Heather and Patrick were scheduled to come in at 1 am on Wednesday, so late Tuesday night, and I was eager for them to arrive. As accommodating and fun as the family had been, I was looking forward to spending some time with someone I had known for more than the month that I've been here. Also, Marissa, Melanie, Jordan, and Elijah and Tanna, all friends of theirs (and mine, but basically through them) from Rainier Avenue Church were also coming so I would have the chance to be a part of a group where I fit in. I was fascinated at my near-obsession with fitting in now that I didn't, considering how much I prided myself on being someone who didn't go with the flow and did his own thing. I never realized that nearly every wacky or out-of-the-ordinary thing that I had done, every pink rain coat or nasty mullet or cross-dressing hiking trip (all of those are completely factual by the way) that I thought of as being my attack on social norms all existed in the context of already fitting in. I now was counting down the days until I could be in a group where I was considered normal. For however welcoming and hospitable everyone here was, I still wasn't normal and I missed the feeling. I didn't go into town Monday or Tuesday, mostly just laid low at the house. I was in a crippling situation as far as my money went, because I needed to go get more money but I wanted to check with my parents to see if I had money in my account first, which I needed to buy more air time for my phone or for Miriam's Internet modem to be able to do. I just hung around the house on Monday and Tuesday, with not much reason to go into town other than to get money. I haven't had any time yet on the trip though where I had some uneventful days where I wasn't grateful for them because of the chance to relax, catch up on writing, and have some time alone. One of my biggest worries on this trip is that I would just get tired of meeting people, because I don't really like meeting new people all that much, and I was always grateful when I had some time by myself, because there was more than enough time hanging out with the relatives. I was very happy to see Patrick's parents again, and if there was any reason that I would spend more time in Nairobi it would be to spend time with them. I sat around talking with Patrick's dad quite a bit, which was great. He is probably one of my favorite people to just sit and talk with. He makes me wish I was an old man and that we could be some of those old guys that just seemed to me to sit and talk and watch people pass. I can't picture getting tired of talking with him.
I went for a fun Monday afternoon around the dreadfully familiar loop of the estate. I think I dramatically underestimated how hilly the loop is the first time I was here, because now it seemed less like I was on a gradual hill the whole time and more like I was climbing a pretty legitimate hill. It certainly would explain how much I had struggled running in Nairobi and hadn't had any issues elsewhere. It put things in new perspective when I thought of doing an hour hill run rather than just an easy hour of recovery miles, and encouraged me and I looked at the training I had done here before from this new perspective. In light of that I took this run very easy, as I thought Kemboi might if he was running on these kind of hills, disregarding what my time was for each lap, and was able to run 70 minutes pretty comfortably, although very slowly. The schools were now on break now, called "holy day" here (maybe they're actually saying "holiday" and just pronouncing it different, but it sounds like "holy day" to me), so I had the crowds of kids running around with me that only showed up in the evenings last time I was in Nairobi. As I had discovered last time, having the kids running around the you is fun when you're doing an easy shakeout, but frustrating if you're trying to get in a solid run. The combination of the suffocating confines of the estate and the annoyance of kids who want to run with you but end up making you trip over them made it a pretty aggravating run, and I wondered how long I would be able to stand training in Nairobi, especially as my mileage increases. It was fun to see the kids though and they were definitely excited to see me again.
I took off for a run Tuesday morning, but was feeling so lousy that I stopped and decided to rest up and run in the evening to see if I felt better. I continued to feel pretty sluggish through the rest of the day and ended up not going for a run that evening because my legs weren't feeling better at all. I worried that the week I was in Nairobi would just be a dead week for running that would set back my training that was already behind the mileage schedule I kept last year. For me training is something that has a big effect on my mood. If training isn't going well, it bugs me and I worry about it all day, and if it's going well then my mind is racing with the possibilities of what the upcoming season might hold.
