ubuntu: My First Track Meet in South Africa

I know, I know, this is the post that you all have been waiting for... haha.

So I traveled for an hour to Durban to compete in the first meet of the season at King Park Athletics Stadium, right next to the new Durban World Cup soccer field that is currently under construction. It got off to a rough start: first I am told that I am supposed to bring my own starting blocks, but I don't think our team even owns any... I panic a bit. A half-hour waiting in the registration line [it is pretty inefficient to have all the athletes go up one by one in a large mass to tell you what events they are doing] I am told that the 400m and the 100m races are switched-- meaning that the 100m race was starting in about 4 minutes instead of at the end of the meet. I run to the front of the line, do a half-warmup, and then I am on the track and ready... but then it takes an hour for me to actually get into the blocks as we then wait for the heats ahead of us... it was a mess.
As I try to figure out what is going on, I look at myself: I am wearing an over-sized top made for marathon runners with the bottom half of it being nothing but mesh/net material, my belly button peeking through and saying hello to the entire world. Below that are some flappy distance-running short-shorts with nearly zebra-like rainbow stripes on one side and the UKZN symbol on the other. And on my feet are some takkies [sneakers] that I kept from Harvard last year. I didn't quite look like someone who was going to be sprinting and long jumping that day. It had been raining all morning, so the track was slippery and my teammates told me that running on a wet track in takkies for a 100m race was just going to make me slip and I would be really slow... they recommended running barefoot. Considering that falling on my face at the starting line is not a new experience for me, I decided it was worth taking the risk to run in takkies instead of shredding my feet. I watched the girls in my heat dig their spikes into the rubber surface with every stride they took getting farther and farther in front of me as I crossed the line at a laughable 13.30 seconds.

I then waited at the long jump pit, watching Wale jump and wondering when we would actually start-- they were jumping 36 guys simultaneously without any flights... it was a slight mess. The girls started long jump over two hours after the scheduled start, but there were only about 7 of us so it went pretty quickly. I jumped against 4 high schoolers, a 50-year old woman, and an annoying girl who was about my age. With such stiff competition, I didn't know how I would stack up. Wale bet me that I wasn't going to jump over 5meters trying to jump in takkies on a slippery surface and no coaching... seriously? If I did anything, I was going to jump over 5 meters. Oh please. So that was my goal-- to make Wale feel stupid for saying such a thing. I left the meet with a 5.34m mark, which is still over 17 feet and considering the circumstances I am not too angry about it. One of the high school girls jumped a 5.15m and the older woman never made it to the 4-meter mark... so it was a pretty solid victory [not that it counted for anything].
It felt weird not wearing spikes. It felt odd not having anyone there [no coach, no teammates] to watch me jump and give me advice as to what to work on. It was weird to not even see a rubber track the 5 month prior to competing on it. But I will admit-- I loved it. I had so much fun. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt on the long jump runway and how running to the board, no matter how unprepared I was at the time, felt so familiar [and I only fouled one of the six jumps, which is quite an accomplishment if you know me]. Between my events I ran around the field cheering for teammates competing on the track, even though I don't know most of their names... I just kind of also wanted to show them how important it is for teammates to support each other. I was very lucky to always have a group of teammates to watch me long jump the last couple years and although I didn't have that this time, by the end of the meet the whole team was on their feet cheering for our last runner. :)

In the beginning you would have thought I was competing for Harvard still.