Seconded to the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT)
When we graduated from the Officers’ Orientation Course (OOC) we were assigned to the units where we would spend the rest of our two years of initial service. I was among several seconded to the Institute for Maritime Technology (IMT). As noted in “Ancyent blog31 national service through initial training 1978”, full-time employees of IMT were civilians. They wore regular clothes rather than uniforms and were paid a respectable salary plus good benefits. (Very good benefits, which is why a few years later I went to work at IMT as a civilian. More on that in a future episode.) Those of us doing national service had to wear our Navy uniforms and were paid the same pittance as other conscripts of the same rank rather than what the regular IMT employees were paid. (The pay scale for conscripts did improve quite substantially during our period of service though.) At the time IMT was in an old building less than a stone’s throw from the training base where we had endured the OOC.
With the OOC behind us, we moved into the Navy officers’ mess and, outside working hours, could come and go as we pleased. One might think that I would immediately have started running regularly again. As is so often the case, one would be wrong. I was rather unmotivated. I went running a few times before I even bothered resuming writing down the distance of each run. For the week ending April 9, 1978, I recorded just a total (20 miles). Three weeks later (April 29) I ran in the Western Province Marathon Championships, finishing in 2:48. That was the second-fastest marathon I had run by that stage, so clearly I had retained some running fitness.
As mentioned, we were each assigned to a regular day job, such as at IMT. But we still “belonged” to the Navy and they made sure we did our fair share of naval duties. At first we had to take turns at being Officer of the Day (or night), that is, the person in charge of the whole Simon’s Town Navy base overnight on weekdays or on weekends. While on duty we had to stay in the command center (but were allowed to sleep). Duties of the Officer of the Day included giving ships permission to enter or leave the harbor, directing firefighters if there was a bushfire on the mountain behind the town, and generally responding to any crisis that might occur, such as an enemy invasion. There was a pistol in a safe for us to use if we needed it to repel attackers.
We hadn’t been given our proper officer ranks at that stage though and after a while some high-ranking officer decided it wasn’t appropriate for midshipmen to be in charge of the country’s main Navy base, even if just overnight or on weekends. So the Navy had to come up with some other duties for us. They decided that outside regular working hours we should drive around checking that guards were all at their stations (and signing the logbook at each site to show we had been there). We were supposed to carry a pistol while doing these rounds, but after the first few occasions I left it in the safe. On weekdays we had either a 4 PM to midnight shift or a midnight to 8 AM shift (on top of our regular workdays). Most of my colleagues preferred the 4 PM to midnight shift, whereas I have always preferred running in the late afternoon, which made that shift less desirable for me. If assigned to the midnight to 8 AM shift, most of the others would do a quick tour of the various guardhouses right after midnight, go back to the officers’ mess to sleep for several hours and then do another quick tour shortly before 8 AM. I was much more conscientious and so would spend the whole time driving around. To help pass the time I usually tried to accompany the crew of the harbor patrol boat on at least one of their trips around the harbor, rather than just signing their log.
There weren’t very many midshipmen assigned to jobs in Simon’s Town, so we had one of these shifts every 3-4 days. Because we also had our regular jobs at IMT or elsewhere, these frequent night duties were rather taxing. Fortunately, our proper officer ranks came through soon afterwards and we were able to go back to being Officer of the Day – not only were we allowed to sleep while doing that, but there were many more officers available to take turns with this duty. Our initial “proper” rank was ensign. Some time later those who had more than just a 3-year degree were promoted to sub-lieutenant. It took about 18 months after the OOC before we received our actual Deed of Commission certificates (see image below).
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| My Deed of Commission as an officer in the South African Defence Force. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether I served “with loyalty, courage, dignity and honour”. I may have discharged my duties with a modicum of diligence, though certainly not with zeal. |
As I mentioned above, after we completed the OOC we moved
into the Navy wardroom, that is, commissioned Navy officers’ mess. Initially we were all housed in a large
barn-like outbuilding but soon afterwards we were moved into the main building,
with two of us per room. Being officers,
we didn’t have to do much for ourselves.
Our laundry was done for us, our rooms were cleaned, and I think our
beds were made for us. At mealtimes we
were served by waiters.
