One downside to living in Africa has been the lack of running opportunities. Either we’ve been in a wilderness area where we can’t run because we’d get eaten or we’re in an urban area where it’s unsafe to run because of the traffic, sidewalk surface (buckled, three foot deep holes, etc) or the people. So we’ve dropped from running four times a week to two times a month.
We’d been hoping to pick up a race and we finally had the chance. We arrived in Casablanca, Morocco on February 1st at 1 AM and got to bed by 2 AM. We got up at 6:30 AM and took a taxi to the Casa Downtown race. We hadn’t found out about the race until the day before and preregistion was closed. So we just showed up and hoped for the best. Amazingly, they gave us free registration, t-shirts and everything! It was total party atmosphere before the race and the organizers led everyone through a 20-minute warm-up session.
This was my first race in almost two years. All told, I figured that I’d be lucky to finish in an hour. Somehow, I ran it in 56:48 (9:10 pace). Was it really only ten years ago that I could still finish in 42 minutes? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
While I ran the 10K Kate Gentry ran the 5K race. Kate doesn’t like running on roads and especially city settings, but was excited to participate in a foreign race. It didn’t disappoint! She especially liked how the locals treated us with extreme kindness. After the race, the party atmosphere kicked up a notch and Kate was twirled around by a fellow runner dancing to the music. It was a very memorable race.