On to Cooler Pastures

Saturday- 13.2 miles- 1:44:00 (last 3 miles at "strong" effort)

Well I am back at the north camp base in the land where some water actually exists and temps are a bit cooler. The air has some humidity and it cools off to below 90 at night! Yippee. It is a bigger base, but has 0% hills and is blacktop though. Anyway I am back after the 7 hour bus ride through the Sinai. I got to see some interesting terrain...some of which looked like southern Utah with red/rust colored rock formations and crumbling mountains. The road was very curvy snaking through the mountains.

EGYPT IMPRESSIONS:

Call me a biased elitist American, but Egypt has a long way to go. 3rd world really is a different world. On the drive at any point looking out the window no matter how many miles away from any kind of civilization you can see trash. Not just a stray soda can or piece of paper, but plastic as far as the eye can see. Blown for hundreds of miles tumbling along and piled into every crack and crevasse in the mountains and up against rocks. Having toured an open pit landfill when I took an Ecology class...I can honestly say the entire Sinai looks like a land fill. The world is in serious trouble due to what man has done.

We stopped for a rest stop mid-way on the drive at a town along the Sea where tourist stop at a restaurant and outside it locals had their two camels sitting there. The entrepreneur spirit being high, the camels owner asked us to ride the camel for a dollar. Nasty looking beast, but what the guy did as I waited for all to re-board our bus absolutely amazed me. He walked over to the camel and proceeded to tear a cardboard box into 5 inch by 5-6 inch pieces and feed it to the camel. Said camel laid there and ate the pieces one by one like it was lettuce. Mind boggling. Maybe they have got a great stomach but eating cardboard printed with logos and ink can not be good for an animal.

Third bash.... 10 days a go three of my friends were making the bus trip from south to north like I just took and their bus happened to come upon an Egyptian bus that had just wrecked going around a corner. My Friends being Army EMT's immediately de-boarded and began helping the Vitim's of the wreck; which was evidently awful. 8 immediately dead, 6 with traumatic amputations and on their way to dying, one guy missing his bottom jaw, ect. As they were stopped along the road other Egyptians stopped at the wreck site too. None were helping, and in fact, a few were robbing the bodies of the dead of their possessions as they laid there still warm. Just a disturbing thing to hear about. Honestly if it was dead Americans lying there then maybe I could see them robbing the dead. But, these people were their fellow Egyptians. What the hell kind of thinking is that.

Sinai Marathon

Sat AM- 26.4 miles- 3:39:17- includes 10:30 of pit stops

Well after taking Thursday off Friday's run felt like crap. Sometimes the time off makes everything feel worse. Then today I got up at 6:45, ate a bar, drank some coke and slowly got around. By 7:30 I was placing my grocery bag aid station (water, Gatorade, 5 gels, and body glide) down behind the outdoor stage/stadium thingy in the shade. I began churning out 17:00-17:45 minute 2.2mile loops feeling sore in my calves and generally tired. Things got better after 30 minutes but by the 7th lap I seriously debated about aborting the long run effort. But, since I only go down to the south base every two weeks and enjoy its scenery, hills and softer surface so much I told myself to just do another lap and by then I was over the bad patch and continued to grind away. I stopped for 1:30-2:30 every 2nd lap (5 times total) to hit a gel and drink.

Considering last March I ran the Bataan Death March marathon in 3:47 and in April ran 3:34 at the Charlottesville marathon, and 3:28 at the Frederick marathon. Today's solo run up and down the 36 hills in the Sinai desert was a pretty good one.