#luckily pals from the online chat convinced me to do it

[lorawant2sleep]

gospodi blyat' sometimes it feels like there's a fucking mole living under my ribs or something like that why it hurts there

moreover the doctor said that the reason why i thought this was happening isn't real but i’m too lazy to figure out what it is

[jessiewre]

Day 56

Sat 29th Feb

🧅🧅🧅 Leap Year & Day before the Run 🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♂️

The room was very, VERY hot. We were sleeping on single beds in different corners of the room and the ceiling rotating fan was only reaching the edges of our beds. I got up early to escape & headed to the roof terrace - and immediately spotted the main attraction! The clouds had cleared for a moment and there was a beautiful view of Kilimanjaro peak. So cool!

I ran down to tell Phil to get up immediately and come see it. He grunted and reluctantly agreed to, so I ran back up where I’d left my stuff...and saw that the cloud had covered it up again. Uh oh...

LUCKILY when Phil appeared 5 minutes later, it popped its lovely head out of the clouds again and Phil was suitably impressed. We sat on the rooftop and ordered breakfast enjoying the view as the sun rose, but there was a problem developing. The heat was increasing very fast and the rooftop was getting really hot. There was a large roof cover so we weren’t getting direct heat, but it felt like the roof was absorbing all the sun and heating up the area into some sort of giant oven. Phil began to sweat profusely and ended up having to leave to shower and cool down before he lost his cool completely. He came back 20 minutes later feeling much better, much cooler, but after 15 minutes he was sweating again.

I was ok though and felt quite happy chilling on the rooftop, so Phil said he’d go for a walk. He wanted to do something, so went to get some bottles of water (literally water and not beer this time wtf right) then came back.

Wasn’t enough to satisfy him though, and he decided to go to an ATM to get our cash sorted. Fine by me! We agreed that we’d go together for the run registration half hour later, once he’d returned, as I wanted to go together plus was going to potentially sign up for the 5km fun run. 
Well, half an hour came and went, and I began to wonder where he’d got to. I hoped he wasn’t stressed looking for a cash point.

Then, an hour later, a very sweaty flappy Phil burst into the room.

‘Am I in deep shit? Are you fuming?!? Oh my god, that was SO annoying!’

I felt sorry for him straight away, but then noticed - he had his race number in his hand.

‘Phil...have you been to register for the race? Why did you go and register without me??’

Phil huffed and puffed a bit before launching into it.

‘Jess, just listen, that was SO annoying cos I walked to find a cash point and then realised I was really close to registration, like 0.8km...’

At which point I interrupted to let him know that 0.8km is not ‘really close’.

‘Jess, shut up, you don’t understand, I tried to go there and there was loads of traffic...’

‘Traffic? So you had to get a tuc tuc there? Makes sense I suppose, considering it wasn’t very close’

‘Jess shut UP it was really stressful, I tried to get online to let you know where I was cos I thought you’d be fuming I’d taken so long, and I couldn’t get online and so rushed back here, and I didn’t even pick up my tshirt’.

I was baffled as to his decision making.

‘Phil. Firstly, WHY did you go to register after we agreed to go together and I specifically said I wanted to go with you to register?? Secondly, why are you talking to me like I’VE done something wrong??’

But by this point, he’d got himself in such a state that we were not able to have a sensible conversation about it. Phil’s way of dealing with how annoyed he was with himself for making shite decisions was to shout at me, a lot (at one point he actually said ‘All you want to do is your blog’ which was a low blow I thought).

So I retreated to the safety of the rooftop where I could hurl abuse of my own at him from a safe distance via WhatsApp. Ahh, you gotta love a whatsapp argument. Phil is typing... oh IS he now.

Well it worked a treat and Phil went all Gary Barlow on me, messaging me along the lines of Whatever I said, whatever I did, I didn’t mean it. After admitting he’d been a grade A twat, he skulked up to the rooftop to apologise and started to laugh (the audacity of it), and we agreed to try again and head to the registration TOGETHER. I showed him the definition of the word on dictionary.com to avoid any further confusion.

We walked the (long and not close by) distance to the Keys hotel and oh thank goodness, there were still places available, so I signed up for the 5km ‘fun’ run. I had prepared my happy speech in advance ‘Oh yay, there are spots left, fantastic news, I’m so relieved, I thought they might all be gone by now and that would have been terrible’.

