Saturday, December 5, 2009

Barbados vs. Guyana: Part 1


What's happening now?

Well, I signed up for a half marathon in Barbados and have been training for it over the last 8 weeks.  Training?  Yes, training Guyanese Peace Corps Volunteer style: run a lot, stretch, work out, drink a beer, have some rum, etc.

There are three other Peace Corps/Guyana volunteers running the full marathon: Dave, Elizabeth, and Sophie.  They are all pretty serious about the entire marathon race.  I'm only running half the marathon, so I'm only half serious about the race.  Fair enough, I believe.

Problems for me have been:
  1. The running distances of my training schedule are in miles, I used a taxi in Guyana to mark miles on our jungle road... turns out the taxi odomiter were in kilometers.
  2. My knees have somehow turned to mush even though I've been training for the last two months (could be lack of exercise during college).
Perks:
  1. It's only 13 miles and I have Ibuprofen
  2. Barbados is flat.  I trained on hills
  3. The crowd and other runners will push me on (I was told to fixate on a female in front of me as motivation)
  4. There's five days of sunshine, blue water and white sand, beer, rum, dancing, snorkeling...
The perks totally out weigh the problems in my opinion.

Yet, I've learned that 9 months in Guyana has dulled my sharp sense of tourism protocol.  I made an error (quite a stupid one) with our guest house booking and am now trying to straighten everything out.  It's too long a story.  Suffice it to say: if you know me well enough, just imagine something absent minded that I'm capable of doing and you'll probably get close.

In addition to this, Dave and I arrived in Barbados and the airport wouldn't exchange our Guyanese dollars for Barbados ones (neither will the U.S. apparently).  We also tried to top up our cell phones (charge up minutes)... and that won't work either, even though we have digicel phones and digicel is a main mobile company here in Barbados.  Looks like Guyana has trouble being recognized everywhere outside of Guyana.  I thought this was suppose to be a vacation

Tomorrow morning at 3 am, Dave and I will take a taxi to the race site.  His race starts at 4:30, mine starts at 5 .

Wish my chicken legs luck.  They will need it!


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