Outer Mongolia

The tinny little ring, so soft and yet insistent, that accompanies an invitation to iChat, was endlessly recycling as I returned to my oatmeal-and-bacon breakfast. I click, and there is Cheryl’s smiling avatar.

“Hello” I type.

“Wow, you’re there!” she returns.

I do a quick check by her name, and see the video icon lit, so I click into web cam mode. She responds, and we can start talking and looking at each other. Or, she can see me just fine, but she’s all “pixillated”, the image broken into 100’s of little squares which seem to randomly change places, giving a very Picasso-eque touch to the exchange. Whatever; the girl is calling me from half way around the world, 15 time zones away, like, in Outer Mongolia.

Literally.

When we were kids, and China’s Communists were consolidating their power over the Middle Kingdom, they had to assimilate several parts of the empire which had drifted away in the absence of any real central power during the first half of the last century. So there was an area referred to as “Inner Mongolia”, to distinguish it from “Outer Mongolia”, which was part of the Russian (Soviet) empire, a separate country but nonetheless wholly owned subsidiary of the Kremlin.

Inner Mongolia disappeared into China, and Outer Mongolia became simply Mongolia, since 1990 a democratic and capitalist country madly at odds with itself. Twice the size of Montana, set at about the same latitude with much the same geography (with the exception of the Gobi desert in the south) as the Big Sky state, Mongolia houses 2.7 million people and about 10 times that many sheep. More than half the population remains at large in the steppe-lands, riding horses, herding sheep, living in yurts, and nomadically following the best grazing.

The others live in and around Ulan Bataar (“Red Hero”), which is a chaotic melange of stolid Soviet concrete office and apartment blocks, and the third world version of the business strips found leading out of most smaller American cities, without the benefit of even rudimentary zoning.

In the 50’s if you wanted to refer to someplace so far away it like going to Mars, you called it “Outer Mongolia”. That’s where half my family is now.

Cheryl is there for a month, with middle child Shaine, now 26. Shaine wants to apply to medical school this fall, and feels that an experience in a poor foreign hospital might help her. So she and Cheryl signed up with Projects Abroad, which places Western volunteers in “third-world” (although if Mongolia was part of the Soviet block, wouldn’t that really be “second-world”?) health care sites. They are at the major “Children’s” hospital in UB, which is actually primarily a maternity center, where nearly 10,000 births occur a year.

I’m waking up, eating breakfast and reading the online news, Cheryl is getting ready for bed; it’s 9:30 PM there.

She has stories about the disappearing sidewalks, the amazingly dedicated and intelligent female head of the Ob service, the rolling brownouts restricting hot water to 2 weeks a month, the traffic which literally knows no bounds, the completely unrestricted commerce, and on and on. She had Shaine are keeping a blog, and for further insights into their lives and observations there, I suggest you give it a look-see.

http://hannatruscott.blogspot.com/

“So, tomorrow, we’re going to try and walk to the hospital – it’s about 3 kilometers from here.” They are living in an apartment with a Mongolian family, who is paid by Projects abroad for sharing their home. “ It’s not like anything I’ve ever seen – there’s no respect at all for pedestrians or even other cars. When we want to cross the street, we wait until we get about 8-10 people, then we all go out at once, and try to intimidate the drivers. You can’t do it alone.”

Apparently, she has never been to Manhattan.

I start to tell her about my race on Sunday.

It was the Lake Meridian Triathlon, in Kent, an Olympic distance race in its first year. It was put on the Raise the Bar, a multi-faceted organization which is a triathlon team, a running team, a women’s fitness group, a race organizer, and a positive community force for self improvement. I know very little about them, other than they are growing and put on very well-run races.

They also seem to attract many people who are just getting into fitness, much less triathlons. This race featured not only 135 entries in the Olympic distance, but an equal number combined into a Sprint race (1/2 the length of the Olympic), and a Super Sprint, even shorter. All raced on the same course at the same time, with the Sprint going 15 minutes later, and the SS 5 minutes after that.

Which made for some interest on the last half of the bike and the run. Since I was near the pointy end of the race, finishing 11th out of 135 (and the second oldest there!), I was pretty lonely until the last five miles of the bike, when I started encountering an endless stream of somewhat large folks tooling along on a collection of road and mountain bikes.

I wondered what the attraction was about triathlon, especially for people who’ve never done one, and why it seemed to have a mystique for them. I think, apart from the over-arching aura that Ironman lends to the sport (“the hardest single-day endurance event on the planet” or some such gibberish), there is the obvious sight of very fit, very fast people (many not so young) zooming by you on their sleek carbon or titanium steeds, or whipping past in running, not just jogging, strides.

I had a flash that, just being out there, being as (relative to them) fast as I am, I can provide a validation to the slower and newer participants about the true nature of what they are doing, that it is a real sport, that real athletes aspire to. And if we can do it well, and are riding and running along with them, then they are real athletes, too.

Personally I have the utmost respect for them, the ones trying for the first time, or keeping on back there beyond 2 hours and 45 minutes in the Oly distance. In many ways, what they are accomplishing is of far greater significance and impact that what I accomplish. I have been active all my life, been on swim teams as a youth, and hiked and skied, and cycled and all without a break since then. I never took on weight, I never became a couch potato, so I have no clue how hard it must be to get up off that couch, make a decision to do something as seemingly impossible as swim a mile, bike 25 miles, and then run 6 miles, train, and then go do it, from start to finish.

And for those who will never see the finish line in under 3 hours, I have no idea how hard it must be to keep coming back, to keep trying to get in some biking or running despite a 60 hour a week job or 4 kids under 15 at home. All I know is they amaze me.

They gave out MONEY for the top finishers in this race. For the men, second place was 47, third place was 52 years old. If I were in the Sprint race, and my time was half of what I did the Oly in, I would have won that race. If I could have won the Sprint, it truly was an everyman (and woman) event. And the best part of all: I got home by noon.