exercise

Jenny and I ran in the Xiamen International Marathon yesterday. I ran 10K and Jenny ran the half marathon. Altogether it was a good day. The weather was warm (upper 20sC) and humid There was a splash of rain at the start that just bumped up the humidity level.

The planners did a good job for an event of its size (more than 20,000 participants). The honeypots at the start line were the worst aspect; it’s a wonder everyone in the city isn’t crippled with dysentary right now. The city did the usual half-hearted job of managing traffic; their solution was basically to close all roads on the island, except around the port and airport (in other words, as long as the marathon didn’t hamper commerce...) Running alongside 19,900 Chinese enthusiasts provided yet another reminder that stuff we take for granted is new here, and everyone in China is just kind of making it up as they go.

Jenny and I were separated at the start because the planners sensibly staged the start by distance. The start was ungodly crowded, literally shoulder to shoulder. I don’t need to describe the smell. A CCTV helicopter kept passing overhead to the great amusement of the crowd; helicopters are really rare here. The race got a late and slow start. With that many people, almost all of whom had never run a marathon before, about half of whom were wearing thoroughly non-sporty gear like jeans and leather shoes, and most of whom had done no training whatsoever — with all that the first 1-2 km took probably 10 minutes. So it’s difficult to talk about finish times.

I missed all the distance markers so I never had a feel for how far along I was, I just kept passing people, especially on the hills. The “passing people” thing was really interesting; remember, almost none of these runners had even seen a marathon before, so niceties like “slow runners fall to the outside” and “large groups shouldn’t walk eight abreast” were unknown. I probably ran 20K in my 10K, if you count all the sidestepping and zigszagging. At all times, the race was so tight-packed that every runner was arms-reach from other runners. It meant running with your elbows. At one point, I detected a sharp smell of onions and I immediately thought, “that smells like Westerner B.O.” and a muscly clydesdale running the half-marathon brushed past me. So maybe Chinese people think we smell like onions? Do I smell Chinese (whatever that smell is?) This probably has to do with body chemistry and what foods you eat, and as we basically eat the same diet here as in Oregon, I’m guessing not.

The crowds along the course were also dense, and very inspiring. Chinese has exactly one cheer for all sporting occasions: Jia you! Jia you! Jia you! (pronounced “Jah, yo!”) It means, ludicrously, “add oil,” and is usually chanted in a “tastes great, less filling” back-and-forth manner. For once, I was glad for the attention paid foreigners. It made me feel sort of like a superstar. Groups of high school girls would should “hello hello!” and I’d smile and wave and they’d giggle. With my shaved head and plain grey HUSKERS t-shirt (just try explaining what a “Husker” is...) I know I made a martial appearance. A few times the army guys (who were basically lining the entire course, in the typical Chinese show of patriotism reserved for all large public events) saluted me. The heat and humidity combination was potent. I could feel my skin flushing, the heat radiating off my head. I poured some water over it to no avail.

All of sudden, I was about 500m from the finish, with plenty of gas left in the tank. I sprinted full out across the line. My time was 1:05 by the official clock, and somewhere between 45 and 55 minutes by my watch. Who knows what this means, given the clusterFrack at the start?

After the race, I found myself stranded across the island from our apartment, with literally not a taxi or bus in sight. I ran into two teachers from XIS and we three essentially walked across the island home.

Jenny had a harder race than I did; which sounds improbable because she’s a much stronger runner. We think it was a combination of the heat, and the fact that she only drank pure water. In conditions like that you can quickly unbalance your body salts and get light-headed and nauseous. Her time was something like 2 hours.

