Ground-air-ground missile

What is more dangerous, being on the ground or flying in the sky?

After almost a day of suffering, you could say that I have finally come out of a coma. I cannot tell how long the spell of fainting, staggering and sudden pounding of the heart lasted, during which, once fully conscious again, I could not fall asleep.

A recent little stumble during an easy run, which ended with me sweeping out a roadside ditch, should have warned me that I was not quite in form, but let us start from the beginning.

After a long run, about 21 km at an altitude of 2300-2400 m, we went to a nearby safari park to rest.

Jurassic Park

The sight of the tallest inhabitant of our planet reminded me of scenes from the film Jurassic Park, in which a long-extinct dinosaur suddenly appears in front of the visitors to an unusual amusement park.

It was not exactly easy to get closer to the giraffes. Barbed wire separated us, and imagining what would happen if we decided to feed them helped us keep a safe distance.

The question of who would have the upper hand in an unplanned encounter and take to their heels we left unanswered for the time being.

Because of the long dry season, many animals gather around sources of drinking water, where we, too, lay in wait with our lenses and the cameras built into our mobile phones.

Together with the huge herbivores mentioned earlier, a couple of sprinting antelopes kept us company on the way to the lake, where at last we could watch the birds that had flown in to gather food for their young and cool down a little during the hot day.

Welcome to real safari

Do not look for any likeness to an ordinary zoo in Europe, where on every corner all kinds of animals from far corners of the continents wait for you behind bars, with a graphically perfect description of where they come from, what they eat and how many young they have when grown.

It happens more often that you walk several kilometres without finding a single animal. If luck is on your side, you come across a wild animal in its natural surroundings, and even without a professional video camera the memory of that moment will stay with you for the rest of your life.

If it is not your lucky day and you do not follow the instructions of an experienced guide, it is likely that one of the predators will lie in wait for you in its hiding place first, and it will be the one to savour that moment.

In the end everything turned out well; judging by the footage, we came back in the same number and line-up as we set out.

Nike Discovery cross country in Eldoret

We filled our rest day with a visit to perhaps the toughest running race in the world. Against extremely strong competition and in difficult climatic conditions, that is 2091 m above sea level and temperatures of about 30 degrees Celsius in the sun, the best women and men of the African continent raced here.

Their rivals included some white runners as well, such as the elite Swiss runner Julien Wanders, but just as at the big international championships, here too they had almost no chance against the Kenyan runners.

Notice the second man in the yellow vest in the leading group, the eventual winner named Bedan Karoki; we will probably hear about him soon.

A pleasant extra was the races of new running talents among the children, in which we could spot potential future winners of the Diamond League or the Olympic Games. In the case of the junior category, we may see them as early as Tokyo in 2020.

The first time in the air

If there is one thing I am really afraid of, it is heights, for example in climbing, bungee jumping, tandem skydiving or paragliding. Fear of being even a few metres above the ground gives me rather unpleasant feelings, from dizziness to stomach ache and headache.

In spite of that, my friend David and I booked a paragliding flight (the equivalent of 60 dollars) with a launch from one of the most beautiful cliffs around Iten. The price seemed as irresistible to me as the stunning surroundings we were in. Seeing the view from more than 2500 m above sea level into the vast valley lying as much as 1000 metres below us was priceless.

I decided to try to overcome my fears and say goodbye to them once and for all.

I didn’t succeed

Then came the necessary preparations by the French-American duo of instructors and the obligatory two-minute briefing on the basics, chiefly how not to kill yourself during the take-off run and what to do in case of an unplanned landing.

If you fly regularly, you surely never imagine that the safety instructions for a plane crash might actually have to be put into practice. I thought much the same at the moment when Floran (Flo for short), speaking with a funny French accent, was strapping the paraglider on me and, instead of taking in all his instructions, I was filming him on video.

That is why I was surprised when the promised 20-minute flight turned, because of worsening weather, into a 10-minute adventure, the last few tens of seconds of which I can barely recall, just like the first minutes after landing.

Ground-air-ground missile

Nowadays nearly anybody can run and jump from the cliff with the parachute on his back. However, who is so lucky to survive an emergency landing and fall down into girls’ arms at the secondary school’s football playground?

