The international journey that almost wasn't

Two years ago, I applied for and received an internal university fellowship as a part of the IGERT program.  The goal of the program was to give engineering Ph.D. students experience with business and public policy and not just focus on "pure science".  One of the stipulations of the fellowship would be to travel to Ghana for a month sometime during the spring or summer of 2014 to teach.  This was a huge undertaking for me.  As of two years ago, I had never traveled by plane, never left my time zone, or never left the country (aside from a very brief trip to Canada, which I don't count since it was back before one even needed a passport to visit).  Since the trip to Ghana was so far in the future, I thought little of it.

Fast forward to September 2013, when the initial planning stages for the trip began.  Thinking ahead, I also wanted to try to do a spring marathon before I left the country. Because I thought the trip would be during August, my original plan was to run the Buffalo Marathon at the end of May to redeem myself after my first attempt there, run some races over the summer, then head to Ghana.  However, it was decided that the trip would be moved up to May and June; even with dates unspecified, this made Buffalo seem very unlikely.  I started to search for another one.  At the end of November, I talked to another runner back home, who recommended the Gettysburg Marathon to me.   I looked into it, and I decided to try it.

Throughout the next few months, I ran a lot, spent long days and nights in lab, consumed more caffeine than I would have liked, wrote a lot about the results of the long days nights in lab, submitted a paper to a journal, got rejected from that journal, submitted to another journal, finished my Master's, and continued to plan for the trip to Ghana.  Dates were finalized: we would leave for Ghana on May 15th, roughly 2.5 weeks after the Gettysburg Marathon.  It looked as though my training and the trip were all coming together, until about three weeks from when we were supposed to leave.

We received an call from the Embassy, saying that they could not process our visas!  Since that was right before race weekend, I thought little of it and ran the marathon, a new PR by almost 4.5 minutes.  I was not sure how many opportunities I would have to run in Ghana, so I decided to not take too much downtime just yet.  We tried contacting the Embassy with little luck.  After a week, a dangerous thought popped into my head: if I didn't get a visa and couldn't go to Ghana, I could still follow my original plan and run Buffalo. This seemed kind of crazy, but when crazy ideas get into my head, sometimes I decide to follow through with them.  I decided to test my recovery at the Bill Lawler 5K, six days after the marathon.  Somehow, I managed a 15:50 and decided to go ahead with a "retaper".  Another week passed, and I still didn't have a visa.  Five days before my planned flight date, I ran the CP Rochester Run for Fun 5K in 16:17.

It seemed as though running another marathon would be a legitimate possibility until two days before the flight date.  Other members of the group traveling to Ghana physically flew to Washington, D.C., explained the situation, and left with all of our visas in hand. Thus, my crazy idea came to an end.  It was kind of a downer after I had psyched myself up for it, but it was probably for the better.  Two marathons in a month?  I'm not built for that...yet.

Ghana was a very eye-opening experience, between the teaching, traveling, and running, enough for another post.  I'll close by mentioning that I decided to race the Medved 5K to Cure ALS the day after I returned from Ghana.  Between the lack of sleep, lack of real training, and jet lag, I didn't know what to expect.  Although my 16:34 wasn't amazing (15 seconds slower than last year), I'm still pleased with the result.  Roadkill as a whole had a great showing at the race too! The trip to Ghana was a huge unknown factor, as I didn't know how much I'd be able to run while there, if at all.  There is much work to be done, but I feel that I've maintained a decent amount of fitness.  Here's to getting fast this summer for Bergen!

Credit: Matt Roberts