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| The Navy wardroom in Simon’s Town. That was the closest I could get to it on Google Maps. When I looked at it again in December 2025 the lower part of the “Welcome to” sign was blurred out. I see that what was the SADF is now the SANDF – South African National Defence Force |
The wardroom had previously been a hotel (Seaforth Hotel, if
I recall correctly). It was just over
the road from Boulders Beach, a crappy, windswept collection of rocks and sand
next to a frigid ocean. (In summer we
did occasionally go down there to cool off.)
The beach has since become world famous.
A website even has it as #12 on a ranking of the world's best beaches: https://www.worlds50beaches.com/boulders-beach/
though in my opinion it wouldn't even make the top 12 best beaches in the Cape
Peninsula. More about Boulders Beach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulders_Beach.
Another site rated it as #35 in the
world in December 2025: https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-ideas/best-of-travel/australian-beach-crowned-worlds-best-in-prestigious-list/image-gallery/7b3bf8a8f84b6b41f882d500451e2bea?page=6. How can Boulders be the only South African
one in the top 50 in that article? A
couple of penguins were introduced to the area in 1982 and the penguin colony
now numbers around 3,000. (Some sources
I’ve seen say the initial two penguins were introduced to the area, others that
they found their way there themselves.)
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| Photo of Boulders Beach that I took when we visited Simon’s Town in 2019. |
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| Apparent penguins not only can but will bite. Photo from the same visit, as are the three below. |
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| I included this photo mostly to show the size of
the thorns on the thorn bushes. |
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| A somewhat better photo of one of the penguins |
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| A photo of part of the beach in which the hordes of penguins are more clearly visible. |
When we were moved into the main building of the wardroom we
were assigned room-mates. Tristan, or to
give him his full name, Tristan Maurice Blandin de Chalain, had the misfortune
of having to share a room with me in the wardroom. (I was a thoroughly disagreeable person back
then. I’ve since matured enough that I
am now just moderately disagreeable.)
Tristan had a BSc(Hons) in molecular biology from the University of
Natal in Durban. (It is now the
University of KwaZulu-Natal, after merging with the University of
Durban-Westville, which under Apartheid had been a university for Indians.) He was also seconded to IMT.
Tristan and I were about as different as two reasonably educated people could be. He was sociable, driven, and ambitious. I am asocial (though certainly not anti-social) and have never had any particular ambition.
Tristan was very good at getting people to do things for him. While we were doing our national service he completed an MSc degree through UCT, on a project he worked on at IMT. The project involved investigating different materials and coatings to determine which were most resistant to fouling when immersed in sea water for an extended period. He persuaded statisticians at IMT to help with statistical aspects of the design of the experiment and to analyze the data. I think he managed to get Navy divers to secure the materials under water in False Bay. Maybe he measured the amount of fouling when the materials were retrieved at the end of the experiment. If so, that may have been the extent of his involvement in the actual conduct of the experiment.
Of all the guys with me on the OOC, Tristan is the only one I have had contact with or information about since we finished our national service. Tristan must have applied to UCT’s medical school while we were still in the Navy. He qualified as a doctor in 1984 and went on to specialize in plastic and reconstructive surgery. In the mid 1990s he spent a couple of years working at hospitals associated with Emory University in Atlanta here in the USA, and after that worked at SickKids (the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada) before moving to Auckland, New Zealand in 1997. He travelled to the Philippines annually to do pro bono work treating children with cleft lip and palate conditions. I don’t know if he still does that or has retired from that or his private practice in Auckland. We had been friends on Facebook, but when I checked in early 2026 it appears that he has deleted his Facebook account. I don’t see him in my list of FB friends and he doesn’t show up in a FB search. https://dechalain.co.nz/profile/
In our room in the evenings, I usually read novels and drank (more on that below). Tristan worked on writing a novel. I don’t know whether that was the start of the novel Wolf’s Paw that he eventually published in 2009. https://www.amazon.com/Wolfs-Paw-Tristan-Chalain/dp/1608609677 The setting for the early part of his novel is the South African bush war. Emory University and Atlanta more generally are the setting for later parts. Oner of the characters is a plastic surgeon. As Tristan hadn’t been to medical school or lived in Atlanta at the time we were room-mates, I presume Wolf’s Paw is not what he was writing back in the day.
