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Refugee spirit triumphs in Sahara Marathon Story and photography by Marcello Di Cintio
I didn’t plan on running in the Sahara. I travelled to refugee camps in Algeria to write about the displaced Saharawis who, for 35 years now, have lived in a bleak exile far from their ancestral home in the Western Sahara. The Saharawis fought a war with Morocco over the territory in the 1970s and 1980s and, though the UN-brokered ceasefire of 1991 still holds, the conflict remains unresolved. More than 100,000 refugees still live in camps built on a patch of land known as the Hamada du Draâ, a gift of the Algerian government. By accident, my arrival in the camps in February 2008 coincided with the annual Sahara Marathon. The Saharawi government conceived the event to encourage physical activity among the camps’ children, and money collected from entry fees goes toward sports projects. More than this, though, the annual race alerts an international audience to the Saharawi plight.
I woke late, and was the last runner to press into the bus that carried us to the starting line. The other participants looked more prepared than I was. I wore hiking shoes rather than running shoes, and hadn’t eaten or drank anything since the previous night’s camel couscous and apple Fanta. I couldn’t even fasten my official number to my shirt. Another runner noticed this and handed me a couple of safety pins. The bus turned off the highway onto the flat desert. We got mired in a patch of loose sand about 200 metres from the start, and everyone stepped down and walked the rest of the way to a flagpole that marked the starting area. The starting lines for the marathon and half-marathon stood somewhere far behind us, and those competitors had already been running for a while. The fastest among them would eventually catch up to the slowest of us. In the meantime, we waited for a starter’s pistol or some indication that our race was to begin.
An official appeared and spray-painted a crooked yellow line across the hard ground. We all clustered behind it. Someone blew a whistle and 50 runners trampled the sand. The real runners burst ahead in smooth motion, their backs straight and their heels lifting little spurts of sand with each stride. The rest of us puffed along behind them. Our initial cluster of runners divided like a cell, splitting into smaller and smaller groups. For a while I was trapped alongside a Saharawi girl who wouldn’t let me pass her. Twice she sprinted ahead of me and each time she slowed to a walk, but as soon as I caught up she dashed off again. Eventually I was running alone. I jumped over a flattened goat corpse and passed three women raking trash into piles for burning. The coolness of the morning melted into a thick liquid heat, but at least the sandblast winds of the previous day had settled.
A tall camel holding two turbaned riders in an ornamental saddle stood next to the water station at the three-kilometre mark. The men shouted “bravo!” from their perch as a woman handed me a full two-litre bottle of mineral water. I spilled as much as I drank, and dropped the rest onto the sand. Truckloads of Saharawis rumbled up and down the route. The drivers pressed on the horns, while their passengers leaned out of the windows to cheer on the runners and wave Saharawi flags. I lifted a hand to salute them. Most of the time, though, I had the desert to myself. Only the sound of the hamada under my too-heavy shoes crunched the silence. Near the finish line, the blanch of the desert gave way to walls of noisy colour. Hundreds of women, each wrapped in bright fabrics, flanked the final 300 metres. Their desert saris, or melhfes, fluttered orange and yellow and blue. Swirls of purples. Splashes of black on green. One woman decorated her veil with pink pom-poms. Despite the heat, many wore woven gloves to protect themselves from unwanted tans. For a few seconds, they cheered for me. The women ululated through their veils as I reached the final turn before the finish. Children held out their hands for me to touch and I started to run faster. My eyes stung from the sweat streaming into them. So much blood rushed to my head. I could taste iron on the roof of my mouth. My knees hurt, but I sprinted the last few metres just to earn a shred of the ovation. Someone strung a souvenir medal made of recycled aluminum around my neck and shouted out my official time, but I couldn’t hear it amid the shouts and the pulse in my head.
I was on their side. The Sahara Marathon Marcello Di Cintio is a Calgary writer and author of Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into The Heart of Iran. His latest book, In the Shadow of the Wall, is to be published this year. January/February 2012 |
Nearly 400 runners, most thin Europeans, spend the days before and after the race living with refugee families. The more people who know about their cause, the organizers reason, the harder it will be to ignore. I didn’t have the fitness for the full distance, so I signed up for the 10-kilometre race. I hadn’t been an athlete for nearly a decade, and never a runner, but I wanted to be able to say that I ran in the Sahara. To be honest, I wanted the T-shirt and the participant medal. 
I easily spotted the serious runners. They stood invariably tall and lean and white, and wore proper runners’ bibs, little cloth caps and nylon shorts cut high on their thighs. They strapped Lycra bandoliers with tiny plastic bottles around their waists. I imitated their stretches and tried to gather the nerve to ask one of them for a sip of water. A few Saharawis also waited at the start line, mostly teenagers wearing donated running shoes and loose jogging pants. The girls tied their headscarves tightly around their heads. They didn’t have any water either, but drank glasses of sweet tea in a nearby tent. Many of them looked as out of place amid the Europeans as I did, but for the Saharawis, the race was less an athletic event than an expression of existence.
And, in that moment, what started as an athletic boast became something more. The exhaustion stripped away my ego, my detachment and my journalistic objectivity, and replaced it with the spirit of these people. All I felt through my fatigue was their gratitude for my running under their flag. I was no longer the detached observer.