Back to Reality

Again I sit in Casablanca’s Mohamed V airport, typing steadily to kill some of my eight-hour layover. This time, with the sun tan (*burn) I was hoping to achieve and a few more kilometres on my legs than I expected to run.

THE TRAVEL

Getting to Sierra Leone is not an easy journey. It was a much longer journey when I used to live in Belfast, but even from Segovia I doubt I could complete the journey in less than 14 hours, even with all the luck and punctuality in the world. The route from Segovia to Casablanca was remarkably straight-forward, aside from the slightly confusing satellite terminal I had to pass through in Madrid airport, but once I stepped foot onto the Casablanca runway things started to go pear-shaped. I hate to generalise but of the four African airports I’ve been through, only one has had anything close to a calm or controlled atmosphere, and that was Eldoret airport in Kenya where the average number of passengers on any given plane is probably less than 50. Not so in Casablanca, with seemingly the entire Sierra Leonean diaspora on their way home for Christmas and bearing gifts.

Once you land in Sierra Leone you are still hours away from getting into Freetown, thanks to the airport having been built on a peninsula, via a six-hour coach journey, or a half-hour ferry ride across a 20km-wide inlet. The ferry mightn’t sound so bad, if it weren’t for the completely chaotic nature of the crossing. First you need to deposit your bag with the ferry company, and choose which porter you would like to pay 10,000 Leones (about £1) to carry it a grand total of 50 metres from the terminal to the luggage bus. You also have to navigate every other person in the arrivals lounge trying to sell you a SIM card and a ferry ticket. Then the waiting starts, as travel-weary passengers load into the bus which takes you down to the ferry terminal – a wooden-walled shed full of plastic chairs and tables looking out into the darkness outside, behind which hides the sprawling expanse of Freetown. The wait in that (albeit large) shed can last anywhere from 1 to 2 hours, before decamping down a rickety wooden pontoon to the ferry. Well, “ferry” could be an overstatement. It is essentially a floating bus, playing cheesy music and equipped with lifejackets which don’t fasten but you are encouraged to wear regardless. The ferry journey is usually swift, although on this occasion some plastic got caught in the boat’s propellers and left us wondering if there was a fuel shortage as we bobbed aimlessly halfway between the shore we had left and the shore we were trying to get to. After the engine started up again and we began motoring towards Freetown again, the staff on the boat walked the length with a box wrapped with Christmas paper and with a slit cut in the top, asking if anyone wanted to donate a ‘present’ (another 10,000 Leones duly handed over). Finally arriving at the ferry terminal on the mainland, a real sense of relief washed over me – the waiting was finally over. I quickly grabbed my baggage and leapt into my dad’s Land Rover, and headed back to the house.

THE RUNNING

The first run of the trip was only preceded by a cup of tea. My flight landed at 3.35 am, my ferry arrived in the terminal around 6.40 am and I was out the door and doing loops around the compound my parents live on by 7.20 am, my logic being that as I was already tired, I may as well do the run right away and then chill out the rest of the day and not worry about it. The loop is about 350m long and I did about 30 laps for 11ish km – it’s all on Strava if you’re interested in the gnarly details. I did quite a lot of running on that loop over the 12 days I spent in Sierra Leone, interspersed with occasional outings with the local Sierra Leone army PTI, Staff Sergeant Matea, who I have run with every time I’ve been out to Sierra Leone. A veteran marathon runner, he was excited to hear I was giving the event a go myself, and immediately suggested we do his ‘marathon test run’ before I headed back to Spain. I agreed out of curiosity more than anything else, and it looked like my plan to take it easy over Christmas was out of the window. The run took me from an area of Freetown called Regent to the army physical training camp in Benguema. Looking at a map beforehand with my dad we estimated the run would be about 25 km, and we weren’t far off – it came out to just short of 26 km.

What I hadn’t been prepared for was the mad nature of the run. The pace was comfortable and the course overall downhill, but everything else about it was pretty stressful. The run started on the equivalent of an A road in the UK, and then moved onto the main highway from Freetown to Hastings, a large town about 20 km from Freetown. Running through a toll gate was a fairly unique and bizarre experience (we didn’t have to pay the 5,000 Leones to pass, for anyone wondering). The last 5 or 6 km was on a slightly calmer section of road, traffic wise. Aside from the relative lack of speeding vehicles, though, it was absolutely mad. We seemed to have chosen market time as the streets were packed with police guiding traffic, stalls spilling out into the road and hordes of people and animals everywhere. I suspect Matea had told his colleagues that I was doing the test run as there were quite a few guys waiting in the courtyard of the training camp to watch us finish, and Matea put in a noticeable surge in the final few hundred metres. The guys waiting in the courtyard were eager to hear my time – 2 hrs 4 mins – which they seemed impressed with. The rest of the trip was made up of mostly easy running, either around the camp loop, on a beach or up and down to a smaller army camp. On the last day of my stay I took on my now traditional challenge of racing up Leicester Peak (a steep 1.8 km hill behind the compound) as fast as I could, improving my best to 9 minutes 13 seconds (from 9.20 back in April 2017). All in all, in my 12 days of Sierra Leonean running (warm-weather training?!) I clocked up a total of 129 kilometres, and managed to get out and run every day of the trip, even if a few of those were pathetic hungover stumbles around the compound loop.

THE REST

When I wasn’t running I wasn’t exactly living the life of an athlete. Christmas and New Year celebrations don’t exactly lend themselves to feeling fresh every morning, and particularly between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day I felt pretty consistently ropey. That didn’t prevent a few brilliant days out, including a couple of trips to the beach, lots of swimming in the compound swimming pool (watched by monkeys from the trees nearby), and a few boozy outings to restaurants. All in all a great Christmas break and over far too soon – the ferry back was enjoyed even less than the trip out! Now to get back to Spain and stuck into training for this marathon!