Becoming International Athletes

A few months ago, I started searching for races in South Africa in order to check off one of our goals during this trip... to participate in an international race.  At that point, our trip to South Africa was far enough away that we could begin to train and it would be motivation for us to run more than just a few miles.  We loved those 2-4 mile runs, giving us not only a great way to see a city, but helping us experience a place from a different perspective. In some cities, we’d go for a morning jog and be joined by hundreds in the park (I’m talking to you, London) and in others, we could almost hear people thinking “tourist” as we trotted by.  

I found the Cape Town Gun Run, a race kicked off and concluded by the firing of a cannon, which is particularly important to the history of Cape Town.  Entry for the race was only $13, which I initially thought was too good to be true, but I couldn’t pass up.  I registered us both and plotted out a training calendar (of which we didn’t follow one bit).  

Race day came and to our immense surprise, the empty sea-side streets we had wandered the prior day were now absolutely packed with runners by 6am.  Total participation was so high that we couldn’t get any sort of stride for the first 5km. We even walked through some bottlenecked areas, joking with other runners about the crowd.  Before we knew it, we were crossing the 13km mark.  From there, the rest of the course was beautiful flat road along the ocean.  We took a sip of the Coca-Cola that was provided at water stops, which we had avoided until then, and admitted to ourselves that it actually tasted better than the orange powder Gatorade we would have normally been offered.

9km later, we crossed the finish line and celebrated the completion of our first international race! Making small talk with the other runners, Daniel jokingly asked where the beer was and with confused responses, we realized we weren’t in America.  There was no beer garden at this finish line.

Now on to the next challenge…