I mentioned that Tristan is the only one from the OOC whose career after national service I know anything about. However, there is another conscript who was with us at IMT with whom I have had subsequent contact. Pieter Juriaan “Riaan” de Jongh had a degree in statistics from Universiteit Stellenbosch. Riaan was called up to the army but after his initial training was seconded to IMT. He was the odd man out in that he wore an Army uniform while all the other conscripts at IMT were in Navy uniforms. Riaan completed an MSc through the University of South Africa (UNISA). UNISA is a university in Pretoria through which all degrees are by correspondence, with no in-person classes. I later worked at UNISA, so will write more about it in episodes about the 1980s. I presume Riaan started his MSc while we were at IMT. After national service he continued working at IMT as a civilian and completed a PhD through UCT. He later spent a year or two doing a post-doc at UNC here in Chapel Hill. I exchanged a few emails with him about 10 years later when we were trying to decide whether to move here. He eventually became a professor at the Potchefstroom campus of North-West University. (North-West University was formed in 2004 as a merger of the University of North-West, the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, and one of the campuses of Vista University which, under Apartheid, had been just for Black students.) Riaan is now retired, though (as of January 2026) was still listed on the NWU website: https://natural-sciences.nwu.ac.za/centre-business-mathematics-and-informatics/riaan-de-jongh.
For most of the time we were on the OOC we did not have
access to alcohol. Once we had moved to
the Navy wardroom we could come and go more-or-less as we pleased. That included being able to buy alcohol. Soon after finishing the OOC I must have
returned to Port Elizabeth to retrieve my car.
I needed that even just to commute freely between the wardroom and
IMT. As I mention later, I also used it
to drive to UCT to run with other people.
It also meant I could get to bottle stores to buy alcohol. We didn’t have access to a refrigerator in
the wardroom, so I used to fill a cooler with ice to keep beer cold. As in my last couple of years at UCT, I drank
4 beers (and ate peanuts) while reading alone in my room. Sometimes I bought a bottle of wine or sherry
rather than beer but didn’t finish a whole bottle in an evening.
I wasn’t concerned about my drinking at the time, only in
hindsight. Fortunately, the amount I was
consuming stayed constant rather than increasing. Also, once I finished national service I cut
back substantially and my alcohol consumption continued to decline as my
tolerance for alcohol decreased. I
sometimes joke that I started running further so that I could drink more beer
without gaining weight but that with increasing fitness my tolerance for alcohol
declined and so I drank less beer.
Statistical software was in its infancy in the late 1970s. Riaan spent quite a bit of his time programming various statistical functions on an HP-9825 desktop computer, which was a very advanced machine for its time. (If Hewlett Packard had had anyone with a little vision, Microsoft and Apple might not have become household names.). It had a single line display (see image). Programs could be saved on HP-format tapes, which may have been called data cartridges, that fit in the slot on the left just above the keyboard. There was a small built-in printer, on the right above the keyboard. I think the slots below the keyboard held various packages (or apps in more modern terminology).
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| HP-9825 desktop computer. |
One of the peripherals that could be operated with the
HP-9825 was a pen plotter. I couldn’t
find a photo of the exact model we used, but the image below is of a reasonably
similar model. Small things amuse small
minds – I used to be fascinated by how the mechanical arm grabbed a pen of a
particular color, drew using that pen, then put it back and grabbed a pen of a
different color. I think we also used
the pen plotter as a digitizer, that is, moving the arm to each point to be
digitized and hitting a button for the coordinates to be recorded.
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| HP pen plotter. |
If I wasn’t part of the statistics group, then what did I
do? Not very much. I tried to avoid trouble (and work) and spent
a lot of time reading New Scientist and Nature magazines. For most of my time at IMT I was assigned to
work with a civilian employee, Dave Harrison. Who was an engineer. That was a very valuable experience for
someone who had graduated with a reasonable background in mathematical,
statistical and operations research theory, but who had done essentially no
applied work. Engineers tend to be very
practical people – not just in the sense of being able to change a lightbulb,
but also knowing that an approximate solution to a mathematical problem, with the
results expressed to just 2-3 significant digits, is often better than spending
months to get an exact solution correct to 10 digits. An approximate answer to the right question
is better than a precise answer to the wrong question (or, rather, to the
question that is answerable with the available theory).
