By Jett Thomason

I like Djibouti in the morning.

I wake up early in the US, so jetlag throws my natural tendency into overdrive with a 3:15, 4:30, or if I’m lucky, 5:00 am wake-up call. I have spent the past week in Djibouti at a training conference for our new Somalia program. US Government restrictions on official travel to Somalia (and Puntland and Somaliland) have channeled a large number of donor conferences and foreign involvement in the Horn of Africa to Djibouti. Arriving on business, working all day and a large part of the night, I have sadly not been able to see much of the city, to say nothing of the country.

However, the ridiculous hour that my body insists is time to get up also makes it easy to be the early morning jogger. I do not normally like these people. And in fact, I do not normally like to run.  But as a good friend says about writing, I like having run. And so, after ten minutes of forcing the eyelids closed, knowing that the battle was lost, I roll out of bed and by 5 am have my tennis shoes on the quiet morning streets of Djibouti. I start my run.

There is, as with all colonial experiences, a foreign sector. The hotels used for official business are always in this zone. At this hour, though, I am the only international around. Guards laze back on their cheap plastic chairs, bored and letting their rifles droop on the ground. A few women are bent straight over at the waist, whisking the road clean of dust. They turn at the sound of my feet on the beaten asphalt. Unlike the daylight hours, our eyes meet for a moment. Whether they are more emboldened with no one watching or too tired to pretend not to see me I cannot say.

The guard at the end of the barricaded street is a worker at the hotel. I am a paying guest and there are vast gulfs of space between our two worlds. However, at this hour I get a nod as I pass by. We are both among the few awake and that is some shared bond.

In Africa, local athletes rally at city stadiums or school yard fields to run. Streets in the developing world are among the worst places for exercise – normally. Taxis and diesel fumes and vendors spreading their wares out to the edge of rushing traffic make road running impossible during the day. In the morning stillness I pad down the center of the street luxuriating in the space.

Djibouti is an old French outpost on the Indian Ocean. Strategic only for its location, the country has continued to mine its sovereignty rather than build any real industry. It is easy to get a feel for the city just a few minutes into my run. The avenues are straight and angled to the cross streets. The expat sector is on a jutting peninsula of land so I run out from this zone down the wide boulevards. Returning along residential streets is easy with the confidence of knowing my hotel is at land’s end.

I raise a hand to the small merchants in each of the roundabouts I pass on my jog. There is an inevitable clustering of these small stores lit with white fluorescents and hawking dry goods, browning bananas and cylinders of propane. They wave back. Taxis tend to coagulate at odd corners and I do not greet them for fear they will think I am a fare and fire up the cars. Most of the drivers are sleeping on a piece of cardboard next to their cars with thin cloth scarves covering them as some defense against the mosquitos.

Turning into the side street the crackle of an intercom flares up and the recorded call to prayer begins from the side mosque. A group of guards eating from a large platter of rice call out in French, “Bon Courage!” I respond with “Merci” and turn sharply down another street to avoid the stray dog that suddenly jumped to attention at the sight of me. Courage is needed indeed.

The chewed leaf stimulat khat is as prevalent here as in Yemen just across the water. Evenings on the street in Djibouti are always marked by men sitting on a stoop and feeding sprigs of khat into their mouths. The effect of each leaf fades fast so users clasp their bunch of leaves in their left, preparing the next bunch of leaves with their right. Those who are already heavily into the chew grab you on the street and try to pull you in to look at their cheap trinkets that one finds from Senegal to Kenya and that are probably made en masse in southern China. Spraying bits of green leaf and their khat eyes crazed by the prospect of tourist dollars, it’s a side of Djibouti I have come to dislike within just a few days.

Running up the side streets I can see gnawed stems of the khat and wisps of micro-thin cheap plastic used to wrap the bunches. These are always found in piles where the users stood together the day before. Sure enough, I turn a corner and see a big sign for “Khat Awady”, or “Evening Khat”. It is 5:30 am now, and instead of the huddled groups of drugged men, I am greeted by several older men passing me on their way to mosque.

Sun licks at the sky while a woman coaxes a fire into life near the taxi stand. She sells rice and meat to drivers and there are a few women like her on this street. Squat, dusty trees shelter the place and improve her stand’s marketability. She is either too busy to acknowledge me or I have crossed some time limit when foreign men are not allowed to directly into women’s eyes.

The end of the run is the hardest. The fatigue sets in and the exoticness of the place wear off and it is tough to stay motivated. I approach the end of the street and can see the hotel lights. They are preternaturally bright and speak to foreign currency establishments with generators and razor wire enclosures. This is not generally how I want to see another country but this is the job and the reality of Africa.

Sweat rolling off me in the humid air and feet beginning to hurt as much as my sides, I see someone coming down the road. He has a bag packed and the look of a night watchman coming off duty. The lilt in his step is does not fit with the other laborers I see packed onto mini-buses, driven into the foreigner zone for their menial jobs.

