About 3 weeks to go until this challenge and I guess that all is going roughly according to plan. To my surprise I haven't really struggled with the physical aspect of it, but perhaps I forgot what else could get in the way.
I recently spent 72 hours recovering from yet another cold. Not nearly as bad as last time but still, 3 days off exercise is 3 days not getting fitter. To pass the time I have been checking over my steed and all is not well. The R wheel has come back from South Africa slightly less straight than your average ring doughnut. I don’t know if it happened towards the end of the race or in the flight but it needs fixed before the triathlon; 180km is long enough when all your energy is going in the right direction. And for some reason my rear derallieur is only moving through 9 of the 10 gear positions it should have. I cannot fathom what’s going on at all. It’s not a massive problem in that I think I could set it up to run smoothly on 9 of my 10 gears (as opposed to currently it running badly on all of them) but you want everything to be perfect for a race so you’re not worrying about it. And if it chooses to get worse half way up Col de Vence then it’ll be a long and depressing walk back to Nice...
On the plus side running and riding has been going well. SA was a brilliant boost to the riding training and the running distances are getting realistic now without feeling too much like hard work. I recently entered the US embassy’s 10km race here in Dar and was pleased to come in 2nd. I thought I could win it for a while but the local guy with whom I was battling at the front knew what he was doing. He saw his moment when I was struggling a little and made sure he hurt me enough then that I couldn’t pull the gap back, and he beat me by about 10 seconds. Hats off to him, he was a fit lad.
Even my swimming is improving a bit. The incentives to practise down in Mtwara are massive; the water is beautifully clear and warm and you are surrounded by half the cast of Finding Nemo. I am optimistic now about going the distance, especially with the advantage of a wetsuit to buoy my confidence. Sure, the whirling salt and neoprene froth which is the start will still terrify me, but now it feels more like terror than panic, and that seems a slight improvement. I should explain in case anyone new is reading now; I could not swim a length of a pool until I was 31. I mean I had “swimming lessons” at little school, but a lesson consisted of being placed in the shallow end of the local pool; if you could swim to the deep end you got a badge, if not you tried again next week. Now I’ve taken some adult lessons and been lucky to have help and advice from the Mrs. Now Suze herself does not swim either. Rather she gets into a pool and all the water spontaneously chooses to flow past her, and suddenly she is at the other end. There’s an effortless beauty to it which is an inspiration when you are as splashy and square in the water as I am. Little by little, pole pole, I approach her standard, although like a logarithmic graph I will never quite get there. I just hope I have got close enough.
So I don’t know if I’ll get round to many/any more updates, but rest assured you’ll hear all the boring details after the event.
Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Tuesday, 2 June 2009
It’s a Jungle out there.
It is, quite literally, when you get a few miles outside almost any Tanzanian town, a hot, humid, seething mass of greenery. Now I love this, it’s the main reason for me personally, to come and work in Africa. But there seems to be some instinct, or at least tradition, of fearing it. I hope it won’t seem too pretentious if I waffle on a bit about it. I’m not claiming to be any kind of authority on any kind of literature, just trying to link some stuff together in my mind.
Joseph Conrad talks frequently about the menace of the forest, both in Heart of Darkness (in which even the title suggests a foreboding danger) and in earlier less famous works. Even when speaking through the voice of Marlow, who is clearly critical of many aspects of the Euro-centricism and imperialism he witnesses, he describes the forest as frightening and “so dark as to be almost black”.
Shakespeare talks in a similar way about British forest. A few hundred years before Conrad (obviously, as Britain’s forests didn’t really last into much of the 20th century), the dark forests are frightening and avoided places in, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now I believe this metaphor has gynaephobic overtones as well, but ultimately it is the forest that we are supposed to fear.
And we’re not out of the woods yet, culturally. Around the time of WWI (in setting at least), Henri Charriere’s “Papillon” tells of his hero’s attempts to escape, not just from a French prison colony, but from L’Enfer Vert. The French overseas dependency of Guyane, almost entirely covered by rainforest, is still known by this nickname. Sections of the film Papillon are actually shot there on location, although Steve McQueen never even attempts a trace of a French accent.
Although I didn’t even take a journey by aeroplane until I was 23, I have since then had the privilege of visiting all these locations. I love walking around the few remaining tracts of Shakespeare’s British wilderness, and the much better preserved examples in Central or Eastern Europe. Suze and I’s honeymoon was in the “Green Hell” of French Guyana. And although it is never specifically stated in Heart of Darkness whether Marlow’s boat travels towards the Congo from East or West Africa – much more likely the latter – we have now travelled, and in Suze’s case worked, in both.
