In the opening scene of Cool Runnings, the guy heads out at the break of dawn for an early morning run. We see the full sun slowly rising up over the sea, almost as if it is being born out of the ocean water. The dude sprints past a pack of giggling children offering up high fives, across a white, sandy beach and down a palm tree lined dirt road. He passes by a friendly group of old and weathered fishermen in their sailboats and then through an admiring group of chatty women carting baskets on their heads. All the while he greets everyone with a good morning and a wave.
Except for the fact that I am in Africa, white, a girl, geriatric-ly slow, and sans a really sweet Jamaican accent, that scene truly serves as a pretty accurate representation of my running situation here in Mozambique.
Running.
I always thought it was such a silly ritual. For years I watched my brother run and run, all the while thinking he was a masochist with entirely too much time on his hands to be devoting so many hours to running. Running from nothing and for nothing. Just running.
I don’t know what it was--maybe I took one of my brother’s crazy pills, but one day I too, just felt like running. It was relaxing and calming and made me feel good. I wish I could say I was born to run…that I was a natural but let’s be honest, I’m slow, have terrible form, have to wear custom orthotics, refuse to do speed intervals, prefer flat terrain, and once had a fellow runner on my favorite trail convinced that I was training for the Special Olympics. Let’s just say I will not be shipping out to run Boston anytime soon. Still, no matter how slow I am or how often my knees give me problems or how awkward and uncoordinated I may appear, I still just love running.
So, upon arriving in Angoche, my home for two years, one of my first tasks was to scout running routes. As luck would have it, I found a nice little dirt road that leads out past the salt fields to a beautiful stretch of open beach. On early mornings it is usually me, the road, a few fishermen headed out to sea and several small groups of women off to farm their little plots of land.
Those first couple months were definitely an adjustment. Because I arrived in the heart of summer here, I tried to be out on the trail no later than 4:45 A.M. to try to beat the heat. Some days though, even at that time, the temperatures were well within the 110s.
And when I first started running on the road, people were downright confused. Every single person I encountered stopped dead in their tracks and stared at me as I trotted on by. Little children who had never seen a white person before were terrified. In fact, several children out of sheer horror at the sight of me burst into tears and ran screaming for their mothers.
Once the kids realized I had no intentions of eating them or harvesting their organs or taking them off to the Land of Tall White Girls or making them wear clothes, they became infinitely friendlier. Now there is a core group of kids who will wait on the side of the road for me when I pass by. My site mate Erin and I, on a run together once, taught them the concept of a high-five. Now, every run the kiddos will see me hobbling along from a distance, and they will mobilize to form their high five line. They make me feel like Jackie Joyner-Kersee…that is until some of them start to accompany me on my run and eventually have to slow down to a glacial pace so I can keep up. Quasi naked, barefoot, and sometimes with loads on their heads, those kids can still run faster than I can.
Besides the kids, I have another favorite part of my run. You see, there’s this section in the road where some mornings, if I time it just right, the full African sun will be coming up, silhouetting a row of women working their plots of land, the alternating downswing of their hoes operating like a cog in perfect rhythm. The coconut trees create a sort of canopy and the reflection of the water from the salt fields makes the women in their beautiful capulanas appear almost angelic. I half expect a giraffe to pop its head up and serenade me with some Bob Marley or Justin Bieber song. That’s how surreal it is--that picture for me--it is so beautiful and quintessentially African it should be on a calendar or in the optimistic closing scene of one of those Sponsor-An-African-Child-for-75-Cents-a-Day commercials.
I try to relish the beauty in these vistas on my runs, though, because at any moment I could happen upon someone going to the bathroom on the side of the road. There is a big lack of latrines in the neighborhood closest to the road I run on so a lot of people just stumble out in the early morning for a public pooping exhibition. I have to be careful of fecal matter everywhere I step.
Along with the high-fiving kids, I have found that there is a solid group of people that has become accustomed to seeing me running and will keep tabs on me. If I start out thirty minutes later than usual, I will hear at least three or four people when I pass by tell me "Atrasou hoje" (You were late today). Once, after being away from site for a week, Erin informed me that she had been inundated with concerned folks from the trail wanting to know if I was sick because they hadn’t seen me out running.
Having these folks start to understand this crazy ritual and get used to seeing us running for other reasons than to avoid a careening chapa driver or to catch a chicken gone awol, well, it gave us an idea. You see, every year Angoche commemorates its founding with three days of festivities including a motorcycle race, a sewing contest, a sail boat race, live music, speeches, traditional dancing, and…a foot race. Historically, they have never had a woman enter the 10K foot race because it is reserved for “homens fortes” only strong men. Women, we were told, were physically incapable of running that distance. Nearly every person gave us this forecast.
So, what did we do? We signed up and entered the men’s race.
Angoche Day quickly arrived, and I found myself at the starting line in front of thousands of gawking Mozambicans, my ashen legs seeing the light of day for the first time in 11 months, getting ready to go all Title IX on their asses.
I have never felt so exposed, spectaclized (yes, I just invented that verb: spectaclized, as in to be made a spectacle of) and so damn determined.
They blew the whistle, and off we went. The race was a continuous loop 6 times around the main drag. The streets were lined the whole way. Some people cheered, some clapped, some hollered out marriage proposals, everyone stared. Not only were we women running in a man’s race, we were also reportedly the first foreigners to participate in an Angoche Day activity. The race was supposed to start at 8 am and in true Mozambican fashion, it started at 11:30, quite possibly the hottest time of the day. We all crossed the finish line to the incredulity of so many. When my friend passed one of the men (she eventually won third place and was even interviewed by the radio) his response was “Como?”-- HOW? That was the response of so many…Como? How was it possible that women could do the exact same thing as the men?
We soon became the talk of the town. Most people seemed to get a big kick out of it--I’m not sure if it was because I was running or because I was wearing shorts and they could see my knees. Some people congratulated me, some told me that the whole race my face resembled an exhausted goat just after giving birth, others told me I embarrassed them because I didn’t win. They didn’t understand why I didn‘t just quit after someone had already won. I explained our goal was to show that we could run the same distance as the men and faster than a lot of them. I just wanted to show them and all the marginalized girls here that they shouldn’t listen to those nay-sayers who are constantly telling them they are incapable of doing something.
With the Angoche Day race over, I am back to trotting along on my road at my own pace with no plans of using running to make any more grandiose statements on gender equality. Just running to run.
It’s funny to me that in the states there are magazines and stores and doctors solely devoted to runners. It would be ridiculous to me if I hadn’t at one point actually used the services of all three of those things. For the longest time I was so convinced running was a science. And like force equals mass times acceleration, maybe it was a scientific equation I would never master.
I think though, that after a year of running in Africa (my Nike pedometer thingy tells me I’ve logged over 1,000 miles in Mozambique) I am starting to understand why celebrities who want to run a marathon or something choose to come here to train. Whether it’s with Maasai runners in Kenya or giggling children in Mozambique, Africa makes me realize how innate and beautiful and cadenced running is--and how anyone can do it. I don’t think it’s a science. I think it’s music.