The biggest project I can recall working on was an operations research model to optimize acquisition of major naval systems (such as ships). That involved using a mathematical / computer model to minimize total costs subject to constraints relating to fulfilling the Navy’s duties (such as detecting and neutralizing sea-borne attacks). Dave and his partner-in-crime, Fred Evans, who had been an officer in the Royal Navy, determined what kinds of equipment to include in the models, as well as guesstimating costs and capabilities. My job was to develop the integer (mathematical) programming model and implement it on a (mainframe) computer. Dave and Fred had some innovative ideas for new ways to address the Navy’s needs. For instance, one was to deploy around the coastline a number of tethered lighter-than-air craft (“blimps”) carrying radar and other equipment, to be able to detect approaches from the sea. Our models indicated that the blimps were a cost-effective way to satisfy some of the required capabilities.
From time to time Dave and Fred had to travel to Pretoria to present the results of our models to the Navy’s top brass. The saying “generals always fight the last war” seemed to be particularly apt for the Navy’s top brass. They apparently didn’t like the tethered blimp idea, blimps being far less sexy than aircraft carriers or nuclear submarines (not that we had anything quite as unaffordable as those in our models). So Dave said I must add a “digital blimp filter” to my program to filter blimps out of the solution.
Of course, the whole thing was actually an exercise in futility. That’s partly because the war involving the Army and Air Force was sucking up increasing amounts of money whereas, as I mentioned earlier, there was no credible sea-borne threat. So funding equipment for the Navy was a much lower priority. Also, the arms embargo was already in place against South Africa and the Navy had to be content with whatever anyone was willing to sell rather than what may have been best suited to the tasks at hand. That’s probably why the most modern vessels in the fleet at the time were Warrior-class strike craft bought from Israel.
I mentioned earlier that the Navy also had three submarines, obtained from France. France also supplied a submarine simulator, to be used in training submariners. The Navy wanted to upgrade the capabilities of the simulator, but the French had been among the first to stop talking to South Africa. The submariners approached us to see if we could reprogram the simulator. But all they had by way of documentation was a printed listing of the program in assembler language (or maybe a French version of FORTRAN, I forget). Back in those days, code wasn’t self-documenting (or well documented). We would have had to reverse engineer the code, without any information about what each command meant, before being able to add to it. It was never clear whether they had an appropriate compiler, so even if we had managed the Herculean reverse-engineering task we might not have had any way to implement new code. Needless to say, we declined.
In interacting with the submariners we had a tour of one of the vessels that was tied up in the harbor. Those of us in the group who were in uniform were “initiated”. We had to leave our caps just inside the entrance. While we were on the tour some of the crew painted the inside of our caps with a red substance. That made a red ring around our heads when we put our caps on as we were leaving.
Earlier in this episode I mentioned starting to run again and about a month later (April 29) managing 2:48 in the Western Province Marathon Championships. From then on I ran regularly. Two days after the marathon I ran the Fish Hoek running club’s 8km time trial in 30:18! According to my logbook, about two months later I dropped out of a marathon at 20 miles. I didn’t record (and don’t remember) why I stopped. Maybe I had intended it only as a 20-mile training run.
Initially when I started running again I ran out and back
from the Navy wardroom, heading either roughly north or roughly south. The former required negotiating the traffic
on the narrow road through Simon’s Town.
The latter had much less traffic, but the road was a very narrow strip
between the ocean and that part of the Table Mountain Range. By late afternoon, which is when I ran, the
wind was usually howling and funneled along the road alongside the
mountain. Depending on the direction of
the wind, either the outward leg or the return one was directly into the wind,
which was often strong enough that I had to shield my eyes from stinging sand. The
photo below shows how Simon’s Town is squeezed between the mountains and False
Bay.
