The Rest of Cape Town

Unlike any other fellow Maseru expat I am aware of, I don’t love Cape Town. I was told by my former boss that Cape Town is good for when you need to get to Europe (I believe his euphemism for ‘civilization’) but can’t get to Europe. He warned me not to go to soon after my arrival in Maseru, or I would be unimpressed. I went for the first time about 10 months after my arrival on the continent, and then again exactly a year later. I still wasn’t impressed. It has mountains and ocean and winelands plus all the typical urban “stuff,” museums, restaurants and the like. It just seems to lack something for me, the vibrancy and quirks and gritty charm that make me fall in love with a city.

So when a friend told me the night I should have been tucked into my own bed, but due to a problem with my plane ticket, I ended up imprisoned in a luxurious hotel with an ocean view courtesy of South African Airways, that there were worse things to be than stuck in Cape Town, I didn’t exactly see his point. Also, gorgeous as the hotel and surrounding beach was, I was not actually in Cape Town, but truly stranded miles outside the city on some forgotten corner of the Atlantic. I truly tried to make the best of it, savoring the meal courtesy of my SAA voucher, reading Memoirs of a Geisha in the hot yellow sand, and dancing in the surf early the next morning, but really, I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

Early the next morning, while waiting to check in to my rescheduled flight, I saw the employee who I fought with the day before. And it was just my luck that out of the dozen or more ticket counters, I was sent to hers. She didn’t look pleased to see me either, but while the day before, her claws were out, today, with genuine sympathy (possibly tinged with fear) she said, “I am so sorry that I have to give you bad news again, but your flight has been cancelled.” I was speechless. I have never missed a flight or had a flight cancelled in my life, and in pre-volcanic ash times, my sense of perspective was not what it might have been. After waiting an hour at ticket sales, I was told that they could send me on a different route, but it wouldn’t get me to Bloemfontein until nighttime, which meant that I still wouldn’t get home until the following day, and would probably miss work, for really no good reason.

Shamelessly playing up the part of the tiny, white, foreign girl, I told her that I couldn’t be traveling after dark, especially at bus stations and borders, that I don’t know a soul in Bloemfontein and any other number of points that would cause the woman behind the counter to envision tales of my slain body in the papers the next day. She said there was nothing she could do. My misery was genuine, though far from unique, as I was in a crowd of stranded, crying faces. Fortunately though, I was the youngest-or at least I appeared to be-and this got me home. Assuming I was a minor, and a troublesome one at that, more than a few people conspired to get me the last seat on another airline into Bloemfontein (and more importantly for them, out of their airport). And I made it back to Maseru in time for the birthday party of a student that I had promised to attend.

My last time in Cape Town, I did all the touristy things (museums, wine, penguins, Nelson Mandela’s prison cell) with the exception of going to the top of Table Mountain. It’s a mountain. It looks like a table. Lesotho has tons of mountains. Some uncannily breast-like. I have some sort of ridiculous opposition to the idea of going up Table Mountain. So considering I have done all the touristy things I think are worth doing, I looked for some less obvious things to occupy my time. I sought out little farmer’s markets, gazed up at the crackly screen of the planetarium observatory, meandered the bays and had a Thai massage that sent post-marathon lactic acid fleeing my body in terror.

And shopped. Now I am not a shopper, with the exception of farmer’s markets and bookstores. And I did a little at both of those. Actually a lot. The school librarian sent me to Cape Town with 2,000 ZAR (enough for about 30 books) to buy new titles for the Early Childhood section of the library. So I bought fresh breads and shiny-paged glue-smelling picture books and was happy.

I also had a shoe-shopping task ahead of me. The week after I got back was the school’s annual dinner/dance. Last year, I wore a dress fashioned out of a second-hand mumu that looked decent, if slightly like the upholstery on my late grandmother’s couch. I decided to go more formal this year with a not-previously-owned red dress from a flea market. Unfortunately, the shoes I bought last year got danced to shreds and at the kiddie racks in Maseru my only options for a replacement were magenta and leopard-print. (And even someone whose two nicest dresses come from a mumu and flea market knows that magenta and red don’t match). I figured in between buying organic tomatoes and South African fairytales I would stumble across a pair of plain, flat, black, size 3 shoes. Ha! 1st problem: Size 3 (or 5 US) is an endangered species in this South Africa. 2nd problem: Stilettos are not. I thought I found a pair I could live with (and more importantly dance in). “Do you have something similar without the heel though?” I asked the saleswoman. She looked at me with obvious disgust and said, “That’s not a heel, that’s a wedge.”

And this point, I quit shoe-shopping, and figured buying a new dress would be easier. I pulled a plain black dress (goes with magenta right?) from the rack of a neighboring store and the saleswoman asked if I wanted the matching panties. Apparently, I cannot tell the difference between a dress and pajamas. At this point, I quit shopping altogether, knowing that after 10 minutes of dancing I would ditch my shoes anyway and that my bare feet match anything.