Not three hours after the run, the local papers had already printed pictures and stories, and released special editions. (Xiamen has several very small papers that superficially resemble “nickel ads” newspapers in size and heft. These apparently cover only local news.) The one we saw had two big stories: the cover story was that a Chinese guy won the marathon, which seemed hinky given the enormous distance the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams had on everyone else. We later surmised that the marathon officially comprises two marathons. The “Elite” marathon starts a few minutes before the “real” marathon, has the really big prize, and gets the international coverage (and pro runners). The “International” marathon is the one we (and 19,800 other people) run in. This allows the Chinese to save face by never letting a foreigner win “the International Marathon,” yet also attracts (and piggybacks on the image of) superstar international runners, who never have to worry about mixing with the (literally) unwashed masses. Interestingly, this is a pretty close mirror of the relationship between the two Ports brands: Ports 1961 is a haute couture runway brand sold outside China; Ports International is the China-only brand, and provides 90% of the corporate revenue. We use plenty of press from Ports 1961 for the International label, but never vice versa.

Jenny and I have decided next year to run the full marathon.

I am now entering my third continuous month of sinus allergies. This weekend I pretty much lost the ability to breathe through my nose. I sat in the sauna at the gym and it felt awesome. It’s hard not to blame the pollution: this is easily the most polluted place I’ve ever lived. But who knows what kind of exotic stuff is blooming here? I’ve been steadily upping my meds, yesterday I was taking twice or three times the recommended dosage of antihistimines, etc., but I have acquired such a tolerance to them that they have become essentially pointless. Heavy coffee drinkers know what this is like: when you have a constant level of caffeine in your system, it no longer keeps you awake. So I quit the meds cold turkey this morning and my head feels like the I-5/Banfield interchange at 5:30 in the afternoon.

I learned at a young age that I can’t trust my body. Actually I probably learned this when I was born, with club feet, a heart murmur and a lazy eye. Allergies, nearsightedness, and asthma came later. I was a skinny, pale kid with gigantic bug glasses, kind of like Peter Billingsley in Christmas Story. I was the kid who couldn’t throw or catch and always fell off skateboards. I hated being that kid.

When I was 24 I went to an eye doctor for my first set of contact lenses. The optician had me put on these polarized glasses for a depth perception test. It was in the form of a ten-page flipbook: each page had a circle cut into four quadrants. With the polarized lenses one of the quadrants was supposed to jump out. The effect was increasingly less pronounced: so page 10 was, I dunno 10 times harder to perceive than page 1. I made it to page 2. The optician said, “I have never seen someone with two good eyes that did as poorly on this test as you did.” I said, “this explains why I can’t catch a baseball.” Later, the optometrist fit me for my new contacts and I almost cried. He said, “I always like fitting someone for their first contact lenses.” I held my hands out beside my ears (in my peripheral vision) and said, “I had no idea people could see out here.”

On the other hand, I have an iron stomach and good teeth. For all the falling down I’ve done in my life, the only bone I’ve ever broken is in my right pinky toe. I can suffer heat and cold, in fact I kind of like heat and cold so it’s kind of a stretch to call it “suffering”. I like to sleep on the bare wood floor and have never met a food I couldn’t enjoy eating. I can think of no better way to spend a warm Saturday than to ride a bicycle a hundred miles, preferably over some hills. Unless you’re moving—helping a friend move a refrigerator is almost as much fun as the bike ride. I like to remind myself that, poorly engineered though it is, my body is wiry and tough and good for a lot of abuse.

I always hated complaining about my health. Or more accurately, I hate being fussed over. I’d rather suffer than draw attention to my discomfort. The worst is when I’m in a house with cats. Cat owners who know me, know that my cat allergy has sent me to the emergency room (twice). So they fuss and fuss: they clean really thoroughly, lock the cat in another room, open windows, run air purifiers. This bugs me because I hate the attention (see re: Peter Billingsley, above) but also because it doesn’t do any good. The only thing that makes an allergy better is to get away from the allergen.

This is a hard lesson for Jenny, with her good eyesight and strong lumbar vertebrae and resilient immune system. In her entire life, if she has ever been sick, well there was something she could do to make it better. Get a pill from the doctor or somesuch. She always wonders, what can we do? The sad answer is: nothing. We ignore it. There are some problems that have no solutions, so you have to learn to cope with them.

This is probably the most I’ve thought about my own body since...gee, ever.