The First Forty-Two

The First Forty-Two

Last week I ran the Soweto Marathon, a 42 kilometer (26.2 mile race). Soweto is a township of Johannesburg, South Africa, and this was my first time to experience the city outside of the airport. The race is advertised as an interesting and surprisingly good way to get a flavor of Soweto, which, as once the center of apartheid resistance and home to Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, has a significant place in South African history.

Registering was easy enough and I even arranged to have the day off from work post race. But getting myself there was trickier. As much as I like to believe I am an incredibly lucky person and can outrun the bad guys (and gals), even I know that to be in taxi rank at night in Johannesburg is an idiotic risk (although I did try to manipulate a few people into admitting it can’t be that bad). I couldn’t find any other marathoners in Maseru, but as my search for a lift circulated through the expatriate grapevine, about a dozen people conspired to keep me out of the exhaust fume, mugging zone jungle of public transportation. In the end it was my supervisor’s wife’s colleague’s friend who gave me a ride. People were appalled that I considered arriving in Jo’burg in the evening alone on public transportation, but no one thought twice at the idea of me driving across international borders with a man I’d never met before.

We planned to leave on the afternoon of Halloween, but being the last Friday of the month (pay day), I knew that the lines at the border would be hours long, so I went there at 5 am when the border post is fairly deserted. I was following the popular but shady advice of stamping out of Lesotho and into South Africa, and then coming back into Lesotho without getting a stamp. Thus you come back to the border any time that day and can skip the lines because you already have a stamp with the correct date. Even though people do it all the time, I felt like a fugitive and was utterly paranoid that all of the immigration police were intentionally surrounding me. (They weren’t. They were more or less sleeping while standing up). In any case, no one paid any attention at all to me as I “snuck” out of one country and into another, but just in case, I tried to look as lost and stupid as possible (“Wait, which way is South Africa? Oh, right, there’s that gargantuan ‘Welcome to South Africa’ sign. But how the heck am I supposed to get there from here?’ Oh, the sidewalk. Ok, well thanks for your help”).

After a day of over-stimulating Halloween festivities at the school, I was off. We drove into the city at twilight, and it was the closest thing I’ve seen to America since I watched New York City peel away from the airplane when I took off in June. The highways were like those you’d see anywhere back home, and lights glowed in the windows of high rises. Melville, the neighborhood of Jo’burg we arrived in, reminded me a bit of Williamsburg, Brooklyn- bars and bookshops and bakeries and nice restaurants and a tattoo parlor. About a dozen of us from Maseru-dwelling foreigners met up for dinner, where I was really excited to try ostrich, but was really disappointed with what ostrich actually is- a slab of red meat (although surely not to those with a more sophisticated carnivorous palate). A woman sitting across from me kept saying over and over again that she couldn’t believe we haven’t met. She seemed really distressed by this fact, like I was missing very important meetings of the Pale People in Lesotho Club. The following night- the night before the race- I met up with a friend and he and his family loaded me up with my favorite carbs- pasta, couscous and chocolate cake.

On race day, my biggest initial concern was how to adjust my brain to pace myself in terms of kilometers. Even in cross country races or road races in which the total distance is measured in kilometers (a 5K race, for example), the splits are still marked by mile. Until now, I never thought about how weird it was to talk about 6 minute miles in a five-kilometer race. ANYway, this shouldn’t have been my concern because although there were kilometer markers, there were no clocks to go with them and I didn’t even have a watch. Plus, at about the time I realized that I would have no way of timing myself (kilometer 3 or so), something inside my body I have yet to identify was threatening to turn off and I decided I would be lucky just to finish. I didn’t get any blisters, the chafing was not as comprehensive as it could have been, I had no pain and even my knee that gets funky from time to time behaved itself, but I was dragging myself the whole way. The woozier I felt, the slower I went, so the later it got and the hotter it got, which made me even more woozy.

But the internal revolts I felt in my body are hardly as interesting as what I saw (blurred vision and all) and heard around me. Lining up for the race, I strategically positioned myself alongside a circle of runners singing and dancing. The race officials gave all of the instructions in Zulu and Afrikaans, and if they were also speaking English, between the crackle of the sound equipment and South African accents, I didn’t recognize it as my language. So even as I felt myself inching forward with the crowd I didn’t know the race had started. Suddenly I was passing over the starting line through a stream of confetti, boxed behind a man whose shirt said, “I run for Jesus.”

It was 6 am and we were in a residential neighborhood of tiny one-story homes. People were standing outside in their pajamas looking doubtfully at us. One large woman in too-big, metallic gold negligee was holding out a tub of Vaseline for the runners. We ran by a hair salon and a man on the roof blew his horn for us. Passing the gas station all of attendants looked up from their pumps or from underneath cars and cheered. On street corners here and there, people stood holding messages scribbled on cardboard signs, and shouted in languages I didn’t recognize. At nearly every kilometer, people of all ages handed out plastic bags of water. When the crates of water emptied, mothers put their babies inside to sleep and pulled them into the shade. There were also the same sachets filled with sticky, colored sugar water and a dozen meters from each “juice” table were a slew of neighborhood kids begging the runners for their drinks. One man grabbed about ten and carried them for several minutes before depositing them into the hands of shirtless, sweaty children who shrieked with delight.

As the day wore on, the heat from the sun was staggering and relentless. The lack of trees along the route, and the black asphalt made it all the more suffocating. Sympathetic spectators stood on their lawns spraying hoses at the runners. Others filled buckets with water, dipping a single mug into it again and again, offering it to any runner passing by. Still others invited the passing crowd into their homes to use the toilets or fill their bottles from the tap. I was a bit wary of the share-the-mug-with-a-thousand-other-people method, and I had a feeling that if I went inside someone’s home, I would never want to leave. So I drank sachet after sachet of water that tasted more like the plastic bag than any other experience I’ve had with H2O.

As the morning wore on, I saw many more people going about their daily business who just happened to be in the path of the race. Young people hawked produce on the side of the road, old ladies walked out of churches singing and I even went by a backyard wedding. For several kilometers I ran alongside a man with yellow sunglasses and long dreadlocks, who periodically told me to “take it easy baby.” At one point we ran through the neighborhood in which he lives, and he pointed out his neighbors, his doctor, his minister among the spectators to me. I wouldn’t have guessed he knew any of the spectators if he hadn’t said anything, not because they weren’t cheering for him, but because they were cheering for everyone. All of the spectators were just screaming for the runners as if they knew them personally. Part of that is just marathon culture, but there was a much more intense level of commitment to the runners on the part of the spectators than I’ve seen in New York or Philly or Boston. And I think I can say the same for the level of commitment from one runner to another. When I finished the race, I stood swaying in the grass, trying to unsuccessfully open a bottle of water. An equally sweaty and exhausted, if more lucid, South African mom in shining armor scooped me up into her car and drove for ages to her home for lunch and then way back across the city to my hotel. So ended my first 42 kilometers in South Africa.