I haven’t died yet! Today was the first day of the running club at work. I feel great, but the run was really hard. I had figured I’d show up where everyone assembles before the run and then pick the weakest ones… but my colleagues swang by and picked me up just before lunch, took me to the changing room, and then off we went! “It’s not far” took us through a rural villagy area near my work, and into a terraced corn farm (big hills, up and down), then around oh my god and down and up up up up up oh my god. After a while I told my partners to leave me and I had to walk up this hill.

I walked for a few minutes and then started to run, then got tired. Several times! My buddies said that was probably around eight kilometers, of which probably three was up a mountain — not to mention the altitude of running in Nairobi/Uthiru. That’s why Kenyan runners dominate when they go to international marathons! They’re trying to convince me to run in the Nairobi marathon in a few months. I told them I’d do ten kilometers and they were unimpressed, pushing me to do the twenty one. I guess the marathon is all flat, so by then I won’t even feel it.

I was pretty tired when I finally got back. I showered off and rewarded myself with a big plate of pilau (spiced rice with beef) at the cafeteria and a chicken breast with stew. So hungry! And TOO thirsty! I spent the rest of the afternoon banging my head against an issue on our server with Perl scripts running in Apache. If anyone reading this is using CentOS 4.4 and trying to use mod_perl 1.999_16… that’s a pre-release version of mod_perl 2! It’s mod_perl 2 BUT the API changed in 1.999_22 and they renamed all the function calls to Apache2::*! Remove CentOS’s version and install a newer version from source, or if that fails you can install it from the CentOSPlus repository (version 2.0.3 right now)!

On a running note again, the view was actually breathtaking, I’ll have to bring my camera phone next time…