Fun run eh? We’ll see. Other suitable names for it could be the ‘5km Why Try’ or the ‘5km Pain Train’. Look, I KNOW its only 5km but I hadn’t run for ages so felt a little unsure as to how it was going to go.

Phil walked me over to a counter where he had seen a running hat for sale on his first trip there and he wanted to try it on. I managed to convince him that this red monstrosity of a hat looked super duper cool, was not a crime against fashion on every level and was the PERFECT match to accompany his wonderful & sexy running waistcoat. I wasn’t the only one thinking it, the guy selling them couldn’t get rid them quick enough and practically gave it to Phil, offering a 5000Tsh discount for no apparent reason. I know the reason. We all know the reason.*

While Phil was chatting to this guy about running and other boring things to do with running, we were approached by a guy with a camera woman asking if he could do an interview with Phil. I think it was the hat that did it. They obviously thought Wow look at those gullible fools, they’ll do anything. And they were right of course. I lolled while Phil answered a few questions and told them something about London being cold. Then the tables turned and they asked me to answer some question too. I was like No no no, I’m only doing the 5km, I’m not a runner runner like.

But they didn’t seem bothered, asking me too to say my name, how far I was running and how I’d prepared. ‘Well I haven’t prepared’ I said ‘But I’m only doing the 5km so I think I’ll survive!’.

I then could not for the life of me get ‘I Will Survive’ by Gloria Estefan out of my head.

Enos the interviewer took our number and said he’d send us a link when it went live. Sure mate, course you will - I fully expected to never hear from him again.

We left to go find some lunch and asked our tuc tuc driver to take us to the Kilimanjaro Coffee Lounge. But he was utterly clueless and we pulled up outside a completely different cafe called Union Cafe. Handily though, it was really close to our hotel so we thought Screw it, Union cafe it is then. It was pretty good, had a nice bagel with cheese, tomato and avocado plus a Mediterranean platter - houmous, pitta and two minuscule bowls of other dips.

My ice coffee shake was like pure syrup though and despite the first sip tasting delicious, by the end of it, it was positively nauseating. It was all a bit expensive too.

Back to the hotel where we watched the Crown with a Safari beer (so many great beer names here) and tried to take it easy ahead of tomorrow’s race. Loads of last minute sponsors came flying it which was really nice and gave us a much appreciated boost of support. They’d probably heard the news about my 5km run and thought I was a legend.

Out of pure laziness, we wandered round the corner back to Union Cafe to grab a takeaway pizza but decided to sit there instead when we saw there were tables available. As we sat there, Phil suddenly looked behind me and said ‘Jess...is that...is that a cricket on that mans shoulder??’.

Sure enough a huge locust was just sat on this guys shoulder, like it was his pet, joining him for dinner. I was fairly certain it was not his pet and it looked hilarious sat there like his pal. I got the mans attention and said ‘Excuse me, you have a cricket on your shoulder’. He stared at me with confusion and when he eventually realised what I was saying, he started to do a shimmy shake with his shoulders leaning over his table in a panic to try and get his mate to flick the cricket off him 😂😂😂. His mate finally got it and the man tried to look all calm as he casually turned to us and said ‘Thank you’ through a forced smile.

We enjoyed this incident very much.

The chips and Greek salad were ok but the pizza was rubbisssshhhh. The pizza looked like it had been sat for ages, like it had been cooked twice. Being the feminist that I am (aren’t we all?) I used a ring of onion to mock propose to Phil (ITS A LEAP YEAR Y’ALL) and he said yes! But please, don’t get excited guys, it was a piece of onion yeah 🧅. We took the carbs and headed back our crazy hotttt room. We got all our running gear ready, though I had my doubts about wearing running leggings in the heat, then did a bit of bed shifting to catch the fan breeze a bit more. We’d learnt from the night before and both put ear plugs in to drown out the crazy loud road noises before attempting sleep.

*Look Phil, I was kidding about the hat. I thought it would be funny to diss it on the blog and I actually think its a wonderful and very fantastic practical addition to your running kit. Please wear it with pride and enjoy the shade it gives you. I certainly will.