Chapter 16 – Running is done
No more runs
I had been indoors whole of Sunday and Monday. The main reason being that the temperatures had just been so low. None of the days has had anything over ten degrees. It has not rained in the last three days, by rain I mean a real rain, since drizzles are a norm, especially in the early morning hours. Today being a Tuesday, November 5, I just had to get out there. Being indoors was getting to me. That under the table heater was becoming unbearable – can’t live with it, can’t live without it. I had already given up on my runs. I was not going to subject my system to those freezing temperatures. Let the Norwegian sun not cheat you. That sun has light but no heat. It was still freezing cold with the sun up there, even on this Tuesday. And… let me say the truth, the sun is never up there.
In my room, I usually stand next to the big half wall high window and open the two big windows. There are no windows grills, enabling you to enjoy the full view of the outside… or even jump out if you wanted. When at this window, I can observe the sun come up in morning from my left and progressively move towards my right as the day goes by. The sun is never up there. The sun in never overhead. The sun is visible in front of your view, moving from the right to the left. Think of the Norwegian sun like a rainbow. It moves from left to right and you can see its full path through the day. Nothing overhead. Nothing hot.
I leave the room at 3.15pm to yet again walk to Madla, some three kilometres away. I am in shock when I have hardly walked for ten minutes, just as I walk past Kiwi supermarket, to see the sun going down behind Kiwi into the waters of the Atlantic in the background behind Kiwi.
“This is crazy!,” I talk to myself as I look behind Kiwi, which is just cross the road. I had to however checkout some prices of items, and I had to get to Kiwi. However, there is no pedestrian crossing to cross the main road, which is just next to my walking path. I am forced to walk some one-hundred metres ahead to reach the underpass, which I use to get to the other side of the road, then walk back the same distance to get to Kiwi shop.
“This is crazy!,” I talk to myself once more.
I am through with Kiwi after a short browse. I am now out for the 2km walk to Madla. The side pedestrian walkway is fairly free of people. I probably meet only four people on this stretch of road. Another two bikers pass by me on either side at different times as I keep taking my stride. I get to Madla at four. It is getting dark already. I look around Fretex and get some things that I like. Think of Fretex like a bargain shop. You can get things at insane prices – insane in both ends of insanity – very cheap, and also very expensive, however usually on the ‘very cheap’ end. The items are a mix of new and second hands. Second hands go for a song. You can shop the full store of these cheapies, which are usually as good as new. However, those of us with big feet cannot find anything to fit. I have gone there forever but have failed to get any running shoes for self, yet I see very cheap good quality as-good-as-new sports shoes of small sizes for as low as one thao!
“This is crazy,” I talk to myself as I see others get good deals while my body size discriminates against me.
I would eventually walk back from Madla, then decide to divert to my left, to take the road opposite Pizzabakeren. I can see the Atlantic in the background. I know that somehow this road should lead to the waters. However, in Norway you never know how the road shall go. Severally I have walked comfortably to private compounds and houses. The road sometimes just comes to an end onto a house! Talking about houses, now that it is almost five and it is dark – pitch dark, I see that the houses have those large windows without grills. And surprise! surprise! They do not have window drapes! You can just see people seated inside, watching TV or something as their life continued. There is no gate either, just a live fence if lucky, but usually no fence no gate, just a road that ends into a house.
“This is crazy,” I murmur.
I soon get to the waters. The very waters that I have now come to know so well. I ran the marathon besides these waters. I took several weekend walks to these waters. I have taken photos next to the three swords that stand next to these very waters. I know these waters. I walk in the dark, though the streetlights are now on. It is just 4.45pm. It is as dark as it can be. I check the temperature on the display that stands at the ‘Sverd i fjell’ site. This display board is about 2m tall and half metre wide. It is board that has digital display on both side. It displays date and alternates it with the temperatures. Below it, you can see the display of the current time, then two displays showing some numbers.
