To the kind people following this blog, we’d like to apologise in advance for some rather overzealous posting over the next week or so. We are in the process of replacing a couple of old blogs with this consolidated effort, so we’re just trying to catch up and get all those old posts into their new home.
This shouldn’t take more than the next week or so, so please bear with us – we’ll return to a more ‘normal’ posting schedule soon!
King and queen of the mountains!
When Wouna and I started running, we stayed in a hilly neighbourhood. No matter which direction you ran, you’d hit a hill within about a kilometer. Even our little 4km daily loop automatically doubled as a hill-session. One hill on our daily run was particularly challenging. When we first started running it felt totally insurmountable, and we were in awe of any runner we saw who actually ran over the hill. It ended up taking us a couple of months of running before the big day came where we were finally able to run all the way over it. We felt like we had finally joined some elite club of super-runners!
Even after this realisation that it was actually possible to top the hill without walking, it remained an important indicator of ability – each time we had a bit of a lapse in our running, or a layoff due to injury, the distance we could run up that hill before slowing to a walk, became a measure of our progress. Continue reading
I’ve never considered myself the Bruce Springsteen of running – I wasn’t Born to Run.
In fact, the first time Wouna and I gave in to a nagging runner friend and joined her for a 5km fun run I was already past 30. And little kids of between 3 and 5 ran the shit out of me.
Maybe it was the shock of realising we weren’t able to run continuously for more than 2km, or the fact that kids that scarcely reached my knees easily ran away from us, but from that day we did our best to get better at the running game. Running together, we persevered, eventually managing our first 10km race, then a 21, then a 32, and then the wheels came off – the classic story of injury from over-use. We rested, cut back, tried again, this time getting all the way to completing a marathon at a pretty decent 6min/km pace. The sky was the limit, so we did more marathons, and quickly progressed to our first ultra – the scenic Two Oceans marathon in Cape Town. After this came injury again, followed by cut-back and rest, slow build up, eventually another marathon, and so forth, until now, about 10 years later, I would contend that we’ve spent enough of the past decade on the road (or on the trail) to be able to refer to ourselves as runners. Continue reading
Race entry fee:
$120.00.
Buying a commemorative T-shirt:
$59.00
The burn of the air in your lungs as you clear that hill at the 25km mark:
Priceless.
Yes, its difficult to measure, in monetary terms, the value you get out of a running event. Looking back at the past decade, few things have left a deeper impression in my memory than the wonderful, tough and enjoyable races we’ve been fortunate enough to be part of. Continue reading
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