The Senegalese National Workout

Saturday July 5
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It's been 90 days since I last wrote a blog post. I am going to be a whiny bitch and play the "I-don't-have-any-time-since-business-school-started" card. Thankfully, my friend wrote me and inspired me to keep going. So, no excuses. I am going to finish this blog.

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SCOTT: There's somebody following us.
CURTIS: How do you know?
SCOTT: In the city, there's always a reflection. In the woods, there's always a sound.
CURTIS: What about the desert?
SCOTT: Don't go into the desert.
-Val Kilmer & Derek Luke from David Mamet's "Spartan"

When I landed in Dakar, I took a taxi to my hotel. The ride seemed to continue a brief nightmare that I'd had just before we landed. People stared intently at me as I drove by. Wayward springs poked through the fabric of the cab's seat. The axels groaned every time they met a pothole. The cab driver didn't understand a word I said and the air had the low-grade menace of a Damid Mamet movie. Every street turned into an alley and the lights were never bright enough to see the faces of those who watched me.

I got to my hotel and checked in. My room was stifling, but fatigue is more powerful than comfort, so I slept soundly.

I woke up around 6:45 and went for a run on the beach. There were hundreds of young men--and even young women--out doing what I call the Senegalese national workout. It involves running for a couple of miles, stopping every quarter mile or so to do situps and pushups. In the meantime, you also do fun things like windsprints, running backwards, sideways crossovers and bear walks. From 6 am to about 10 am, all of the beaches around Dakar look like a very black version of Muscle Beach in Venice, California. The beach is filthy and trash strewn. At first, this seemed normal for a developing country with intermittent trash service. I assumed that trash washes up and stays there until a big storm. I would have continued to think that except I happened to be on the same beach one night before nightfall. All of the local women brought their buckets of trash down to the beach and threw it at the tideline. This was their trash service. Luckily, Fishheads and plastic scraps weren't going to keep me from training there in the morning. Though they did make think about the diseases I was courting.

On my first day, I tried to do too much in the heat and I was struggling. A cute Senegalese girl jogged by while I was trying to do some pushups. Whe was wearing a headscarf, long pants, a tight fitting soccer jersey, and clean Western running shoes. She chuckled at me and said--my french was rusty--"You don't have to do it all in one day."