By redirecting our landing point away from the frame of the football goal to somewhere between the six-yard box and the penalty area, Flo won my trust and convinced me that even a sudden landing à la française has its charm.

All the greater was the happiness I felt when my trainers touched the grass, which was unexpectedly brightened up by African girls from the nearby secondary school.

A short break from lessons at A.I.C. Girls’ Secondary Kessup certainly suited the pupils. They rushed out onto the football pitch just before the paraglider came down and gathered around us, together with their teacher, as if at a dance, where the leading role was played by a confused white man looking like a British paratrooper in the First World War.

Had there been a history lesson going on at that moment, this cultural interlude would probably have reminded the girls of the distant past, when Kenya was part of a colony ruled by the British Empire with the military support of France, which began with the so-called Entente Cordiale as early as 1904.

Where is the man from the heaven?

He came down from the sky and vanished before everyone's eyes. If you decided to look for him, you would find him back on the running tracks in Iten …

No more paragliding today, girls are going back to school and we on the running tracks …

… and I should add that he did not stay on them for long.

When I take into account the events of the previous days, especially the combination of hard training sessions with states of great exhaustion caused by lack of sleep and rest and the effects of sunstroke, I can say that acclimatisation to the local conditions did not exactly go well.

I really enjoyed my first ride on a motorbike, which Africans call piki-piki (though even here you can find a quality machine – see the photo).
I had already managed to recover from the unpleasant state of my stomach after the paragliding flight, and thanks also to the fast ride on tarmac, which covers only about 14% of all roads in Kenya, the colour was slowly coming back to my face.

The last quality training?

Our running group had three-hundred-metre hill repeats on the day's programme, for me the toughest running session so far and perhaps also the last.

Even during the easy warm-up jog I felt tired, but I put it down to stiff muscles after lazing about in bed in the morning. The warm-up exercises, however, lifted my spirits and I assumed I was well prepared. How wrong I was!

I did not finish the planned three sets of 5 repetitions. Already halfway through the second set I noticed a considerable loss of strength, and I could no longer manage the ninth hill.

I felt really awful. My heart started pounding, although my heart rate was still normal, if anything falling, perhaps because of low blood pressure. I could not catch my breath, so I thought it better to go off to one side.

As if that were not enough, and wanting to fight back against the situation, I tried to run up hill number ten.
How do you think it ended? After 150 metres I nearly collapsed, and I had no choice but to wait for the end of the session.

And the second ride

As a cool-down jog of about two kilometres was waiting for us and I had little strength left to spare, I set off home on foot. While I had walked only a few hundred metres, my friends comfortably finished the session and caught up with me. With the last of my strength I ran after them and ….

I recall only very dimly what happened from the moment I staggered and sat down in soil soaked with water again after a long dry spell, through hugging the driver of a piki-piki while my friend Pavel held me from behind so that I would not fall off on the way, to lying down on the grassy yard in front of our house.

Has the writing of blog to be finished?

“At last I can see!” I apparently declared when I had drunk the first mug of bottled drinking water and downed the rest of a bottle of Coca-Cola. Thank you, God, for these gifts!

I am not sure whether I witnessed a hypoglycaemic shock or simply the symptoms of overtraining in an enthusiastic amateur runner who still dreams of the day when he beats all his personal records.

I am sure only of one thing: I have good friends around me whom I can rely on. Had they left me lying in the ditch, completely unable to call for help or take a single step, the colours of the blog's web pages would have turned to shades of black and white, and the word Deceased would have lit up across the whole page.

So what is more dangerous?

When we were riding back with Flo on a piki-piki along dirt roads from the secondary school grounds on Monday, Flo said:

“I often feel safer in the air than down below. Even when you are moving on the ground, whether you are running or riding a motorbike, you never know what might happen. That is why I prefer to fly.”

And I had to agree with him. Whether you are trying to take home lovely memories on your camera's memory card in the middle of a safari, taking part in the race of your dreams, training to prove something to yourself, or jumping with a parachute from a hundred-metre-high cliff without absolute certainty that you will survive ….

… everything depends only on whether you have luck in life. I have had it several times already and I believe it will stay with me.

Thank you, my friends! 🙂