It takes a dreamer to think about running a marathon. It takes a compulsive planner to enter a marathon. It takes discipline to train properly for a marathon and it takes an over-competitive and slightly demented minded person to actually run the damn thing. Needless to say I’m not very disciplined and am paying for my sins by feeling like a 95 year old with a walking stick lodged halfway up his arse two days after running the Knysna Forest Marathon.
The desire to run a marathon stems from my life-long competition with my father. Our relationship involves a lot of teasing and whenever I bring up his matric report (“Ed’s final results is going to be a cliff-hanger!”) and my degree versus his absence of tertiary education, it doesn’t take him long to bring up the fact that no matter what I’ve done in my life, it’s not as hard as running 89kms between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. That’s 15 laps of Kenton!
I entered the race after managing the Two Oceans half marathon pretty well on the back of no proper training but a fair bit of fitness built up from a variety of sports I indulge myself in at Varsity to excuse myself from doing Auditing tuts. I figured with a bit of training I’d be able to double my feat. I ran a 1h36 in the half, a good time under the circumstances but attributed completely to the fact that I could not stand the thought of friends of mine beating me! I clung to their coattails the entire race and pipped them with a couple k’s to go. My reward was a medal, a lesson never to eat a rusk after a long run and ligament injury in my foot.
My training period coincided with study leave with exam week being the week leading up to the run. As good as exercise is for studying, it’s pretty hard to get your body in a state of concentration after running 15km’s, so that was about as long as any of the runs lasted.
I signed up to run the race with Jonty, a very good friend of mine from way back when I used to go to Kingswood pre-primary every Thursday.
Wrapped in a blanket and black plastic bag, we left drove from Plett to Knysna and boarded the taxi to take the trip into the Knysna Forest for the start. Despite hoping for a powerful rendition of Chariots of Fire on the trip, we were subjected to some R&B song on triple repeat before a slow love song played to our exit from the bus.
The taxi dropped us off in somewhat of a no-man’s land with the sounds of a bilingual Afrikaans announcer echoing through the woods. A 300m or so walk in the darkness was a bit unnerving as we pictured Fiela se Kind reaching out and grabbing us any second. If I remember correctly she turned out pretty decent looking in the movie so maybe that wouldn’t have been the worst thing after all. I’d just have to teach her a bit of English.
Very unlike the dog show of a start experienced at the two oceans - admittedly I was in the seeded group due to me having run 10 ultra-marathons, being over-50 and called Peter (the name of my girlfriends father) – creeping up to the front of the 1200 runners was hardly challenging, if not bitterly over-optimistic. The mood was relaxed as everyone around us seemed to have done this before, apart from the short podgy coloured lady cracking the same line repeatedly (“is this the seeded section? [laugh at own joke while everyone pretends to chuckle despite having heard it 3 seconds and 6 seconds earlier, finding it funny on neither occasion]”). The average age of the runners must have been over 40, which made me feel a lot younger than I’m going to feel when I become a 25-year-old first year article clerk in 2013.
The starting gun went off somewhere in the dark with no audible countdown. Knowing very little about the route, we figured that we’d treat the first 14 of the 42.9k’s - note the ‘.9’, thank you- as a warm up and figured that we’d be able to run the last 10 on adrenaline in contemplation of the finish. That left us with two sets of 10kms in the middle to negotiate with the combined effort of a little training and a helluva lot of self-motivation, denial and mental stubbornness!
Runners are encouraged to run with their blankets and jackets in the beginning before handing them over to needy locals who “line the streets” waiting for their gifts. This so-called tradition seems to have been oligopolised by a few of the locals who struggled under the weight of jackets thrown at them. I waited for a needy looking human but after 5 or so k’s of running with a blanket over my shoulders like an athletic, manly Mother Theresa I tossed it aside next to the 38km sign signalling distance remaining. Admittedly the traditional needy mobs might not have been so keen on coming out an hour earlier for the fewer mentally deranged marathon runners and waited for the 7000-strong half-marathon brigade.
Jonty had little desire to run the race with me, knowing full well that I was too competitive to let him, so we split up a couple of kilometres from the start and I was left to my own company for the remainder of the race. The first 12-ish kilometres cruised by pretty easily despite the constant uphill, or in the case of the Knysna marathon, up-mountain. I learnt a fair amount about the demographics of the runners in those early stages as I completely ignored the first guy who spoke to me partly because I thought he was talking to the long-grey haired man on my other side who was most probably Fiela’s husband and partly because I had absolutely nought idea of what he was saying! To understand Afrikaans my brain needs to be tuned in to pick up the few words I do know and slow them down to a reasonable speed in my mind so that I can decipher what has been said to me! After a second Afrikaans man asked me something only to get a sheepish confused English reply from yours truly, I put the two above-mentioned experiences together along with the places the other runners came from – Brackenfell, Durbanville, Paarl, Strand etc - to realise I not only stuck out because of my age, but also because of my home-language, instantly fulfilling my curiosity as what it would feel like being a white guy at a Youth League rally. As far as the black runners were concerned, I saw them at the starting tent, some filling up tog bags of free Pick ‘n Pay treats provided by the race sponsors, but not again until prize-giving where they monopolised (nationalised?) the podium.