One indicates ‘Du er syklist nummer 544 i dag’
The next one displays ‘Totalt har 125182’
The temperature display is ‘7 degrees’.
I note that it is only the date, time and temperature that shows the same information on both sides of the board. The ‘syklist’ and ‘totalt’ are different on either sides. This is because the other side of the board had these figures as ‘471’ and ‘131009’. My engineering is already at work here. This is a sensor for bicycles, monitoring both sides of the display. It probably records any approaching bike in the particular direction, that is why the numbers are different.
“This is crazy,” I say. No wonder my fingers are almost frozen. Think of seven degrees like the breeze you get when you stand next to the door of a fridge. Imagine that for a whole day.
I keep walking. Now that I have not been running since Monday, “Thank you cold weather”, walking has become the new running. To craft a ‘proper’ walk that can equate a ‘real’ run, I really had to keep the burners on the legs going – for long. I keep walking past Rema1000, not being tempted by the ‘Grantis Wi-Fi’ and keep going towards UiS. I decide to take the forest trail. It is now past five. It is dark with a vengeance, however, the streetlights on the forest are on. I still find people walking those well light paths on the dark forest. I retrace my otherwise running route. I walk the forest trail. I keep walking, as if I was doing a run route. I now know those trails so well that I can close my eyes and get myself around that maze and back to civilization. From there I walked back to Kiwi for a ‘real’ shopping before putting an end to my walk after a Runkeeper record of 3hr 10min 42sec on a 16.38km track.
I stopped using Endomondo when I started my walks because that phone with Endo is used for my steam of music, and that phone cannot do two things at a time. It is a good synonym for the male species. If you stream with Endomondo, then you get that ‘it has stopped working’ message. I also reserved the phone for the now bad photos that it takes with the front camera, after the main back camera having failed. The only reason why I still keep this phone is because I hate throwing away money, even bad money. It spent about 6k on it. That is real money.
However, this phone has given me enough user-ache. Figure this, it has 4G but does not have or support SIM toolkit. That means that I cannot transact mobile money on this phone, be it MPESA, Airtel money, T-Cash or anything that would need SIM toolkit functionality. It has 64GB of internal memory but does not support Playstore. It has big 4GB ROM but cannot install Runkeeper! It is not rooted, hence any effort to take control of the phone has failed.
It forcefully installs some apps in Chinese language, ‘nipende nisipende’, even if I uninstall them like daily – and with no root access, there is nothing I can do to block such. It runs out of the 64GB internal storage, when in reality the actual used memory is only 10GB! Strange I tell you!! It supports additional SD memory card, but you have to sacrifice dual-SIM capability to do that! It supports many phone functionalities but still gives a big error message in red letters, that persists in the background when the phone is in use, “Dear user, the SIM card you inserted is not compatible, please insert the correct SIM card!”
As I said, this message persists on the foreground of the phone screen, on top of all apps for as long as it wants. Then like it does not care, the message just disappears on its own! It can stay annoyingly blocking my background programs for a whole day or even days. Or sometimes it stays on screen for less than five minutes and then it is gone. I have reset that phone many times, but it still retains all of its behavior. And, Oh, do not even get me started on resetting. It is something you do not want to do – believe me.
You reset the thing and it starts up in Chinese! You are stuck. You see messages and buttons and you do not know what is what! You just keep clicking things without knowing what is what! It is a bad experience. It makes you doubt who is controlling who, between the phone and you. By the time you have taken your ‘forever’ locating that language switch function to English, you would have been frustrated to the core. That red error message will be none of your concerns. But how can the phone show a SIM error while receiving and sending messages and being able to call and receive calls?
“This is crazy!!!!”
Second snow
“This can’t be snow!,” I shouted at Mutua.
We were walking from KEH after the final meeting with the administrators. We were now preparing for our journey back home. It was around three.
“What are you talking?”
“Look,” I pointed towards the sky, where some tiny flakes were falling down. They were sparse, like a very light shower, almost hardly visible, but the white specs were clearly evident as they fell down from the sky.
