Malawi

April 24 , 2007: Malawi Marshes

Last night I did my first evening run in my neighborhood since we moved to Lilongwe. Jimmy and I arrived here from Blantyre about 9 days ago, I am still recovering from the grueling Two Oceans Marathon (ahem, it's a 56k) on April 7, and moving is always exhausting. So for one reason or another, I have not explored the neighborhood much on foot.

Last night, though, I was antsy. I was supposed to meet a friend to run, but at the last minute she sent a text message that she couldn’t make it. The air was cool, and the first stripes of the sunset looked promising, so I decided to head out anyway. I thought I would swing through our neighborhood – unimaginatively named “Area 9” – and see if I could work out a good route for speed work. The roads around here, unlike Sunnyside (our cheerful-sounding neighborhood in Blantyre) are flat and paved. The tarmac doesn’t have many potholes and is not heavily traveled by cars, so – despite being soulless in name – I thought Area 9 seemed like a good place for running speed workouts. So I considered it an exploratory exercise.

Lately, I have been missing my running friends from Austin. Despite slogging through the necessary training for the Two Oceans, I have come to understand that I will be a much better and happier runner if I have others to train with and race against, to complain to and eat post-run meals with. Many days, I reminisce about my various running partners in Austin – those slower than me, faster than me, and the particularly motivating ones who I leapfrog with from workout to workout – and am amazed at the variety and number of people who have entered my life through running.

It took me a few months in Africa to realize how much I craved that company – after all, I can be a solitary athlete. I have been known to do solo two-hour treadmill workouts when there is a group running just across town, and sometimes I eschew conversation for contemplation. But at some point recently, it struck me how much, for the better part of the past 10 years, I have depended on the regularity of sweaty evening workouts, on the sweet feeling of exhaustion upon completing a Sunday morning long run, on the stress relief of laughing while running, on the peer pressure that pushes me to be better. And on the steadiness of realizing that there are, in fact, a few things in the world that you can always count on.  

Indeed, I have come to understand (somewhat late, more perceptive runners like Jimmy would probably say) that I won’t become the athlete I want to be on my own. Other runners simply make me a better me.

Yesterday, I pulled out my training schedule for the Houston Marathon, which I ran in January 2006, a couple of months before we left for Africa. I felt both impressed and slightly depressed at what I had been able to do a short 16 months ago; it struck me that I have quietly and quickly dropped far out of my own league. I skimmed over the names of workouts – Stratbud, Wilke, the Damn Loop, Marshes – and got wistful just thinking about them. (If you had told me 16 months ago that I would type that sentence, I would have whacked you round the head with a rolling pin.)

I especially felt melancholy about the Marshes – a workout named for the last name of the guy in Austin who coined it, which I did regularly in the darkness of early mornings in the winter of 2005. Heading out from my house in the cold, I would jog for a couple of miles to downtown Austin. The core of the workout essentially consists of running a “ladder” of streets – about 8 residential roads that sit parallel to each other and form the “rungs” of a ladder, all meeting a common street on either side. The workout is not complicated – run the “sides” of the ladder easy, run the “rungs” hard – but it hurts if you do it right. It also is one of those workouts that gets you focused. After about 15 minutes, I found, I would completely tune out everything: cars, kids, people on their way to work. And jogging back home, tired and warm, I'd feel a great sense of accomplishment every time.        

Despite the absence of similar workouts in Malawi, I have pretty much kept up my running for the last 13 months. It has been out of habit more than anything – and some degree of personal necessity. But last night, as the sky was filling up pink, it looked like there might be something special in store.

I was in a good mood and feeling more recovered. As I began to run, I also instinctively began the familiar actions that have come to characterize every Malawi run: the near-constant returning of “hellos” and thumbs up, regularly hopping off the road for cars or bikes, and meeting blank stares with a smile and a wave. I passed men pushing bikes piled high with wood for cooking, housekeepers from the rich houses scurrying across the fields to get to their villages before the black of night, little girls carrying babies on their backs, tall rows of corn waiting to be harvested. I ran by groups of people who had stopped talking to watch me approach from 100 meters away – confounded and perplexed to see a white girl out running on the streets.

I crisscrossed a few streets to see where they led, but each one kept coming back to the same place on either side. And as I kept on, I realized that, sure enough, the layout of this neighborhood was the same as the Marshes. Two main streets running parallel to each other with the rungs spaced just about evenly apart. Without even trying to, I had found the Malawi Marshes! For the first time in weeks, I started running hard just because I felt like it. I was so excited that I completely missed three or four “Hello Sister”’s thrown my way. I was imagining those winter training sessions in Austin, where you are so focused that for a few minutes there is nothing in the world but your heart pounding in your head, your feet beating the pavement, salt dripping into your eyes. I quit after a few minutes, wary of muscles still screeching from the Two Oceans, but the feeling was familiar, in a very unfamiliar way.   

An epilogue to the Malawi Marshes happened as I started my cool down. Just as Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine started up “The Rhythm of the Night” on my .mp3 player, I passed the neighborhood mosque and the imam began belting out his soulful call to evening prayer. The resulting obnoxious cacophony of sounds competing in my eardrums – a mix of worlds Muslim and Latin; devout and heathen; ancient and, well, the ‘80s – made me laugh out loud. Figuring I had better start christening Malawi running routes with unique names, I ran a second “Mosque Loop” just to enjoy the confusion. 

And realizing that I savored the dissonance made me realize how far I have come in a year, maybe not in miles but in life. I may not have become a stronger or faster runner, but I do think that somehow I have become a more patient person. And more accepting of how surprising might be the circumstances in which epiphanies occur. Maybe this is because of the confusion that life is here, and not in spite of it. Perhaps it is what happens at the cacophony that ensues at the encounter between me and Malawi – where all of the questions about what it means to be rich or poor, black or white, needy or wanting, useful or futile can get exposed during the course of a 30-minute evening run.     

Because what occurred to me, during the second Mosque Loop, is that despite what I suspected, I haven’t lost my running inspiration. The Marshes is here, and they are not even far away. I just have to jog out my front door, and then remember to keep my eyes and ears wide open.