The following is your complete insider’s guide to running a half-marathon in Almaty with minimal training — in nine easy steps!
Step 1: Choose a city with poor air quality and high elevation. This is vital to provide maximum challenge to your lungs. During your first two weeks in Almaty, your body will be so ill-adjusted to the elevation, air and local pollen that you will have a permanent cough and an inability to run faster than a 10-minute mile during the one training run you attempt.
Step 2: Sign up for a half-marathon scheduled within a month of arriving in Almaty. Especially after needing a couple of weeks to physically adjust to the city, this will guarantee that you have only about three weeks to train for the race — an absolutely perfect training period for your first time running a half-marathon!
Step 3: Realize you haven’t done any long training runs outside yet, and that the farthest you’ve ever run in your life is 10 miles. Then, when your study abroad program schedules a picnic in the mountains, decide to run 7 miles (including a genius 1-mile detour after misreading the map) straight uphill to the picnic location. Since you’re running alongside the road, you’ll be breathing in exhaust pretty much the whole time, and thankfully, the incline will just keep building. When you stop halfway through at a grocery store for water, ensure that you don’t read the label and accidentally buy sparkling water, so that you almost vomit following your hydration break. The key to finishing the training run without your legs giving out will be stopping to chat with the wild horses along the road and gazing out at the green mountains rising just beside you.
Step 4: Do the rest of your training runs at the gym on a treadmill, for no real reason. This way, your poor attention span will keep you from running more than 4 miles at once!
Step 5: Double-check that your half-marathon is scheduled for the same weekend as a program trip to a small village in the Kazakh countryside. Instead of skipping the excursion, book a taxi back to Almaty. That way, you can still have your breath taken by Charyn Canyon, a river-carved canyon running through the Kazakh Steppe near Lake Kaindy, a brilliant turquoise pool punctuated by a frozen forest — dead, but still standing, following the earthquake that formed the lake. Appreciating the natural beauty of Kazakhstan will inspire you enough to overcome your dead legs, following a four-hour car ride back to the city, the day before the race.
Step 6: Pick up your race bib and shirt from a massive convention center, where you will also receive a bag containing (among many other things): children’s vitamins, toothpaste, a keychain, cereal and a sports drink.
Step 7: Wake up at 5:30 a.m. on race day and enjoy an energizing breakfast of raw honey and a large bottle of water. Walk from your apartment to Republic Square, where you will have to fight your way through throngs of eager runners and fans to get to the start area.
Step 8: Accidentally place yourself in the very back, behind the three-hour pacers because you think their sign says two hours. Take a look at the thousands of people before you and realize that there is absolutely no way in the world you can run 13.1 miles.
Step 9: Run 13.1 miles. Breathe in the surprisingly fresh morning air. Let the music at each cheering station carry you to the next. Stop at every bathroom, then decide to just keep running anyway. High-five students who woke up at 6 a.m. just to watch people run. Look out at the mountains always framing the horizon. Feel your legs carry you down every hill, much faster than you intended, and force them to climb steadily back up. Listen in on the runners beside you — their jokes, their half-sincere affirmations — and try to pick out other foreigners in the crowd. Watch the giant stone head outside the Almaty Museum of Arts and, later, the towering gates of the First President Park go by. Push through cramps in the final 2 miles, as your legs spontaneously remind you of your lack of preparation. Drink a nonalcoholic beer at the finish and promptly throw up at lunch afterwards. But, most importantly, enjoy the very best tour of Almaty that money can’t buy.
