“Last Saturday, my friend Richard and I were brave enough to enter the Kathmandu marathon, or rather the half marathon as doing the full distance in this mad traffic would have been suicidal…
It was definitely done in the finest Kathmandu style! When I arrived at the marathon registration desk at 5.30am last Saturday – I was already half an hour late – the person who was supposed to take my details was nowhere to be found. “She will be here in a minute,” said race director, Nilendra Shrestha, who had taken on the brave task of organising the marathon in the Nepalese capital for the seventh time in a row.
More than 6,000 runners were expected to participate in the event, which featured a full marathon, a half-marathon and a 5km-fun-run, however, a lot of the aspirants must have overslept, as the stadium – the start of the race – did not seem very busy that morning.
“Every year we want to block the roads, but it’s just not possible here. We don’t have alternative roads and for our citizens and drivers using the roads, this is still something they are not used to,” explained Shrestha, who once lived in Germany and ran across what used to be West Germany in the 1980ies. “Well, it’s certainly a lot easier to do something like this in Europe.”
I must say, I do take my hat off to the organisers; putting together an event like this in Nepal must be somewhat of a nightmare. Kick-off was supposed to be at 6am, which seems very early in European marathon terms, but here in Kathmandu it means you might actually have a chance to beat the traffic. Well, that’s what I thought. Being a good and punctual German, I walked towards the start at about 5.58am, however, there was nobody to be seen. Not one single person was ready to start at 6am. ‘Oh well’, I thought and ambled back into the stadium, where people were still chatting, registering, stretching or just hanging about.”
(By Billi Bierling, journalist and climber, read the full article on her blog)
