African Giselle and Me, who is faster?

Lately, my cousin Stephen Twahirwa and I have been catching up on lost ground -so many years in school and we had never really known each other on personal level. So, we’ve been visiting book stores in town –Aristoc, to quench our thirst for titles. This is one of the most enduring traits I love about Steve -he is a reader, and so am I. Thanks to his initiative, we started jogging between the reading. He had been doing this back in Rwanda for a long time. So the jogging has been going on for about a month now. I din’t know I could run a long distance until Steve came along. 

I have been slowly turning into a Giselle of sorts.

Some dimwit who was sitting on a cliff along the route we take once shouted at me;“what are you chasing?” If didn’t know better I’d have told him about his mother. But jogging, I've discovered, has its rules. It takes some focus –you don’t get distracted, if you do you lose pace and get tired easily. Running or Jogging is one sport that puts your endurance to a test.

I can say I’ve picked some insights into how people run marathons; you have to maintain a constant pace through the distance. This constancy harmonizes your breathing to motion ratio –you have to acquire a pace for the running-breathing motion, which are in harmony. Otherwise you get tired quickly because you use uncoordinated energy to move. See, you don’t have horse power, you have oxygen power. You create your energy on the road, by your mechanism of breathing. The more length between your in and out timer the better.

Anyway, the amazing thing about jogging is that when you do a distance two to four times, it becomes nothing, you begin to want a new threshold –so you keep upping the ante until you reach your limits; which, going by this formula, there isn’t! That is how Steve has been turning me into a Giselle. Where we used to go one round and feel like the end has come to the world, now we’re going there two rounds, and looking forward to a third. This is a distance of about 8 km a round, so we are currently doing 16 km –not very bad for starters.

I don’t exactly want to acquire the identity of a running junkie on any competitive scale. It’s just that I don’t want to get heart disease or any of those ailments that come with body inactivity. That’s why I am burning off all traces of fat that might intrude; I just want bone and muscle, that’s the way it’s got to be. Plus, once you’ve started it’s kinda enjoyable, its kinda heard to stop -when evening time comes, little alarms go off in the legs.

And who knows, in future we might be required to contribute to a global or national cause by running a marathon in which each family is asked to participate with its members -I want to be one of those that finish the race, in case that happens.