How i won the Almaty Marathon

After 5 months of preparing I came to the realization that I really didn’t have any information on the marathon other than that last year it is was in June. My buddy Colin was going to run it with me, but because of travel he had to stop training. He ran it last year and was my in for all the registration and whatnot…so after he backed out I was on my own. I found out it was on the 7th of June and went to Almaty to sign up. When I got to the stadium the race director informed me that the full marathon was cancelled and that they would only hold the half. It was the worst. After unsuccessfully trying to convince him that I really wanted to do it, it was made clear that because of the change in race location and time there would be no medical unit and because of the altitude the local government would not allow blah blah blah. To get around this, Colin called the race director and told him that I was a professional – and then later thought about how not good I am and called me back and made me promise not to die. This was something I also had to promise myself because the director would for sure destroy me if anything happened…and I hate getting yelled at. I also had to promise the director not to tell anyone about it. On Saturday all the runners took a bus up to the mountains to spend the night and acclimate to the altitude. Of course very few people spoke Kazakh so when they were trying to explain some things to me in Russian two guys came over to help me and asked if I spoke English. Money. One of the guys had just moved back to Kazakhstan after living in Philly for 4 years, which was really interesting. These guys were huge for me, and such a help. Timoti and Ruslan. The race started at 8 and had probably about 50 people running in it. It was great to see and talk to all the runners. Some came from abroad (Tajikistan, Russia, China, Uzbekistan) and a lot of them had some wicked fast times. The winner went 1:09! I however spent most of the race battling it out with a 60+ bald guy running in Chuck Taylors. After my 5 laps were over I got the nod from the coordinators to carry on and watched everyone else stop. There were some walkers finishing up the half marathon so for awhile the crowd was still hanging around and the water crew was still posted…but after awhile they started to fade. For my last two laps (that’s right – laps, the course was essentially a 2 km trail up and back 10 times) the only people who were left were Timoti, his family (which was was a huge boost), one timer, and random hikers… the water crews were also nice enough to leave some filled cups at the turn around spots. Finally it was over and I wanted to pass out, but that was not to be. Because I was longer finishing than everyone else I was late checking out of the hotel and had to immediately walk down the mountain from the course to the hotel. While sitting in the room for like 30 seconds a maid came in and said she had to clean so I had to pack up my stuff and get out…and then one of the race organizers caught me and wanted to have a medal presentation ceremony for me. At this point I wanted die…or at least sit down. A bunch of the older runners from the marathon club were hanging around and were impressed by me running alone and we chatted for awhile. Some of these guys had run 50+ marathons so it was pretty cool to have them shaking my hand and talking about my race. At this point, majority of my body parts shutdown and I had to be deposited back to the peace corps office to waste away until I had to catch a bus to go to a village for week 1 of baseball camp.