Tuesday night Ross arrived as we were eating dinner, which was a welcome face for me to see. Ross is a Canadian got to know Patrick while he was here working with Kiwanis in Kisumu before Patrick came to the States, I think working with giving people micro-loans to start small businesses. He had been there for a year, and had been back to visit since, so I saw him as I valuable expert. Thinking about it later, I realized that for all the people that were happy to show me around and help me adjust, none of them were foreigners, so Ross had some valuable insights that I couldn't get from the people here. I knew him from Patrick and Heather's wedding and it was good to talk with him and catch up on things. We had met at the wedding but there was enough going on that we never really got to know each other there, so we weren't even really catching up as much as learning about what each other was doing. I realized that I had only talked with one other person from North America since I had been here and it was good to hear a familiar accent. I went to bed as normal and woke up to the noise of Heather and Patrick coming at about 2. It was great to see them, and I could tell they were excited to be here, especially Patrick. Even from being away from everything I grew up with and in a strange place for two months has proven to be trying, so I have a hard time imagining coming home after three years. Because of their jet lag we stayed up in the living room drinking tea as Heather and Patrick passed out the gifts they had brought for people from America. They brought school supplies for Lois and Nicole, and Mexico national team jersey for Mo, a pair of shoes for Flo that ended up not fitting, and I can't remember what all else. We stayed up a little bit longer then headed up to go to bed, but Ross and I lay in bed talking for the next couple hours, him because he couldn't sleep, and me because I was planning on running early anyway and I wasn't worried about having time to sleep because I figured if I was traveling around with jet lagged people there would be plenty of opportunities to nap. We talked quite a bit about what things are like in Kenya and about Ross' time in Kenya, which I enjoyed hearing because it was good to talk with someone from my side of the cultural divide about the cultural differences I was seeing. I finally nodded off and slept for about half an hour before waking up for an early morning run. I decided I had to at least give a shot to training outside the estate, and felt more comfortable about that after my running adventures in Kisumu and Eldoret that I had gone on without any problems. Kenya was no longer such a strange, dangerous new place, but somewhere to explore.
Patrick and Heather were still awake when I got up to run, and Patrick had already set about checking up on the house and seeing what was in disrepair or needed work. He seemed to me to have a quiet enthusiasm I'd never seen in him that I think naturally comes with coming home after being gone for so long. It was still pretty dark and for the most part I was able to run without any problem, but already people were headed to work and at times I had to weave my way through the crowds. Even after only two days it was a breath of fresh air to run outside the estate. One of the reasons I hadn't ventured out into the city was just because of the danger of running around alone as a white person on the outskirts of Nairobi, so I stayed on the main outer rim road that circles the city center. This morning I decided to keep the run as simple as possible to ensure that I didn't give myself a decent chance to get lost. The masses of people walking along the road and through the surrounding fields seemed kind of ominous in the gathering early morning light and for whatever reason strongly reminded me of IRobot with all of the robots gathering. I headed over an overpass where I had as good of a view of the surroundings as I had seen anywhere and it was impressive to the urban sprawl around me. I turned off the main road, which was not headed straight into town onto a mostly empty side road with a generous dirt shoulder. The further I got the more excited I was to be finding an area to run in Nairobi. Forgetting my earlier commitment to keep the route as simple as possible, I turned onto another promising side road, and was rewarded after several minutes of running with the discovery of a large dirt field that looked like a collection of soccer fields. There were several people running and jogging around it, and I figured that if people did work out in Nairobi, it was probably preferable to avoid the crowded roads and run somewhere like here. This was a community jogging area though and none of the people looked like serious runners, but I still wasn't sure I had a good eye for that kind of thing. On the roads around Eldoret it was easy because no one wore anything that even remotely resembled running clothing except the runners, which wore nice spandex, technical shirts, and track suits. Here most people were wearing track suits or exercise clothing but didn't look to me like anyone I could see dominating runners from the rest of the world. I ran several laps around, each one taking about four minutes, and then approached a group that was stretching before I left. They said they met there every day at 6 to run and exercise and said I was welcome to join them. I thanked them, but they were pretty clearly just a group exercising to stay healthy and stay in shape but not run competitively. I was excited about finding this place; just running there, running as many laps as I needed to get the mileage I wanted for the day, and running back would be a monumental upgrade to running around the estate, especially now that my mileage was higher.
