Caracas Chronicles

In September 2022, I ran and chronicled Maracaibo’s 21K race. A year later I come back to the double self-inflicted harm of running and writing, as an opportunity to explore how the city has changed through a strange Sunday early morning when hundreds of people consider that jogging across a long bridge over a heavily polluted lake is a good idea. 

While logistics for 2022’s Media Maratón de Maracaibo was—how to put it?—imperfect, even if the mere fact of making the race happen is a miracle within the city’s disastrous context, this year was entirely different. It was excellent. The bad news is that we had to bring a Caracas company to organize the event: Hipereventos. Another hit for the federalist dream.  

They handed us the kits the day before—dorsals, t-shirts, etc—and exposed us runners to the sponsors’ presence: and me, in particular, to a bizarre experience. One of the sponsors, Alimentos Kiri, is a company that sells, among other things, chickens. So its mascot is a giant white chicken. I think it’s normal that people approach mascots for a picture, but this Kiri giant chick was pursuing me, extending a wing towards my shaking hands not once, but three times that day, covering me with its physical—and emotional—shadow. Why was this creature harassing me, I can’t tell. 

Jogging Over Reality

Anyway, that Sunday, September 17th, we were all waiting for the start at the other end of the Bridge at Punta Iguana. The 21 kilometer route was the same as the previous year’s edition: a bit more than the Bridge’s 8 kilometers, crossing Los Haticos to reach downtown Maracaibo, joining a part of Avenida El Milagro and finishing at Vereda del Lago park. The 10k option finished some kilometers beyond the bridge head. 

If a bunch of happy people running over the place where a human being met a horrendous end to his life isn’t a metaphor of how insignificant is life here, well I don’t know what a metaphor is.  

The cool part for most runners is crossing the Bridge, but actually the bulk of the race happens in Los Haticos, one of the city’s oldest and poorest parts. However, the horrible road I saw ten days before the race was now surprisingly fixed. Another novelty: many people cheering the competitors along the way were the same public employees that prepared the route for us, wearing the city’s government logo with the totally unnecessary reminder of an incandescent sun. Good people who did a fine job. But I couldn’t avoid the thought that the right thing is to have this area always this clean for its inhabitants, not only when a publicized race takes place and strangers from other parts of town deign to run across it. 

If a bunch of happy people running over the place where a human being met a horrendous end to his life isn’t a metaphor of how insignificant is life here, well I don’t know what a metaphor is.  

Around downtown, we ran by Centro Comercial Ciudad Chinita, where some days before a man died in the explosion of a damaged power equipment, another victim of the calamities of our 20-years-long energy crisis. I even saw the patch of burned asphalt where that person was killed and I was unable to block from my mind the grotesque images we watched that week, some of them recorded by the firefighters themselves.

If a bunch of happy people running over the place where a human being met a horrendous end to his life isn’t a metaphor of how insignificant is life here, well I don’t know what a metaphor is.  

The Finish Line

I scored an acceptable marathon time, despite my injuries and the recurring memory of the giant white chicken invading my personal space. People around me were happy with their medals. I even saw our corpulent mayor, Rafael Ramírez from Primero Justicia, wearing sports attire and showing a 21K medal on his chest. A guy with his physique that makes 21K has my vote, I thought at the moment. 

But someone took me out of my illusion when he explained to me that the mayor did 10K and that all medals were the same, reading 21K regardless of how many kilometers you actually ran. 

Regardless of the mayor’s actual running capabilities (or lack thereof), what actually matters is his and his team’s work for the city. Under completely adverse circumstances, and sometimes with mixed results, I can’t fault the guy for his efforts. Even unpopular but important steps like collecting municipal taxes to be later invested in the city have been ramped up under his administration. You really can see that damn sun in those mayoral uniforms everywhere trying to do actual work, like fixing traffic lights and garbage collection. For the most part, given the gargantuan nature of the task, it’s still insufficient.

Effort and good intentions are sadly not enough when the problems are so deeply rooted. Just the fact that the power outages are currently  out of control, with unscheduled cuts that can last up to seven hours in a constantly humid and scolding hot city, makes the battle so uphill that sometimes it’s hard to know if it’s even worth fighting.  

Is the city of Maracaibo also the same this year? The Lake is still green. Power, gas and water are still lacking most of the time. And all the people that, wanting it or not, remain in Maracaibo have to endure a daily life that competes with the most dramatic epic stories. 

The race was better organized. But Maracaibo is the same. Fortunately, the incredible resilience and sense of humor of its inhabitants also remains unchanged.