running away from home!

Last Saturday morning I left Phnom Penh at 7:30 in the morning, aboard a bus headed north to Siem Reap with my friend Pip. We rode 6 hours there on Saturday, only to ride back again 23 hours later! Why, you might ask?!

For the last 6 weeks or so, we have been training for a 10K run around the temples of Angkor Wat. I honestly wasn't too worried about the run itself... I have been running pretty consistently for the past year or so. My friend Pip had never participated in a race before, and when I first talked her in to signing up with me, she was worried that I was going to put her to shame! This is laughable... and of course I knew that that would NOT be the case! Once we started running together, I realized it would be quite the opposite.

Since running in PP is not the most convenient thing to do, we got creative! We had been running at a local gym for awhile, but as you might expect, the treadmill got boring, and we needed a change! So we decided to start a new training method we call "running away from home" a few times a week instead. Basically, this involves us waking up at 4:45 am (the only culturally appropriate time to run!) and leaving Pip's house about 5 am. In the dark, we run down some of the main roads in the city, past lots of other people out on the streets doing aerobics to amplified music, some popular monuments, and to the river front. After about 45 minutes to an hour, when we are ready to quit, we catch a moto home. Despite the fumes from burning trash, smells of urine, trying not to trip on piles of trash or get hit by a car, it has been one of my favorite parts of the day. We have begun to refer to running as our "drug," and I can't get enough! As one of our team members wrote about us in a newsletter: "first they wanted to stay fit, but it turned to an obsession...."

So on Sunday morning we ran a race with many others from around the world. The weather was beautiful, the leaves were falling from the trees that surrounded the roads, and in the spirit of any race, there was a clapping, energetic crowd and lots of crazy runners!

We had made a goal to finish as quickly as we thought possible for us, and we were pleasantly surprised when we ended up running much faster than we had hoped. We decided that we liked running in Cambodia, as we ended up finishing 4th and 5th in the race overall! What a blast! We're already planning our next one....

Here are some of the Instructions on the "notice" we received before the race. I hope you find them as funny as we did!


NOTICE

~You can wear anything, freely.
(anything?! wouldn't find this in the race instructions in the states!)

~ Please manage by yourself, thanks.
(yeah, okay...)

~ But you can enjoy running by 10:30 safely. Anyway , return to Finish as fast as possible. (yeah, we tried... we made it by 7:35 or so.... :)

~ If you missthem, contact Staff, please.
(they were referring to a bottle of water at the finish line... :)

~Be sure to set at starting.
(what?!)

~There is no facilities to deposit valuable subjects, baggages, etc.
(luckily I didn't have any valuable subjects with me!)