May 23rd: Runner's log

May 24, 2014 by Emily Becker

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: 14.07 km

The last three kilometers, all I can think about is water. Drinking Nalgene after Nalgene of it. Pouring it over my head in the shower. Jumping into a pool of it. I didn’t start until too late in the day and the noon sun has zapped most of the water from my body by just halfway through this long run. The next hill I climb, I pretend is a waterfall.

The last two kilometers, my thoughts turn to other beverages: cold Coke, cold Sprite, cold Gatorade. I used to run with a bottle of water. Now, I run with a GPS. I begin to severely question this trade.

The last kilometer, I am swirling the remaining spit in my mouth around, trying to distract myself from how much longer there is until the water severely lacking in my system is replenished.

When I make it home, the first place I head is my kitchen and my water filter, resisting the urge to just stick my head under it and open my mouth like it’s a faucet.

I stop drinking 2.5 liters later.

May 22nd: Runner's log

May 24, 2014 by Emily Becker

As I rounded the last turn of my run, the middle school that marks my return into my village looming up ahead to the left, I encountered three of my students coming out of the woods that line the road.

The woods here aren’t like the woods full of dense trees and small limestone cliffs in my backyard where I grew up in the US. Here, as the trees are mainly cashew tress or mango trees or some other fruit-bearing tree and the main method of cooking is over a wood-burning stove, it’s not uncommon to see people crashing out of the woods along this road with branches or mangoes balanced in basins on their heads.

These students were carrying palm tree branches. I’m not sure what they were going to do with them: use them as a covering for some structure or were just messing around. But regardless, after greeting me, they started running alongside me, normally something that would irk me, but something that I’ll allow if it’s my students.

As a pretty noticeable stranger here, a lot of times, people just want to be with you. They gain respect by appearing to be associating with an American or they think you’ll have something for them or they’re just interested in what you’re doing.

Which is to say that I’ve been followed before. On my bike, while walking through the market. Once, I ran almost four kilometers before noticing that a kid I was vaguely familiar with has followed me the entire way on his tricycle. They want you to know that they’re intrigued by what you’re doing. Even if it’s sometimes a little bit off-putting.

My students followed me for about a quarter of a kilometer, their palm fronds waving as they ran, before they stopped, waved and walk off into the village.

May 21st: Runner's log

May 22, 2014 by Emily Becker

Distance: 6.04 km

I wasn’t supposed to run today. I was supposed to run yesterday.

But a surprise visit from my boss and the inclination to get work done while I could still feel the caffeine from my instant coffee surging through my veins and then the inclination to eat lunch and take a nap meant that I opted for P90x in my house, in front of an episode of Gilmore Girls and hidden from the early afternoon African sun.

I vaguely thought to myself yesterday that I could make up for this missed training day by running today after finishing up my work at my school. Somewhere between last night and this afternoon this vague thought morphed into a definite decision, and I found myself trying to leave school as soon as possible, calculating in my head if I still had enough time to go to the market (my best shot at finding fruit and vegetables in my village) and get in a day’s worth of training.

I didn’t really have to run today. I’m scheduled to run tomorrow, and I will run tomorrow. (I’m one of those people who will feel guilty and stressed until I do something that I know I’m supposed to do.) But the more I tried to talk myself into just going home and occupying myself until I was hungry for dinner, the more I realized that, from somewhere deep inside me, was this incurable, insatiable need to run. I was antsy and my thoughts were spacey to the point where I knew the only way to collect myself was to take off down the road in front of my house for a while.

This is not the first time that I’ve felt like this. Not just since I moved here, but in my entire life. In the Coen brothers’ Burn After Reading, George Clooney’s character runs in order to cope with anything that goes wrong in his life. In a scene after everything begins to unravel, he stops mid-conversation and just states, “I have to go for a run.”

I remember the people I first watched the movie with found this comical. I identified with him.

I’ve never really been a speed runner or a long distance runner, but, I’ve been enough of a runner to realize that, sometimes, you just need to go outside and push yourself.

In volunteer training, we talk about how to find security while trying to assimilate and adapt to a new culture. The forty minutes to hour and a half that I spend running is the time that I feel most in control of a life that a lot of the time is spent out of my control. My breath comes short and quick, my feet pound on the dirt path, my head is clear.

Second lap

February 04, 2014 by Emily Becker

This weekend marks the first of the two half-marathons that I will be running this year in Benin (the second is a fundraiser for our Gender and Equality programs) and the second time that I will be running this particular half-marathon.

I used to hate running in Benin. The combination of my skin tone and the doxycycline I take for malaria means that I hardly ever come back without a slight red tinge to my face and upper chest, despite how much sunscreen I coat myself with beforehand. Not to mention that Benin, in general, is a hot country. Afterward, until I take a shower, I leave a slight wet mark on any surface I touch in my house. But mainly, it’s the direction I run itself.

When I started running, I chose to run down the path that seemed the most logical to me: the red dirt road that passes directly in front of my house and winds its way into the bush. It’s actually a terrible path (it’s uphill on the way back, has little shade and gets a little washed out in parts), but once I started, I kept running it despite its major flaw of passing in front of the 2000-student high school down the street from me.

Imagine the crowds that form on the street in front of the school. Imagine teachers coming in and out of the campus on their motorcycles. Imagine 2000 high school students watching you and yelling at you as you run by. I learned quickly how to plan my runs so that I would never be near the high school while the students were changing classes.

The thing is, that recently, I’ve started not to care whether the students see me or not. Maybe it’s that my music is loud enough now that I can’t hear them. Maybe it’s that I’m running with my friend’s GPS so I know that I’m passing them at 10 kilometers per hour (about a 10-minute mile), which, for me, is not a speed at which I scoff. Maybe it’s that I’ve finally accepted that teenagers are teenagers anywhere and that (like when I was a teenager) their bark is always worse than their bite.

I’m not proud to admit that I’m intimidated by Beninese teenagers (especially the male senior year students, who are really only a couple years younger than me, if that). In some ways, this country has made me stronger and less timid than I was before I got here. In some ways, this country has made me weaker and more timid than I was before I got here. Where that will leave me in 8 months, I’m not sure.

I am sure, though, that I will be trying to outrun it.