I left today for an exciting two week long business trip. I'm going to be in 3 different countries, with wall to wall meetings and work/social events planned, but I fully intend to keep up my Half-Marathon training schedule. I realize there may be days when I just can't get a planned workout in, but I'm going to do my best. I'll make a game of it - the harder it is to fit time in for me, the harder I'll try.
Today was somewhat challenging. I had little sleep and spent most of the day eating and traveling with colleagues and journalists, but was able to break away from the group around 6pm for an hour, just as the sun was setting.
I'm in Mexico in a remote village called Coatepec, where tomorrow I'll be touring coffee bean and sugar cane plantations. My hotel is on the main street of the town so, without a map, and having no idea where to go, I decided to just run up the street as far as I could go, and turn around and come back. I had my Nike+ on my iPod so I could tell roughly how far I had gone. It's finally calibrated better. Not perfect, but I'm not going to be uptight about a few points when there are plenty of other obstacles to trip me up in this kind of situation!
I can't tell you the excitement I felt as my feet started hitting the cobblestones. I felt free and amazingly safe. The streets were filled with people congregating after work. I smiled at everyone I passed and they all smiled back at me. It was still 86 degrees even as the sun was setting, and the humidity was high. The smell of burning garbage and diesel in the street was stifling. There were lots of street dogs, most of which left me alone, but one who was perched on the roof of a bakery snapped viciously at me until I got close and stopped, and took my camera out and photographed him. When I took off running again, he resumed barking.
I kept looking for signs that people here might run, just like me. But there weren't any. The shoe stores I passed didn't have sneakers, or I should say sneakers serious enough to do more than stroll in. People looked at me curiously. Mothers moved their children aside as I came sprinting by. I said, "Gracias!" every 10 seconds, smiled, got a smile back. Nobody seemed bothered by me, just interested in a pleasant way. By the time I came running back down the main street people recognized me and smiled first. I was also going downhill on the way back so I was really booking and I'll bet that was easier to smile at than my huffing and puffing in the other direction!
I just kept wondering what they thought of me. It's like when Julie Edwards and co. used to go running through the streets of Venice, Italy, in 1991, in their ripped fraternity T-shirts. Venetians don't run in the street, and they definitely don't wear ripped T-shirts! We later found out the whole island seemed to know about us - the crazy American students who went running in rags! So I kept thinking, how do I look to these people? I thought I looked pretty impressive, running around in such heat.
At one point, I looked up and smiled to see a set of telephone wires that were hanging with sneakers - just like you see in the U.S., and in many places around the world. I wonder how the tradition of throwing sneakers over street wires came up. I also saw old men walking their donkeys, boys with soccer balls, and bakeries everywhere. Old women hung laundry. Push carts sold ices. In one square where people were gathering to socialize, they were selling huge clusters of balloons and corn on the cob with mayonnaise.
I loved every minute of it. I was so sweaty by the time I got home that my entire "lucky" Williams T-shirt was soaked through. The guy at the desk who had looked at me askance when I'd left lit up and gave me two thumbs up, way up, and said something in Spanish. That made me feel good! (Hope he didn't call me a sweaty pig!) I didn't run with Sport Beans, or water, and I barely listened to my iPod; and yet it all went by faster than any run I think I've ever done.
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