Day ???: America's Favorite Towel

by claire a. williams, claire@trippingonwords.com

As Lara has mentioned, all 22 Tumaini runners and 3 Hope Runs volunteers finished the Saturday marathon at Mt. Kenya, known to be one of the top ten hardest marathons in the world. We were beyond thrilled, and spent many a moment realizing how hypocritical we had been to say that only saps cry at marathons. It was all very emotional, you see, to end a marathon with a small mildy insane monster you love shouting "Very Good Black Crayon!"

Additionally, we made it on national television a few times, allowing the smallest Tumaini children who could not join the rest of the cheerers due to our tight budget the chance to see Black Crayon and While Lola, "Running so slowly as if she [sic] might be walking." They apparently watched the live coverage on Tumaini's one lone television for 7 hours hoping to see us, so they should be so duly rewarded.

In sum, Saturday was running a marathon the way it is supposed to be run. A world apart from last year's marathon for me, when I finished in Madrid, alone, Lara being the only person I knew on the continent. When she found me, she brought a flower she had paid five euro for, and then I went and bought myself a Big Mac and we went back to our solo hostel room and didn't emerge for 36 hours until I needed more food. It was all very insular and about me.

This year was not about me. In fact, there was so little thinking about me (or Lara) that we managed to get ourselves mighty sick in the week leading up to logistical nightmare of a wonderful experience.

For Lara, the result of such oversight was running her first marathon with a low grade fever. For me, the result was spending the two days after the marathon confined to bed with the Lara sickness, realizing that the towel I use here at Tumaini has a label on it reading "America's Favorite Towel."

Which doesn't make any sense, by the way, and I wonder who decides such things. But then I wonder who decides that the Mt. Kenya marathon is one of the hardest in the world, and I realize that I'd rather not know and just believe it instead and congratulate myself and tell myself that it really was okay to cry.