My two tactics as far as in-race entertainment was concerned was to name the runners around me - Oom Piet from Paarl and Elsabet from Maties passed me and got passed in return at regular intervals- and to play songs over and over in my head. Unfortunately the first song that came into my head was: “she’ll be coming (running) ‘round the mountain when she comes”.
The first sign of bad things to come was when a marshal atop the first climb pointing us down our first steep descent of four let off an evil Voldemort-worthy laugh. Supporters in the forest were few and far between with volunteers offering coke and water every two-and-a-half k’s doing their best to encourage and console. The halfway mark brought a fair amount of relief and a rather worrying realisation: I had just matched the longest run in my life but I still had another 21 (.45) kilometres to go!
My goal for the race was not to walk at all. After trying to simultaneously run and drink coke from a cup I had to slightly readjust my sights to include a stop and go at the table to down my half-glass of coke. The sugar boost was essential and well worth the next kilometre of burping! At times in the middle stages of the race I would find myself 100m behind the next person and 50m ahead of the followers. With nothing but trees for company and “she’ll be running ‘round the mountain” stuck in my head I yearned for my i-pod and some Creedence Clearwater and Europe ‘treffers’ to keep the mood up and the mind adrift!
And then it came.
There’s little worse when, 25kms into a long run you start a steep and long descent knowing full well that every stride down will require 4 shuffles up to get back to the altitude from which you started! The hill, no, mountain we had to climb was long. It was steep. It was hard. I swear sparingly when I write but there is a time when swearing is necessary. This mountain was not only a mother-fucker; it quite liked to bend over fathers, sons, daughters and grandfathers all the same! My aim of not walking was shattered as after 4km’s of shuffling at a snail’s pace up the mountain with little sign of the summit I had to break into a series of 5 walking strides every 100m to shift the pain from my calves and hamstrings. To rub it all in, there was a camera man ready to indulge in our pain at the top of the mountain followed by a sea of half-marathon runners in which to get lost in!
Despite being over-taken by some people who looked like they were either wheel-chair bound very soon or part of an MTV episode of ‘Made’ there was one significant bright side: all of a sudden there were ‘steeks’ around us! From looking at balding Afrikaans men in a bid to find a suitable name the view just became a lot more bearable! As we met the throngs of runners who were on course for a 2hour plus time in their mild jog we had to negotiate another long, steep decline through the beautiful Simola Golf Estate. While the half-runners around me saved their knees by trodding down carefully, my quads did not have the strength and left me flying down the hill to the detriment of my knees and back!
My joy at seeing the 10km mark pass slowly by was somewhat drenched with anger as people around me started congratulating me for passing halfway! All I had to differentiate myself from the people who I’d run 20kms more than was a black number instead of a red one! I thought the least I should be entitled to was an entourage of photographers and a Greek-style wreath atop my head! Maybe add in a shirt reading ‘Hardcore. Lank Hardcore’ on the back and I reckon that might have been fair.
Nonetheless, as the clay slash gravel roads became brick paving and then tar road the legs began to weaken at quite a rate and I immediately understood the physics behind the energy efficient old-man shuffle-run. Feasting on the oranges, bananas and baked potatoes that got offered to us once we joined the half-marathon route - fair? Fu*k no! –along with the odd slap of the legs was required to inject some life into my body and avoid being over taken by an ageing humpbacked lady. The will to push myself to the finish depleted as I had to climb a set of stairs in a bottleneck of eager runners. My theory of adrenaline had worn off somewhat as I approached the field in the last kilometre of the race. The fact that the half-marathon had been delayed coupled with me not running with a watch had lead me to believe that I had no chance to reach my preliminary goal of a sub 4 hour run. As I rounded the final bend with the race clock in sight – in sight to normal people, not to my ever-weakening eyes – a shout from a spectator of: “Hurry up so you can get there under 4!” generated some residual energy from a hidden location within me prompting a gallop toward the line. I managed to get in 10 seconds under the 4 hour mark, something that was the least of my concerns as the relief of finishing nearly overwhelmed me completely and I searched the area for a grassy patch to collapse!
Collapse I did. Stretch I did not. I tried but I could hardly lift my legs 45 degrees despite help from my friend Bee, mysteriously glowing with delight at my state, or lack thereof! It took a massage in the medical tent, 4 Pick ‘n Pay Powerade clones (horrible things), a Reds Super 15 victory and the discovery that Jonty had also completed the run successfully for the feat to start sinking in. To cap the day off, we hung around for the prize-giving for the sole reason that we found chairs and could not yet contemplate a walk to the car, only for Jonty to win a camera worth a grand-and-a-half at the lucky draw! Our prior plan to celebrate our weeks of sobriety brought on by training and, to a larger extent, exams were cast aside by my very unhappy lower body. Two days later, legs aching and shoulders mysteriously stiff, I know I haven’t done my last long run. Jonty assures me he has! The stiffness and soreness has left parts of my lower body rather inflated – no, unfortunately not that part – leaving me with a valuable lesson: If you want a big boep – dop lank. If you want big guns – gym lank. If you want massive calves – run a marathon.
