Discover Top Posts Tagged with #kenya running

These Old Shoes

“Because of their lightweight construction and fewer materials, runners should generally expect shoes from the PureProject line to last approximately 250-300 miles” –Brooks.com

Thirteen hundred miles of running later and I can say Brooks is full of $hit. I brought one pair of shoes with me to Kenya, Brooks Pure Flows, which I picked up at the Moorestown Running Company just before flying out of the US in June. The outsoles have lost almost all discernible tread, the uppers have developed a few holes, and some of the small pods on the mid foot have fallen off. By necessity, I picked up some industrial strength welding epoxy somewhere around mid-trip and on more than a few occasions put my inherited fixer-man skills to work (thanks, Dad!) by gluing the mid sole and the upper—which developed an annoying habit of detaching along pretty much the entire forefoot—back together. Listed at 8.4 ounces, my Pure Flows weigh in a few ticks heavier these days, not only from dried epoxy, but from months of irremovable mud pasted on various areas of the two shoes. Exceeding manufacturers recommendations by a thousand or so miles may not be the best practice, but I’ll be damned if the cushioning doesn’t still feel entirely adequate, when properly glued on of course. Despite their resiliency, tomorrow will be a sad day. Last week, I left the coast to kill away my last few days in country while waiting on documents to be delivered in the Kenya National Archives. Tomorrow morning I will go out for one last romp on the rolling dirt paths in the Nairobi Arboretum and then hop on a plane to England where new shoes (and cooler weather) await.

#Brooks Pure Flow #Run Happy #old shoes #Moorestown Running Co #Kenya running #mud and dirt

Running and the Sacred Forests

Approximately one lifetime ago I wrote an MA thesis on kaya forests and discourses about traditional authority in Mijikenda communities since the mid-19th century. According to oral traditions, the kayas were the original homesteads of the Mijikenda ethnic groups that live in the hinterlands of the Kenya coast. While they were long ago abandoned as settlements (and many likely never were used as residences) they are still considered spaces of great ritual significance. In 2008, a number of the kaya forests were gazetted as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. In 2009, I had the chance to travel around with folks from the National Museums of Kenya and put up signs at several kayas marking them as World Heritage Sites. One of those sites was Kaya Kambe, just a short 30min jog from where I have been living in Ribe for the last month. At Kambe the elders argued over the placement of the UNESCO sign and tried to use the sign to settle a land dispute—something people still talk about today. At Kaya Ribe things were far more low key. When we arrived, a young kid showed us to an overgrown dirt path where the museum’s Land Cruiser could carry us to the forest’s entrance. Without any fanfare, we put up the sign and were quickly on our way.

Fast forward five years and I have run past Kaya Ribe almost every day for the last month. In contrast to some other kaya forests that have active—even moderately political—elders’ councils, Ribe is seldom visited for ritual occasions or otherwise. For most in the community, the forest is an ordinary space crossed regularly on short treks down from the heavily settled ridgeline to reach the shamba farm plots that sit below on an agriculturally rich plain that stretches almost all the way to the Indian Ocean. One anthropologist has suggested that the sacredness of the kaya forests increased as they became more and more remote to everyday life (Parkin, 1991). In Ribe, the forest can hardly be considered remote. While most recognize the historical and cultural significance of the kaya, it seems to be far less of a sacred site than it is an ancient, but aesthetic forest patch woven into the rhythms of everyday activities as mundane as tending to a farm plot, sitting on one’s porch, and for some weird visitors, running.

View of Kaya Ribe from a nearby footpath