RUNNING
Red Dust and Yellow Haze
An American running for a year in Bamako, Mali
I was browsing some photos recently and remembered how much I like the picture of myself, below, standing at a busy intersection one morning in Bamako, Mali. It was a tough place to run. But living there was also one of the times I was in the best shape of my life because I ran almost every day there and I loved it.
My husband’s job moved us to Bamako in the summer of 2014. If you know anything about Mali, you may know it’s not exactly the vacation destination it was a generation ago. Timbuktu is too dangerous. The desert in the north is too dangerous. Hotels and nightclubs in the capital city are targets for terrorist attacks.
But for most people regular life carried on and my regular life included running. I found a running community there like I do everywhere. I’d go out around sunrise, before the heat of the day set in. Most of the other people on the roads were other runners, Malians who ran for fun and exercise. Some were professional athletes and Olympians. As someone who is 5'4", members of the Malian national basketball team towered over me, but we were still all runners out there together.
My New Running Normal
I was constantly watching my footing because of loose cobblestones on some streets. Because of sewage ditches with no covers (I know more than one person who fell into them). Because of both the garbage that piled up and the droppings of the donkeys that were used to haul the garbage. My shoes and socks and ankles developed a constant layer of red dust from the sandy, dirt-packed streets and sidewalks. There were times when I had to decide — stay on the shoulder with a bus speeding past, or hop onto the grass lining the road where there was controlled burning of the vegetation and garbage. More than once the bus felt a little too close and the bottoms of my shoes felt a little too warm. I was always on the lookout for street dogs — I’d been bitten by one in India and did everything I could to avoid getting bit again. Everything except stop running on the roads, that is.
Winter in Bamako meant the harmattan, the sand storms that blow in from the Sahel and Sahara deserts. The air is thick with dust and the sky turns yellow. Even the weather app on my phone showed the forecast as “dust” with a fuzzy sun icon. On those days it was impossible to be outside for too long. Your lungs would start to hurt from breathing in sand particles. So in order to get my long runs done I’d run about two miles to a club that had treadmills, run a few miles indoors in the air conditioning, and then run the two miles home outside.
Most mornings the water pressure at our house would disappear around the time I arrived home from my run. We had a small swimming pool, though, so there were many times I jumped in the pool, running clothes and all, to cool off and rinse off, and then shower later in the day when the water was back on, grateful that we had even the small amount of water that we did.
I always ran with my phone hidden from view, and never with earbuds or headphones, and the equivalent of a couple dollars for emergencies — nothing more than I would have wanted stolen if I’d been mugged. I always told my husband my route and when he could expect me back. I usually texted him once I was about a mile away from home so he’d know I was fine. It seems like a lot of work but I think a lot of runners take their safety for granted. Bamako was certainly a place we didn’t want anything to go wrong.
Quarantines and Virtual Races, in 2015
My regular 5K route took me past a hospital that was under quarantine because of Ebola, UN trucks parked outside because some peacekeepers happened to be at the hospital for unrelated reasons. When an Ebola patient turned up, no one was allowed to leave the hospital for weeks so the peacekeepers were stuck there. I was thankful I could be outside, having no idea how serious lockdowns and quarantines were going to become in the future.
I trained for a trail half marathon there, waking up before sunrise on Saturday or Sunday mornings to get my long run in before both the heat and the traffic became unbearable. I had to get creative once I got bored with my 5K loops close to home. I examined maps and asked my husband to drive with me along certain roads before he and I determined together some safe routes for me.
The trail half marathon was canceled due to terrorism, but some big races in the United States were starting to offer virtual options, way back then, so I still got a sweet swag bag and a medal for running 13.1 miles by myself on the streets of Bamako one Saturday morning.
I Would Never Fit in, But I Would Eventually Stand Out Slightly Less
I started seeing the same people on my regular runs. People starting work, children going to school. We’d give each other a smile and a friendly nod. I’d run by the field where kids played a seemingly never-ending soccer game. In order to avoid traffic on some of the busier roads, I started taking parallel dirt side streets. People would call out the local word for “White person” when I ran by but I always felt it was more out of surprise than a threat. Eventually people got used to me and called out “La sportive!” (athletic lady) instead. Some people, runners and non-runners, would yell “Couráge!” or “Espirit!”, words of encouragement, especially on hills.
I got used to jumping around butchered animal parts that had fallen off the back of a motorcycle. I wondered who was going to get in trouble for losing the hundreds of watermelons that had crashed onto the road one night. I loved running over the bridge that spanned the Niger River during the early stages of the morning rush hour. The road conditions kept me in good shape for trail running, with all the obstacles.
It wasn’t easy. I knew I had to stop worrying about my pace and worry more about my safety. I had no idea how much running in Bamako would prepare me for 2020. And we had to leave the country in 2015 under scary, stressful circumstances.
But I would go back.
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