I devoted the rest of my time in Cape Town to taking trains up and down the coast. Riding public transportation for the first time(s) is a humbling experience anywhere. In Cape Town I found this particularly true. I stayed with a friend who lived only two blocks from a train station. His proximity to the station was about the only thing that prevented me from quitting train travel altogether. To make taking trains in and around Cape Town any more difficult would take a concerted effort on the part of several evil geniuses. Perhaps I have been spoiled by the Metro Transit Authority of New York City, but the Cape Town train system had none of the features that make the subway bearable: a voice announcing the stations over a loudspeaker, lights inside the train cars indicating the station approaching or at the very least, a list of stations in the order in which they appear posted inside the train. Each station has only two signs bearing its name, at either ends of the platform. You usually miss the first because you whiz by before the train begins to slow down. You usually don’t see the second one until you pass it while the train is pulling out of the station. The windows are so low, that to actually see the signs, you have to crouch down and tilt your head at a ridiculous angle, usually only to find that the window is too corroded to see out of anyway. And if by some miraculous stroke of luck (or by repeatedly harassing the seasoned train traveler next you, are we there yet? Are we there yet?), you know where you are in enough time to depart appropriately, you will stand like an idiot waiting for the doors to open before someone tells you they are manual. And I mean really manual. My shoulder cracked audibly while struggling to free myself of the amused train car until an old man thrust his shopping bag full of frozen chop meat at me and yanked it open himself. But the ordeal is not quite over. Cape Town train riders have not yet seemed to grasp the concept of letting passengers disembark before they crowd onto the train. When attempting to exit, I found it best not to look anyone trying to board the train in the eye, just protect your vital organs and step into the crowd like it’s a mosh pit.

And since I seem to be telling my tales of Cape Town in reverse order, I should end with a little about the ultra-marathon from five feet up, mid-back of the pack. I arrived in Cape Town the evening before the race and ran into sometimes running partner Chris on the street. He has been swilling coke all day, and spastically tells me our race bags didn’t come with pins to attach our numbers to our shirts (they actually did, but his brain was so saturated with caffeine he didn’t have the patience to get to the bottom of his bag). Another runner had collected my bag for me and I hadn’t gotten it from him yet, so I took Chris’s word and we set out in search for safety pins, while he stopped periodically for more coke, or carbs in any form. After purchasing pins, we next searched for an Italian restaurant for further carbo-loading, but had to settle for Thai. It was here (or rather later that night) I learned that all noodles are not created equal, and I will never again replace spaghetti with tomato sauce for pad Thai. Chris said, “I’ll have the 980 calorie please,” and I saw that all nutrition facts were on the menu. I quickly changed my order from my original choice which I now saw was only 207 calories to a more substantial option, wondering when will I ever again change my order because it doesn’t have enough calories? Actually, when will I ever again eat in a restaurant that prints calories on the menu?

Whether from nerves or the queasy feeling of an MSG overdose, I slept two hours at most that night and was greeted in the morning by Chris’s near constant refrain, “We must be mad.” A friend drove us to the start, and we actually hit traffic at 5 in the morning, all cars full of people sipping powerade and chewing bananas. The traffic slowed to a halt and we got out of the car to walk the rest of the way. We all got separated in the massive crowd, although I did run into some other Maseru folk on line for the port-a-potties of all places. As a fine rain started, I lined myself up toward the back.

Two Oceans Marathon is a misnomer. Contrary to popular belief, the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet not at Cape Town but at Cape Aguilas, several hours drive from Cape Town, although some will argue that Indian Ocean currents travel up past Cape Town. But one ocean was plenty beautiful for me. One of my favorite moments of the race was rounding a corner and noticing the ocean for the first time a split second before Chris and getting to point it out to him (having the height advantage of more than a foot, he gets to see most everything first, including a whale as we ran along Kalk Bay).

I didn’t have any particular goal in mind since this was practice for the Comrades next month. I got a chance to see what the pacing is like, how much food and drink I need to consume en route and what sorts of stress and pain my body will feel. My knee hurt at the beginning, but the pain subsided fairly quickly until about the 45th kilometer. I was pretty sure I could feel it swelling at that point and it looked pretty wrecked at the end. I could see the front was puffy. I was physically incapable of turning my body to see the back but a companion confirmed it was a dead ringer for the front. Luckily, it healed remarkably quickly and an orthopedist finally diagnosed it as IT Band Friction Syndrome with some secondary issues from altering my stride. These South African doctors are used to crazy runners that want to do Comrades on their broken bodies and they are pretty good about doing what they can to help people be able to stay in the race. In addition to stretching and training advice, I’ve got these ibuprofen patches now. It’s like crack for my knee and I feel great.

Also, as someone who has never really been injured before, or has had any real medical issue, (or has attempted ultra-marathoning before) I have never thought so much about my body as I do now. And lately I’ve been attempting to figure out how to best train my body to be prepared for Comrades while preserving my knee. So while walking the beaches, sniffing melons, trying on shoes, riding trains and browsing for books, in Cape Town, I was also attempting to learn the art of balance. By pure coincidence, I found when I returned to Maseru, that in my suitcase were an equal number of boxes of tofu and bars of really good chocolate (both of which you cannot get here)…of course if you check my kitchen now, two weeks later, you will find much more of one in the refrigerator than the other in the cupboard :)

5 Runners That I Know

Two weeks ago, the night before my first ultra marathon, I received an email from a friend. It was sent to two others as well; the four of us ran on the same high school cross-country team.

