May 14th: Runner's log

From May 30-June 19, GenEq Benin is holding Le Tour Du Benin, a grueling 21-day relay-run across the entire western African nation of Benin. I’ve been asked to chronicle the training for my 25 km run on June 12. Visit indigogo.com to donate to the fundraiser.

Distance: 6.69 km

Before I moved here, I don’t know that I would call myself athletic. I had played soccer until I was 16 and I spent time at our student recreation center, but I had never run more than 5 miles and never biked more than 18.

I started running here mainly because of the circumstances (which is the reason for why I try and do a lot of things here that I never tried or did before): three months of a trainee lifestyle where I sat in a classroom for nine hours a day and came home to large portions of carbohydrate-focused food had not been kind to me. The volunteer who I replaced told me that she had lost all her moving-to-village weight by running, so in the first week after I moved in, I also laced up my running shoes and slowly (at the time) started down the road that runs outside my house. And then I did it again two days later. And then again two days after that. And so, I kept doing it.

People noticed this pretty quickly. (Not that there are many circumstances here in which I am unnoticeable) But in a culture where my male students still tell me that girls can’t play soccer, a woman wearing shorts running down the same path every other day was pretty novel.

For the majority of women here, most of their exercise comes from the daily chores they do to maintain the household: fetching water from the well, washing clothes, preparing dinner with dull knives. And these women are strong (try pulling up a five-liter bucket of water), but they are still considered not as strong as men. And the people that surround them still note outdated pseudo-scientific ideas about why they will never be as strong as men.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I keep running necessarily because I believe that seeing me exercise has empowered other women and girls to know that they are as strong, if not stronger than the men in their households, but it seems to me that this is now about more than just living in a culture with a carb and fried-food focused diet.