The time came to begin to congregate behind the starting line. I was finally feeling awake as I waited for the race to begin, as Bideshis were turning on their iPods, and Nepalis tightening the laces of their shoes. It was strange to be so close to the starting line. Unlike the Boston Marathon, where we shuffled along surrounded by throngs of people for twenty minutes before crossing the starting point and turning on our stop watches, I crossed the start of the Kathmandu Half/Full Marathon approximately fifteen seconds after the bell sounded.

            And off we went. Although they did not close the roads completely, the race was fairly well organized by Nepali standards. They had water stations every mile after starting after mile three and had police officers and race officials stationed to direct traffic and point runners in the right direction. The euphoria of running for the first time in over a month set in and kept me from stressing about the amount of miles I had to cover – at least for a little while.

            Running through the streets of Kathmandu was completely different than anything I’ve ever experienced before. The massive amounts of air pollution, as well as the 4000+ ft elevation – on top of the lack of training – made it also one of the most challenging runs I’ve ever done. But that’s what I had been looking for. As I said before, the amount of runners was quite small, and the group thinned out fairly quickly. For the majority of the thirteen miles I was running on my own, with only a few runners in sight. It essentially felt as though I had personal police escorts for a private run through the city. At mile four I passed a goat sacrifice at a local mandir (temple), I dodged bushels of bananas being tossed off the top of a bus at mile six, and I narrowly escaped an attack from some mangy looking street dogs at mile ten.

            I won’t lie and tell you that it was an easy feat to accomplish and that it was pain-free by any stretch of the imagination. I began to develop blisters at mile five, was ready to quit after an hour, and pulled a muscle in my foot at sometime after mile nine. But I made up my mind that I would continue to move my feet until I no longer could. And so I did finish, and did so without walking, and in a time I felt good about. In English, we would call it a bittersweet experience. The Nepali term for it is tito-miTho.