Kate, training for her first marathon said: "I am on a low mileage week (long run: only 14!), yet still was able to achieve a goal that I've been aiming for my entire running career...I bet the Attackerman [that's me] can guess, when I say that it is the most hardcore thing a runner can do...I puked during a run...It really is something I've equated with ultra-awesome athletes since my WHS track days. And here is the story... Now, maybe yesterday I had ice cream for dinner with a dessert of peeps. So maybe I wasn't properly fueled. And I certainly knew it from the beginning of the run, when not even a half-mile into it I slowed down because I had that feeling in my stomach. I thought that I knew how to push the line appropriately without tanking or ralphing. But as Josh and I are .75 miles from the end of the run, going not-fast but uphill, I stopped, said "I've just got to puke", then puked. Gu and gatorade. A few times. Then started running again! It was f***ing phenomenal...I ran until I puked, and then I ran some more.

Only another runner would understand how impressed I was. I don’t neccessarily advocate running to the point of vomiting, and despite what a few graphic remarks about my knee in recent posts suggest, I am not a masochist. Yet, all the runners I know appreciate the way putting one foot in front of the other again and again and again makes one discover and challenge the limits and possibilities of their own bodies.

Fellow former Blue Devil, Kathleen replied "Lately, when I run I start to get teary eyed as I imagine racing again, running as fast as I possibly can. I'm not ready to race yet, but I have been running an hour about 3x a week. My new orthodics make me a superhuman! My orthodics have addressed my 'one leg shorter than the other' problem and I feel so straight whenever I wear them. It's amazing."
Hearing about their running, particularly the night before my first ultra marathon was enormously inspiring. Angela, a medical student at Columbia University, has yet to surface from her hospital rotations to tell us what she’s up to. But hearing from the others reminded me of watching her race one day. It was the end of the season, but the first time she was able to compete that year. She was worried about the race, but when the gun went off, in the biggest display of courage and love I have ever witnessed, she did what everyone else did. She ran. It took her 30 minutes to complete 2 miles. She was the last to finish, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the real winner was that day. She was 16 years old at the time, and she had cancer.

Running makes people do truly remarkable things. After a year of lonely running in Maseru, I’ve been lucky to find a few amazing running partners. I met one of them on the way to the Soweto Marathon. He was running the 10k (which I believe would have been the longest he ever ran) and he gave me a ride up to the race. In the first conversation we ever had, he informed me he would never run a marathon, and stopped short of telling me he thinks I’m insane for 1) doing it and 2) liking it, though he made these feelings clear later. It took a few months, but I eventually coerced him into running with me. He contemplated running the Two Oceans half-marathon until he found out that unlike the ultra marathon, the half marathon did not actually reach the ocean. His solution? Less than 6 months after the Soweto 10k, he ran the 56k Two Oceans ultra marathon. (Technically he remained true to his word and has still never run a marathon).

To train for the Soweto Marathon, I used to do long runs going across the border. While doing some post run grocery shopping in Ladybrand, the nearest South African town, an English man approached me and asked me if I had run all the way there. I confirmed this, and he asked if I’m mad. Shortly after this meeting, he joined the ranks of the insane, and we started training for Comrades together. Chris had run his first and only marathon 20 years before at the age of 21. A former paratrooper at well over 6 feet tall, I have never had such harassment-free running as I do with Chris. It's like running with a body guard. We would meet at 5:30 am and while I gasped for air, he would chat away sharing army nutrition tips (baby food is easily digested energy during grueling exercise), aphorisms (“no one can take this away from you”) and hard core-ness (“If we can’t find a hotel near the race, I’ll sleep outside next to my car"). On his birthday, he told me that he makes the same mistakes at 41 that he did at 21. Being closer to the latter than the former, I didn’t know if I should find this a comforting thought or a terrifying one. Chris became my Two Oceans hero on the starting line. Rather, it was a little before the starting line, as we were lined up so far back from the starting line, we couldn't even see it. 30 seconds after the gun went off we could still sense absolutely no forward movement from the runners ahead. Chris, towering over the rest of us, peered down the street and said he couldn’t believe how many of us there were, it looked like minute or so until we could begin moving- not running, necessarily, but sort of drifting forward. I craned my neck wistfully, but couldn’t see beyond the hairy shoulders of the runner right in front of me. So Chris lifted me up above the crowd to the cheers of the other runners around us, and I saw through the fine rain and the 6 am darkness, for as far as my eyes could see, thousands of pinpricks of runners surging forward like a wave.

2 minutes and 35 seconds after the gun went off, I finally reached the starting line. And thus began my first ultra marathon, which I ran with gratitude and respect to one runner who ran until she vomited and then ran some more, one runner who flies in her orthotics, one runner who raced in between chemo treatments and jogs today cancer-free on the streets of New York City, one runner who ran 56 kilometers to see the ocean and one runner who showed me 7,000 others who ran my first ultra with me.