Kilimanjaro Half Marathon

One of my goals was to work on my health in Africa and it soon became apparent that I had an opportunity to do my first running race since I was a young strapping lad.  The Kilimanjaro Marathon was held on March 3rd, the day after my birthday, and Kathleen and I decided to enter in the half-marathon race.  Kathleen provided training for me for about 7 weeks and was with some fear that I headed out at 7 AM on the 3rd to climb for 6 miles up the side of Kilimanjaro, climbing about 1200 feet in elevation, and then turning around and running down the hill we had come up.

My desire during the race was to get to see the fastest runners in the world run by me.  The marathon race, which started 30 minutes before the half marathon, first ran around Moshi for 13.2 miles and then they covered the same course as the half marathon.  So when I was running up (OK, jogging up) Kilimanjaro my first joy, which for some reason I hadn't expected, was seeing the half marathon runners come running down the hill from the turnaround at me.  Holy cow were they fast, I've never seen such speed in my life and there were a bunch of them.  But then later on I got to see the marathon runners pass me once on their way up the hill and then again on the way down.  There were perhaps 30-40 of these ultra fast runners who were absolutely incredible in the speed (20 km per hour average!) that they were able to sustain.  Wow.

It was my first half marathon and I had never run that far before in my entire life.  Kathleen's training made it not only fun but I managed to almost do a 2 hour time, only 20 minutes behind Kathleen, which almost put me in the top third of all finishers.  The best tip was to keep it slow in the beginning which was easy with the elevation gain for the first half of the race.  I started at the very back...actually came out of the bathroom and noticed the race had started, which allowed me to pass hundreds of people.  Once I did the turnaround at top I let it go and really flew down the hill for the second part of the race.  I felt fast and felt good at the finish.  But the next three days I couldn't walk which I think was because we were running fast on pavement and had done all of our training on a 5K track next door to our house in Arusha.

The picture of Kathleen with a Tanzanian is her race buddy, they ran together and she was the first US female finisher and 11th overall female out of 1500 racers total.  This was a real treat for her because she has broken her foot twice in the last year and for quite some time it was not clear if she would be able to run without pain.  Good news, she can run...and run fast!

We finished off with a couple beers (the Kilimanjaro beer company is actually the sponsor of the race, got some sweet tshirts that advertise the "21 kilimeters", instead of kilometers, we ran).

Mack and Stephen both did the 5K fun run together in support of their school, the International School of Moshi.  They had fun and what a great day it was for us.  We finished the day by going to our Aussie friends house and enjoying Pork Crackling which was new for us but quite a treat.