I could tell it was busier coming home as more people and vehicles filled the roads, but it still wasn't prohibitively crowded as I had feared it might be. My enthusiasm grew as this was confirmed to be a workable running route that would free me from running in the estate and let me see a little more of the city. A couple minutes before getting back to the estate a man wearing a wool sweater ran up next to me and I invited him to run with me. He said he was an 800 runner that lived and trained here in Nairobi at a track not too far away, although I didn't recognize it or grasp his directions on how to get there. He said he had run 1:46 and hoped to be able to get to the US to run, and also planned to run at the Olympic Trials next summer in hopes of qualifying for the London Olympics. I asked him about what it would take to make it to the Olympics, and he said he was hoping to run in the 1:43's and that if he did that he would have a good shot to make it. I was more skeptical of him than I had been of others because we were in Nairobi and he wasn't standard running clothes like others. I took down his phone number and told him I'd call him, but was less enthusiastic about meeting him than I had been about others. It was still nice to have a contact in Nairobi, although once we left I figured I would try to spend as little time in Nairobi as I could, so I wasn't sure how well it would work to meet. Plus, he would be doing 800 training and as I get closer to my own racing season it is becoming more important to start doing the specific workouts and training to be ready to race rather than jumping into random workouts. Thinking about the people I'd met, it made sense to me that it was easier to train in the city and at lower elevation for middle distance runners because developing speed on the track was a bigger part of their training than building strength with the long miles out on the road. I think it would be interesting to see the distribution of what events athletes in different areas ran. My guess is that the marathoners are almost exclusively in the Rift Valley but there would be greater distribution as the event distance decreased.
I was in high spirits as I returned, now not dreading training in Nairobi like I had been. It was one of those things that I realized had been bugging me more than I was really aware of. It was a pretty big weight off my chest to not need to worry about being able to train in Nairobi. Patrick and Heather were making breakfast when I got back, and I realized that it was the first time I had seen a man cooking other than at Roger's where there weren't any women around. Patrick still seemed to me to be floating on air a little bit about being home, which was great to see. I don't think he had slept at all, but him and Heather were both still going strong. After breakfast Heather, Patrick, Ross, Flo, and I headed into town, and I was really frustrated I didn't have money, because I could have just covered transportation into town so Heather and Patrick and Ross could get money, but as it was we had to beg some money from Patrick's dad to get us into town, and from there I had to keep borrowing from Heather and Patrick, which frankly made me feel like an incompetent kid who couldn't take care of himself on his own. Heather pointed out that it was a lot better for me to be borrowing money them than having to get some money from the family, but it still really bugged me. It probably took us at least ten minutes to walk up through the estate because about every other house someone would yell at Patrick and enthusiastically greet him. It was great to see all these reunions, and I met some people I hadn't, who knew me only as the white guy that ran by all the time. The guys that were teenagers Patrick remembered as kids, and it was funny to see some of Patrick's old school mates. One of the things I had hoped for on this trip was to understand more about Patrick's background, and it was funny talking with people in the neighborhood who had watched Patrick grow up.
One comment I'll make here is that I heard some ridiculing of Patrick that he had gone soft in married life as far as transportation. Before he left, according to Flo, he would take the noisiest, craziest matatus that he could, but now we always took the busses, which are far more orderly and I think a lot of young people see as old lady transportation. Once he even told me to make sure I was buckled up, something that no one had even mentioned since I'd been here. It turned out my seat belt had the buckle cut off of it anyway. We visited Patrick's mom at her school and took her out to lunch. Somewhere along the way we picked up Atieno, who had come to Nairobi a day after Flo and I had, and she had barely said hi before she immediately launched into harassing Patrick. Walking around town with them was more fun than with Flo or Junior, because they were a lot more talkative and it was entertaining to hear Patrick talk about how things had changed since he'd been gone. It made him sound like an old man. It seemed to me like the whole time we were out and about in town Patrick was running into people he knew, especially the closer we got his house. I figured the more people he could meet like that the better because they didn't have enough time to visit everybody, so if he could run into somebody on the street and get to say hi that would be great. An interesting insight I heard later that I had never considered was that some people could be legitimately worried that Patrick and gone off to America and found a wife and didn't care about where he came from any more. It seemed ridiculous to me because it was so untrue of Patrick, but I wonder if that happens with some people that go to America.
When we got back a bunch of the kids were out playing and ran over to say hi to me and give me high fives, which was fairly standard protocol for when I came home. It was weird now though, being around kids here that knew me but had no clue who Patrick was. The jet lag eventually caught up with them, and I think everybody went down for naps that afternoon, and I went for an evening shakeout. It was indeed much more enjoyable running with the kids when it was for an easy 30 minutes rather than 60 or 70.
No comments:
Post a Comment