Simon’s Town, nestled on the eastern side of the
southern part of the Table Mountain range.
After a few weeks I was tired of constantly fighting the wind, so I started to drive 20 miles each way to the UCT cross country clubhouse at the cricket oval to run with other people, mostly Bruce Matthews and Graeme Dacomb (see “Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977”).
In late July I was part of a South African Defence Force (SADF) team that travelled to the Outeniqua Relay. The race was held in the vicinity of Oudtshoorn, a town in the Little Karoo that is best known for the nearby Cango Caves https://www.cango-caves.co.za/. It is about a 5-hour drive from Cape Town. There were two SADF teams from Western Province Command (the regional organization that encompassed all SADF units in that area). I was in the B team that finished 9th out of 41 teams. I presume we travelled there and back in a military bus. The only detail I remember is that the SADF put us up in a local hotel – I think it was a Holiday Inn – with 4 of us per room, 2 per bed! One of the other 3 in my room was the late Stephen Donald. Stephen had a very ungainly running action, with arms and legs seeming to go in disparate direction. Despite that, he later became one of the top runners in the country. Stephen died from prostate cancer in 2024. His older brother, John, was an equally good runner. John’s running action was somewhat better than Stephen’s, though still not very smooth.
An anecdote that about a race that included the Donald
brothers. The following year they were
running for Universiteit Stellenbosch.
We were in a 10-mile race in which they finished in a tie for first
place. It was on one of those days when
the wind was blowing very strongly, as it often does in the Cape Town area. We had a following wind for the early part of
the race but then turned into the teeth of the gale. Stephen and John were well clear out in
front. As we headed back into the wind, I
could see three of their in Universiteit Stellenbosch team-mates running
together not too far ahead of me. One of
them was Malcolm Donald, who is not related to Stephen and John and who last I
heard was living in New Zealand. I
worked hard to catch up with the three, hoping to tuck in behind them for a bit
of respite from the wind. As I caught up
with the three, they came to what was almost a dead stop to let me go by rather
than letting me tuck in behind. We stood
around looking at one another until I decided I had no option but to be a
wind-shield for them. (Two of the three
overtook me towards the end but I managed to stay in front of the third as we
finished in positions 8-11.)
In August 1978 I travelled to Pretoria by train for the SADF cross country championships at Voortrekkerhoogte (literal translation “Pioneer Heights”), one of the largest military bases in the country. According to my logbook I spent all of Sunday on the train, a journey of about 900 miles, ran the 12 km race on the Monday, and then travelled back to Cape Town on the Tuesday. I don’t recall how large the field was. There were probably separate races for juniors (under 19 and/or under 21), which would have included most of the conscripts who did their national service directly after high school. Cape Town is in a winter rainfall area whereas Pretoria is very dry at that time of the year – dry and dusty. I remember my lungs burning during the race, from a combination of the altitude (over 4,000 ft) and the dry air.
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| SADF Cross Country Championships, 1978, showing clearly how dry the grass was on the “Services Golf Club”. |
Five days later (Saturday August 19) I ran another 12 km
cross country race, the Western Province Championships, finishing well down in
the field. Four weeks after that I ran
the Stellenbosch Marathon for the fourth time. Although I was only very marginally faster
than in 1977 the 2:35:42 was my fastest time at that stage.
In the late 1970s the half marathon had not yet become a
standard distance. There were a few
races at distances close to but not exactly half a marathon (which is 13.1
miles / 21.1 km) with a variety of names.
For instance, a week after the Stellenbosch Marathon I ran what was
called a “Meso Marathon” which was 21.5 km.
In “Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977” I mentioned that in those days in South Africa, in order to enter a race, be it on the road, track, or cross country, one had to be a member of an official club and have a running license from a local provincial governing body. One was also supposed to run in the official colors of one’s club. Most races had awards not just for the first few finishers but also for one or more club teams. The clubs didn’t have to name their team members ahead of time – the first 3 (or sometimes 4) members of a club to finish counted as the team. (The exception to this was interprovincial or national championship events, for which the provinces had to list their team, usually of 6, ahead of time, with the first 3 or 4 finishers scoring for the team award.)
