A Marathon Day Out

The 9th June 2012 was a special day for the charity Street Child as this was the date of the First Sierra Leone Marathon which was organised to raise funds for this worthwhile cause.  Here’s a link to see what they are up to. http://www.street-child.co.uk/

The format of the event was to have three races: marathon, half marathon and 5km, so lots of opportunities for all (men, women and children) to participate.  The heat and humidity here is a huge issue so we were up early to be at the start at 6.30am to see the runners off round the beautiful undulating course.   

  The local brass band rousingly played the Sierra Leonean National Anthem

 

 

before the first batch of runners (marathon and half marathon) set off. 

There was a 30 minute wait for us 5km runners before we set off on our shorter challenge.  I thought I would be lucky to run the whole 5km course as I had done so little training.  However, as ever the atmosphere of a race pushes you along with the added element of the children shouting “opoto” (the Temeni word for white person) at you all the way.   I finished the course in just over 30mins with a sprint finish over the line against David who had been following me round.  Finishing at just after 7.30am we drank water (lots of water) as we excitedly waited for the first of the half marathon runners to cross the line. The winning runners in the half marathon and full marathon were local runners from the Stadium in Freetown.  Their participation was all thanks to the sterling effort of Jo who raised all the funds to cover the entrance fees, travel and accommodation costs for 22 runners and their coach.

I was staying with my fellow VSO volunteers Deborah and Aoife who both finished the half marathon in brilliant times. Here they are about to start 

And the three of us sporting our medals once it was all over 

Suitably proud of our achievements we headed back to the hospital compound for a relaxing few hours.  We chilled out on the veranda and had hours of fun watching two new kittens playing in a Christmas tree left over from last year.

Gorgeous!

How cute is this?

 Evening came and time for a BBQ at the neighbours before heading back into town to the Clubhouse to meet up with all the other runners.  After the celebratory drinking it was on to a local bar which has an outside dance floor, or rather patio, where everyone was dancing.  In this case, some very wet dancing as an amazing thunder storm started about 1am.  At this point no-one was to be deterred and we were a soggy bunch who made it back home.

A real marathon of a day – up at 5am and to bed at 2am.  Not to be done too often but my,  it was a truly wonderful weekend.