It has been a ridiculously busy weekend. Early Saturday morning, I left to go to mbewa to meet up with some friends and run the porters race trail. When I reached the city, I took a “hitch” to Andy’s house. This entailed climbing into the back of a raggedy white truck loaded with people and bags. I had to stand up the entire ride (10km) and hold onto a bar behind the cab of the truck. I had no foot room to brace myself and felt like I was going to fall out the side about half of the ride. There were two men sitting on top of the cab right in front of me who insisted on speaking to me in Chichewa the entire ride once they found out that I was not an azungu. When I said I was a health volunteer, one began asking me all kinds of questions about HIV, condom use, contracting the disease, and if we have it in America. It was a long ride in, taking forever on the bumpy dusty roads. I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to pay since it was not a mini bus, but they still charged me 700 kwatcha when I got off (which is expensive for a ride…about $2, but we live off of $150 a month).
When I got to Andy’s house, my friends were ready to go. We walked over to the start of the trail with the guide we had hired. The beginning was a steady incline, but not too bad. The boys left me immediately though. They’d been training more for this. The race path turned off of the main road then onto a steep trail. I climbed, trying to run sporadically for the first 15-20 minutes. Then the road got so steep that I was taking breaks every 5 minutes, then 2 minutes, then 1 minute, then every 10 steps or so. Running wasn’t even on my mind anymore. I was just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I felt like I was on a stair stepper machine. When I stopped, I would turn around and check out the view. The ground and town where we started got smaller and smaller and the view got wider and more incredible the further up I climbed. It was incredible. I kept reminding myself that I am in Africa! Since the boys were way ahead of me and out of my site, they waited on me at the top of the steep climb.
When we got to the top, we were able to run for a little bit because it flattened out. We had taken an extended break at the junction, so my legs were full of lactic acid and felt super dead and flat. We were only 7.5 km into the 25 km trail. The rest of the path, we walked a lot. Every uphill killed my back (thanks to my back injury in steeplechase), and the boys had to wait for me many times. I ate my only granola bar that I had stashed in my waist pouch about 3 hours in. I also had a small camera and took some pictures along the way. It was a gorgeous view, but I couldn’t stop thinking about how much further we had. Around halfway, I was so hungry and my body hurt so badly that I wasn’t sure I would make it! We stopped at streams and drank from them. We hiked and hiked. There were lots of chunks of quartz at the top of the plateau. We started down. The path was very steep and littered in large rocks. I was grabbing at everything to keep my balance and prevent me from slipping down. My knees hurt from constantly jumping down from rocks and pounding on them. I swear they swelled up to twice their normal size. All I could think about was food—not surprising for me.
Our guide had disappeared about an hour and half into the run, and we had no idea where he’d gone. When we assumed we were near the bottom, we sat for a minute to scope out a split in the path. Suddenly he showed up again. I asked how much further it was. He said it was 1km. Surprised and thrilled, I took off jogging. It was definitely more than that, but I made it down to the bottom. The trail ends at the Likabula pools, so we all stripped off our shoes and extra clothes and jumped in. The water was that extreme cold that makes you gasp for air when you rise up out of the water. After we jumped in, we went to get cold fantas and cokes. They were so refreshing. That night, we celebrates with Carlsbergs and spaghetti covered in cheese and meat sauce and scanned the sky for constellations. Mbewa is very flat, so the entire milky way is visible stretched across the sky. Even though the day was, physically, one of the hardest days of my life, it was a nice evening spent with good company and many laughs!
