THE STANDARD CHARTERED NAIROBI MARATHON
Justin Lagat In the Maasai language, Nairobi means “city under the sun”, but on this auspicious day, the weather in the city happens to be cold, humid and cloudy. There is a heavy presence of security personnel everywhere to en- sure the event runs smoothly as we proceed through metal detectors to the area allocated for leaving luggage. We change into our running gears and moved ahead to the assembly area to do some warm up as we await the offi- cial starting time. A few minutes to start and we all approach the starting line, not without much pushing and jos- tling. Kenya is a running nation, and all the thousands of athletes gathered here want to start at the front! A group of G4 officers stand in front to prevent a false start. There is much pushing at the front as the loud speaker counted down the remaining seconds; 5- 4- 3 -2 -1! A gunshot! And off we go!
ASM Writer & Marathon Competitor Justin Lagat
The Standard Chartered Nairobi Mara-
thon is an annual charity fund raising event which raises money for ‘Seeing is Believing’, an initiative founded by the Standard Chartered Bank to eradi- cate avoidable blindness in children under the age of nine years. It is held at Kenya’s capitol city, Nairobi, and brings together runners, supporters, the corporate world and the local community. The initiative was started in the year 2003 whereby 6,000 runners registered to run and 60 children were able to undergo cataract operations from the money collected then. The ini- tiative has grown tremendously during the past years and over 800 children have benefitted from last year’s marathon alone. The level of the marathon has also grown to involve the use of timing chips, a high level of organiza-
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