Every year, la Universidad de Havana holds a series of athletic competitions in the spring, known as los Juegos del Caribe. Events range from everything as common track and field to those like karate to ping-pong. Each team is made up of students from a particular area of study/faculty and the different faculties try their best to have at least a few people compete in each event.
The biology faculty, the same faculty that has been giving us free dance lessons, was nice enough to also let us compete in the Juegos as students of their faculty. Some of us competed in the 1500-meter run, another girl from my study abroad group ran the 400-meter and two of the guys from my group competed in ping-pong. When we were asked to write down a list of athletic capabilities, I wrote that I could run and swim. As a result, I was registered to compete in a duathlon of sorts: a 400-meter run, 50-meter swim, 400-meter run.
The morning of the race, I was excited, but also a little nervous. I hadn’t run a 400-meter race since 10th grade and even then I wasn’t very good. I also looked around and saw students from other faculties that had the indisputable build of skilled swimmers. What I didn’t anticipate being the problem was understanding the rules and regulations of the race. How mistaken I was.
The race was at a beach, Bacuranao, just outside the city of Havana. It took race officials about an hour to set up, but the course wasn’t very formal and/or structured. The race began with the 400-meter run in the parking lot, then taking off your shoes and jumping in the ocean to swim to a buoy and back, and finally repeating the same run in reverse. “That’s simple enough,” I remember thinking. I had also “sized up” the other girls in my heat and after realizing that two or three of them had muscular thighs that each were about the width of both of mine put together, I figured that they would be in front of me and I could just follow them. And then the whistle blew.
I set off running and about 200 meters out, I took a look around me: there was no one there! “Awesome!” I thought to myself. I really hadn’t anticipated being in first place and while these competitions are mostly for fun, I was excited. I made it to the beach, kicked off my shoes and jumped in. As I was swimming to the buoy, I heard race officials shouting at me and Spanish and then finally realized what had happened when I swam into the girl who had been behind me. “What are you doing?!” she yelled in Spanish.
If you can get a mental image, picture this: we had to swim 25 horizontally, parallel to the beach. What I had not fully understood is that we were originally supposed to swim on the side of the buoy that was closest to land and then swim back to get our shoes on the side of the buoy that was farther from land; I had done the opposite. As a result, I came out of the water in second place. Then another problem: my shoes.
I couldn’t manage to squeeze my sand-covered feet back into my shoes and then I just decided to leave my shoes and run barefoot on the asphalt. It was only a 400-meter run anyway. So I left my shoes in their designated basket and proceeded to start running. Again, race officials shouted at me. “Grab your shoes!” they said in Spanish. “Even if you’re not wearing them, you at least have to have them in your hands!” As I turned around and went back for my shoes, another girl passed me. I was now in third place.
Funny enough, all of this is now irrelevant because I ended up getting disqualified. Because of my misunderstanding in the water, I had not “followed the rules” and thus, my race results did not count towards the total points of the biology faculty. It’s funny now, but at the time I felt pretty dumb.
Haha. As if I didn’t stand out enough as the American, I had to go and swim the wrong way.
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