The horror! What horror? What do we actually have to fear in the woods these days, except that bears undeniably shit in them? Bears don’t attack humans (or anything even close to man-sized) unless they feel threatened, and likewise there is not a single documented instance of unprovoked attack on people by wolves. Lions, tigers, and pumas take the occasional human victim, but far fewer than are killed in towns by domestic/feral dogs. Mosquitoes are an annoyance, but providing you cover bare skin and take your Mefloquine or Doxycycline, not much more than that. Reptiles are widely feared, and snake bite does kill quite a lot of people in the developing world. The actual numbers are hard to pin down owing to lack of access to care, record-keeping etc, but 20,000 deaths per year worldwide is a credible estimate. That number could be reduced dramatically if we could raise the standard of living in Africa and South Asia sufficiently that everyone could afford a pair of shoes. Which doesn’t sound like that much to ask, really? Conversely, in a single country (the USA, obviously) about 30,000 people per year are killed by firearms and more than 3 times that number are injured.
So trust me, I do have a degree in zoology after all. If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in sturdy boots and a long sleeved top, and as long as you do you are in one of the safest and most beautiful places on earth. There is one thing above all others that’s really worth being frightened of in this world, and it mainly lives in cities. L’Enfer, should you believe in such a place, may be firey red or sulphurous yellow, but would surely be unlikely to be green. To paraphrase the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s ideas regarding it: “We have no need for fire and brimstone, hell is other people.”
Joseph Conrad talks frequently about the menace of the forest, both in Heart of Darkness (in which even the title suggests a foreboding danger) and in earlier less famous works. Even when speaking through the voice of Marlow, who is clearly critical of many aspects of the Euro-centricism and imperialism he witnesses, he describes the forest as frightening and “so dark as to be almost black”.
Shakespeare talks in a similar way about British forest. A few hundred years before Conrad (obviously, as Britain’s forests didn’t really last into much of the 20th century), the dark forests are frightening and avoided places in, for instance, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now I believe this metaphor has gynaephobic overtones as well, but ultimately it is the forest that we are supposed to fear.
And we’re not out of the woods yet, culturally. Around the time of WWI (in setting at least), Henri Charriere’s “Papillon” tells of his hero’s attempts to escape, not just from a French prison colony, but from L’Enfer Vert. The French overseas dependency of Guyane, almost entirely covered by rainforest, is still known by this nickname. Sections of the film Papillon are actually shot there on location, although Steve McQueen never even attempts a trace of a French accent.
Although I didn’t even take a journey by aeroplane until I was 23, I have since then had the privilege of visiting all these locations. I love walking around the few remaining tracts of Shakespeare’s British wilderness, and the much better preserved examples in Central or Eastern Europe. Suze and I’s honeymoon was in the “Green Hell” of French Guyana. And although it is never specifically stated in Heart of Darkness whether Marlow’s boat travels towards the Congo from East or West Africa – much more likely the latter – we have now travelled, and in Suze’s case worked, in both.
The horror! What horror? What do we actually have to fear in the woods these days, except that bears undeniably shit in them? Bears don’t attack humans (or anything even close to man-sized) unless they feel threatened, and likewise there is not a single documented instance of unprovoked attack on people by wolves. Lions, tigers, and pumas take the occasional human victim, but far fewer than are killed in towns by domestic/feral dogs. Mosquitoes are an annoyance, but providing you cover bare skin and take your Mefloquine or Doxycycline, not much more than that. Reptiles are widely feared, and snake bite does kill quite a lot of people in the developing world. The actual numbers are hard to pin down owing to lack of access to care, record-keeping etc, but 20,000 deaths per year worldwide is a credible estimate. That number could be reduced dramatically if we could raise the standard of living in Africa and South Asia sufficiently that everyone could afford a pair of shoes. Which doesn’t sound like that much to ask, really? Conversely, in a single country (the USA, obviously) about 30,000 people per year are killed by firearms and more than 3 times that number are injured.
So trust me, I do have a degree in zoology after all. If you go down to the woods today, you’d better go in sturdy boots and a long sleeved top, and as long as you do you are in one of the safest and most beautiful places on earth. There is one thing above all others that’s really worth being frightened of in this world, and it mainly lives in cities. L’Enfer, should you believe in such a place, may be firey red or sulphurous yellow, but would surely be unlikely to be green. To paraphrase the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s ideas regarding it: “We have no need for fire and brimstone, hell is other people.”
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