“I see it! I see them!,” he responded. At first in disbelief. On close scrutiny, including what had fallen on this jacket, he was amazed that it was surely snowing – light, sparse, not very intense but snowing nonetheless.
The magical moment did not last. In fact, we only got the two minutes of wonder and did not get anything more even as we walked to P10. It was already cold. Under 10 degrees for sure. I now knew what ten felt like. It must have been around six.
Remember that vow that I made last week after my Monday run? The one that I shall never run ever again? The one that walking is the new running? Remember it? I lied!
Running is like that favourite cloth. The one that you throw away and vow never to put on ever – then you still fish it from where you threw it away, and end up putting it on. You vow never to run, but you still run. You vow again and you still run again. It is a rat race. A useless vow to make. Just make it because it is marathoner nature to make that vow, but it is inconsequential. You shall find yourself on the road.
That is how I found myself on the road on this ‘snowy’ day. I had hoped that ‘somehow’ I would get to see the snow ‘somewhere’ on the running path. The temperature must have been around four when I started my three runs around UiS. The sun was ‘up there’ in the horizon, mostly for light. It was a freezing sun. The wind at one side of my circuit, the one kilometer from P10 towards Oljdirektorate, was blowing the frozen air against my body as I ran along. It was cold. I even adorned a long-sleeved T-shirt for the first time in life on the run here in Stavanger. Despite this, the cold did not spare my face nor my hands. It was cold. I regretted why I broke the vow. However, my legs did not feel that cold, despite being exposed too, since I was just having a pair of shorts. Maybe the upper body reacts differently to the cold?
I was soon on the forest trail. The cold did not get better, if anything, it got worse. I had started my run around 3.30pm and hence was on the trail just around four. I just persevered in the cold. I kept going. I met people biking around. I met one or two runners on the trail. I met two or three people walking their dogs. Life continued despite the cold. I met a guy smoking his cigarette. I would later meet a gal smoking her cigarette on the main road that runs in between the forested area. I remembered seeing several other people smoking their cigarettes at the bus stage, while on my walk the previous day. I recalled seeing two or three others puffing along the route as I walked to Madla the previous day. Just another day with ‘mozo’ while life continues.
It was dark by four. It was street-lights-on by four thirty. It was completely zero visibility by five, when I still had another thirty minutes of run. The forest trail was well lit all along and hence the run was visible. The darkness was just the norm. The walkers continued walking. The joggers continued jogging. The bikers continued biking. Those walking the dogs continued walking the dogs. The darkness continued being dark. The cold continued being cold, if anything, it got worse. I continued my run and would soon finish the run around 5.30pm. My gadgets gave me a verdict:
Endomondo recorded 25.4km – 2.06.21
Runkeeper recorded 24.99km – 2.06.04
I was just glad to be out of that cold with frozen fingers that could hardly respond to touch as I struggled to push the key into the keyhole at P10 main door. My forehead was completely stone cold. This run was like running inside a fridge for 2hours. Not comfortable. Not recommended. And… I make a vow once more – I shall never run when it is this cold!
Keeping memories alive
We spent the last Thursday, November 7, taking a few pictures, this being the last opportunity for such. Mutua and I went back to Sverd around three and were rushing back by four thirty as the darkness creeped in. The thermometer at Sverd indicated a temperature of 7 degrees. It felt seven. We did not even settle long at P10 before the WhasApp message that we have a Friday outing was being discussed already.
I woke up late on the last Friday at Norway and packed all that I could. It was November 8 already. I realized that I was not going to carry back all the material that I should. The beddings would have to remain – and how I adored those duvets! Too bad. The two were too bulk to carry back, despite them being feather light. I decided to make a final use of ‘the machine’ – a Canon EOS 600D camera that I had borrowed from an MSc colleague from Kenya also at UiS. That machine was quite something. You could get any quality of picture with a proper sense of ‘focus’. I went back to the forest trail just to take a few pictures of nature. The last time to ‘digitize’ this trail that had become my run route for three months.