“Courage!” he says as I run by with a great smile and nod. I smile, nod back.

This is Jett Thomason’s 14 post at GoMad Nomad. Over the past decade his travels and work have taken him throughout the former Soviet Republics, Europe, and Africa to Afghanistan and Iraq. He blogs for GoMad Nomad at the No Leave Travel Blog.

By Danielle L. Krautmann

We all finished! My running club from left to right: Ricardo, Gladys, Charlie, Gaby, Jorge, Pak Peng, and me.

I can’t take my medal off. It’s bronze colored with a plain navy blue ribbon to hold it on my neck. It’s the cheapest, worst quality completion medal I’ve ever received from a race, and I love it. This one says Lima 42K, 2010 on it…my first marathon. After the race I took a nap and woke up with the ribbon strangling me. I adjusted it rather than taking it off. I wonder how long I can get away with wearing this around the house.

Although I’ve done plenty of half marathons over the past five years, I was hesitant to commit to training for a full marathon. For me, running is something I do to keep fit and clear my head. If it’s a nice day, or I have excess energy, I like to go for a run. If I’m on a run and feel tired, I prefer to turn around and go home. If I’m feeling good, I’ll go further. When I need to “train” for a race, running quickly looses its appeal. Something about adding discipline to the sport makes it feel like more of a job than a pastime.

My first month here I joined a running group through Charlie’s work to meet people and make friends with similar interests. The friend-making mission was soon accomplished, but I kept showing up as the runs increased in length. I enjoyed the camaraderie of suffering through the last couple miles of a long run with friends. So really, my initial training for the marathon was an accident that happened secondary to my efforts to make friends. Although the thought had crossed my mind, it was not until about six weeks ago that I realized I was logging between 60 and 70 miles a week. So I signed up for the Lima 42K.

Me and Charlie. Although he looks like a total idiot with that mustache (grown just for the race), he was my biggest supporter.

I’ve enjoyed running for about six years now. My prior race experience includes nine half marathons, and volunteering as a pacer in three ultra marathons (100 mile races…I didn’t do the races, just helped out). Through all of this, I have learned that there comes a point during which your body tells you not to go any further. Your joints hurt, your muscles hurt, your head hurts, body parts you never knew existed hurt! You feel like you’re running as fast as you can, but know you’re only jogging at best. From here, things can go one of two ways. You can acknowledge the pain and listen to your body, stop and stretch, or walk for a ways. OR, you can remind yourself that its in you to go further and keep running despite the pain. The little engine that could powered itself through positive thinking and I’m here to tell you, it really works!

For me, it was when I reached 28 kilometers and realized I still had 14 to go that I started to feel the pain. I knew completing the race would be more of a mental feat than physical. At that point, I began to fill my head with the most positive thoughts I could come up with to distract myself. Charlie suggested that if I got to that point, I find someone to talk to to keep myself distracted. Unfortunately, speaking Spanish still takes a lot of effort and energy so this didn’t seem like the best option. Instead, I noticed a Peruvian runner with a particularly cute butt going the same pace as me. I strategically paced myself behind him for 2 km until he slowed down and I passed him.

At 32 km, I saw my friend Vanesa and her dog Inca and was reminded of what great friends I’ve made here. At 34 km, our friend Brodie rode up on his bike and chatted with me for several minutes and told me how well my rock star husband was doing (he finished in 3 hours 33 minutes). At 38 km, I passed Charlie’s boss/fellow member of my running group, Jorge, and it occured to me that I was ahead of everyone in our running group except for Charlie.

I'm sprinting across the finish line!

Jorge seemed to think he was going to beat me in the race and thus made a bet with me that if I beat him, he would bring back a People magazine and US Weekly from every trip he takes to the States. The idea of settling down with a cocktail and trashy mag in English every month or so made me run faster. At 40 km I noticed many of the “runners” walking around me. They had hit their walls. I tried to calculate how much time I would lose if I walked rather than ran to the finish, but got distracted by someone with an enormous camera taking a picture of me. In hopes of becoming famous like my friend Gladys and getting in Cosas magazine, I flashed them a huge smile and decided if I had run this far, it would be a shame to slow down.

Just as the finish line came into sight in the distance, I saw my husband running towards me, already wearing his completion medal. “Yeah!” he exclaimed. “You did it! Four hours 35 minutes! You beat everyone from running group! And you look strong!” While I was still running towards the finish, he had a friend from work take a picture of us. He began to ask me questions about our friends. “When did you pass Jorge? How far behind you is Ricardo?” Even in my exhaustion, I adored his excitement for me. I had to remind him that I needed to cross the finish line.

“Charlie, we can talk later, please let me finish,” I huffed out. Then I looked up. There is was! The finish line! My body didn’t hurt anymore and I began sprinting. In the final stretch, I passed two people and completed my first marathon with a smile on my face.