November of 1978 I must have been on leave from the Navy because I was back home in Port Elizabeth. I don’t recall how I was approached to run for a local club team in a 27 km race in Hankey, a small town about 45 miles from Port Elizabeth. I finished 5th and according to the report in a local newspaper the first 5 of us were under the old course record. The club that had signed me up as a “ringer” didn’t win – another club had 3 of the 4 runners ahead of me. In third place was Cliff Hopkins who, as I mentioned in “Ancyent blog25 High school, grade 11 and most of 12” had been a physical education teacher at my high school and in my last PE class had given a couple of us corporal punishment for messing around (jumping onto the high jump mat simultaneously).
That trip home was probably when I met and ran with Deric
Derbyshire, the “running reverend”. https://gatewaynews.co.za/port-elizabeth-running-reverend-finishes-his-final-race/ Why I remember him is because he was leading
a group bidding to have Port Elizabeth host the national marathon championships
in 1979. Their bid was successful and
they put on a good event. As I note
later in this entry, I ran the race for the SADF team.
Although I ran many races in SADF colors, the Defence team in the Cape Town area was not very strong. So I also joined the Varsity Old Boys (VOB) Running Club. As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977” that club was founded early in 1977 and was the first running club in the area (and possibly the country) that was open to runners of all races. Being a new club, many of the office-bearers were relatively young and quite fast rather than old fogeys who had been in their roles for many years. (In one marathon which I will mention later, VOB won the team prize, with the 4 scoring runners, including me, all being committee members.)
Not only did I often run for VOB, but somehow I was
persuaded to take on the role of editor of the club newsletter, Imbaleki,
and also filled a vacancy on the committee.
As mentioned in the November 1978 issue of the newsletter: “Dave Couper
will fill the vacant seat on the committee and allied to his other strengths,
Dave has an invaluable one … the ability to type! You’re just the man the club needs,
Dave.” That was well before the days of
word-processors. I must have had at
least occasional access to a typewriter and, as noted, I was not just the
editor but also the typist, though very much of the self-taught hunt-and-peck
school of typing. I was a very slow
typist. So the newsletters were rather
infrequent, which led to complaints, as seen in the image below. At least it
looks like back then I was much more accurate typist than I am now. In the land of non-typists, the two-finger
typist is king, or should that be slave?
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| The VOB newsletter editor (ahem) was not very reliable
in terms of producing issues regularly. 😊 I don’t recall why we needed another typewriter. |
Part of my “excuse” for not producing issues of Imbaleki
regularly was that a substantial amount of the content consisted of results of
races. Back in those prehistoric days
race results were not posted on the Internet, because there was no Internet to
which they could be posted. Organizing
clubs mailed results to participants and to local clubs. (Almost all races were organized by running
clubs.) Some of the results were in quite
fancy booklets, such as the one for the Two Oceans shown earlier. Others were very basic, just printed sheets,
such as for the Redhill 36 km race (see first page of those results below). As noted in the June 1979 issue of Imbaleki
(see extract below), some race organizers were slow to send out results.
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| Yours Truly putting part of the blame on race organizers for this issue of Imbaleki being late. |
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| An example of the basic race results sent to clubs. This is from the 36 km race I ran a couple of days before participating in the exercise physiology experiment mentioned earlier. The underlining was so I could pick out the VOB members to list in Imbaleki. |
During my two years of national service I went on one
date. I think her name was Ingrid but
have no memory of her last name or what she looked like. I do recall that her father was a quite
high-ranking Navy officer. She was
working at IMT, probably over the summer while she was a student at UCT. There couldn’t have been a spark from either
side considering that we had just a single date and no details have stuck in my
brain.
I mentioned earlier in this entry that soon after I started running again I began driving 20 miles each way almost daily to run with Bruce Matthews and Graeme Dacomb. Over the next several years I must have run more miles with those two than with anyone else prior to moving to Chapel Hill (and even here there may be just one or possibly two people I have run with more frequently).
Later that year Bruce obtained a copy of the book Running the Lydiard Way by the famed New Zealand coach Arthur Lydiard. Bruce and Graeme decided to follow the book’s 16-week marathon training program for “Experienced Runners”. That is, the program was intended for someone aiming to run a fast marathon, not merely to finish. They targeted the Cango Caves Marathon on March 3, 1979.