How I shall miss this trail that runs into that forest? It was the best trail in the world. Well shaded. Among the trees. No vehicles, just bikes, which were few and respected runners – though runners also respected them back. Just daily rabbits crossing the road near the oil museum. The once green thick canopy of tall trees now reduced to dry branches with clear visibility of the sky – thank the winter for that. The joggers, the bikers, those walking their dogs, occasional horse riders on the extreme end of the circuit – those hills, those trees, that forest, those trails. Trails where you could get lost forever and walk around and around until you gave up and asked someone to show you the way out – or looked around to see if you could locate the UiS tower on the hill. I liked and shall miss those hills – which were now at least digitized.
The last trip
I realized that it was heading towards four, yet we had to catch a 1612 bus to town. I had to run back to P10 from my trails and prepare in hurry to be ready for the bus ride. I was soon at the ticket machine spending 37 Kroner for the one-hour ticket and the three of us – with Mutua and Oby – got into the well heated Kolumbus bus no. 6. We were in town by 1630 ready for the 1650 train. We met yet another Kenyan, Beaty, heading with us to our host. Beaty has been here since 2011, though I learnt that she was exactly from the same soil where I come from in BTR. The four of us boarded on platform three and started our journey towards Sandnes. The train display indicated that the outside temperature as 1 degree. It did not take more than 15 minutes of travel before the internal display in the train indicated a temperature of negative two! The train was well heated and hence we just marveled at the display screen and even doubted whether it was working, since the negative temperature range was a first one for us.
We alighted three stations after Sandnes. I cannot remember its name, but that is where we got out when the temperature was still neg-two. We were hit with the chill. We could feel it on the fingers and the forehead.
“I agree, this is a negative two,” I told the three. I had a slight shiver, just like the rest.
‘’It must be, if you have confessed to that!,” Mutua responded.
He had already observed me doing my evening runs when his phone app was reporting a temperature of four degrees. He had already labelled me as having some loose bolts somewhere in my system.
We got to the parking yard and found Faith waiting for us. We bundled our four bodies into the Tesla and drove off the five minutes distance to her house. Her vehicle indicated an outside temperature as negative four. A neg-four temperature was not something visible. Just a feeling of ‘something’ hitting your fingers and forehead. Something you cannot explain, but it is just there biting on your fingers and forehead. That did not last long, since we would soon get into the house to meet her Norwegian hubby and their daughter. It did not take long before we were singing Happy Birthday to Faith. It was already dark though it was not yet six. It turned out to be a fully loaded African-like dinner – with nyama choma – told you so!
The man of the house volunteered to drive us back to our place, dropping Beaty first somewhere near Sandnes, before the gentlemen continued their men stories as we drove towards UiS. That Tesla was a marvel. We milked some information from him, such as the cost being 470k Kroner, a full charge could drive some 560km, and the minimal full charge time of only 15-minutes. The running cost per month was only two thao Kenyan money.
That beauty is started and operated using an ATM like card. The 14-inch screen infront of the car, between driver and front passenger is a full kit, that has car stats, internet, movies, games and internet access – all for free – complements of Tesla. The rechargeable batteries have 8-year guarantee and are replaceable for free if they fail to perform in that period. Full insurance means you drive the thing back to dealer in case of ‘anything’.
“How big is the engine?,” Oby asked.
“No Engine,” Brian who was chauffeuring responded.
“So what is on the bonnet?”
“Nothing!”
“Nothing?”
“Let me show you?,” he said, as he brought the white spacious machine to a halt at the parking of P10. And for sure there was nothing under the hood. That bonnet was empty, just a plastic lining for a luggage compartment.
“And it has automatic motion activated camera to record the surrounding in case something want to harm it”
“How? What?,” we all asked, almost in unison.
“In case someone knocks your car when you are away”
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