I started the program with them, but my body couldn’t handle the intensity of it, and I quickly picked up a injury. From later experience, it seems that (at least until the last few years), my cardiovascular system has been much stronger than my muscles / biomechanics. I used to recover quite quickly after races, as may be obvious from some of what I write in this and subsequent entries, and I can run reasonably fast several days in a week, but cannot handle too much high intensity running. I subsequently used to say, only half in jest, that the quickest way for me to get injured was to write out a training program targeting a specific race. It was safer to not let my body know there was a race in the offing, sidling up to it and then jumping in at the last moment. 😊 I eventually reached nearly the same level as Bruce and Graeme, but it took me longer to get there.
Back in those days when races were still quite small, many of them had few, if any, refreshment tables. Bruce persuaded me to travel to Oudtshoorn with them to second them, that is, to provide refreshments along the way during the Cango Caves Marathon. (As mentioned earlier, Oudtshoorn is about a 5-hour drive from Cape Town. I don’t recall where we stayed overnight before the race.) Bruce and Graeme completed the 16-week training program successfully and achieved their goals in the marathon. First and second in the marathon were John and Stephen Donald, who I mentioned earlier, in 2:17:35 and 2:23:40. Bruce was third in 2:25:24 and Graeme fourth in 2:28:31. That marathon has a net altitude decline, which is no longer acceptable for record-setting purposes, but at least Bruce and Graeme both subsequently ran faster on more legitimate courses.
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| Altitude profile of the Cango Caves Marathon. This is for the current route, which I presume is similar to the one from back in 1979. |
The following website lists the race winners for every year
through 2019: https://arrs.run/HP_CgoMa.htm. As noted above, the 1979 race was won by John
Donald and according to that website, through 2019 his time was the
second-fastest winning time ever. A
footnote near the bottom mentions “Note: This course drops 7.58 m/km which is
excessive.” According to another
footnote, the first finisher in 2011 was disqualified for being under the age
of 20. The current race website says
that runners in the marathon must be at least 20. That seems strange. I don’t know whether that is now the norm for
marathons in South Africa or is specific to this race. As far as I recall, the lower age limit for
marathons when we lived in South Africa was 18.
I mentioned seconding Bruce in the Cango Caves Marathon. I don’t have photos of that but do have a few of seconding in other races. Seven weeks before the marathon Bruce, Graeme, and I ran a 20-mile race as a training run, rather than an all-out effort. According to my logbook we wanted to average 4 min/km (a pace that would correspond to a 2:49 marathon, that is, quite a bit slower than our usual pace when racing a marathon). I assume we ran most of the way together. We were about on the planned pace for the first 15 miles and then I picked it up over the last 5 while Bruce and Graeme slowed somewhat. Why I mention that race (and not many of the others I ran in 1978/9 is because I have a photo of Graeme’s wife Alison seconding me (and Bruce and Graeme, though they are not in the photo).
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| Being seconded by Alison Dacomb in the Atlantic 32 km race in January 1979. Unlike in the black and white photo below (and another one later), here one can see the colors of the VOB singlet – blue and white stripes. |
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| Bruce seconding Graeme and me in the “Meso Marathon” (21.5 km) mentioned earlier. I think the name of the guy behind us was Kobus de Wet, running for the Bellville Atletiekklub (hence the BAK on his singlet). |
Starting in the middle of January 1979 and on and off for
about 4 months after that, I recorded my weight and heart rate in my running
log. (I don’t recall why I started doing
this or why I later stopped.) I presume
I measured those on waking, so as to get my resting heart rate. My weight fluctuated in the range 65-67 kg
(143-147 pounds). That is about the same
range it has been over the past year or so, though the distribution of the
weight would have changed, with fat replacing muscle. I was never exactly muscular. I have always been a 90 pound weakling (or
maybe a 145 pound one), but even those of us with not much muscle to start with
tend to lose it with advancing age.
Something else I did on a few occasions early in 1979 was to be a guinea pig in a few exercise physiology experiments being conducted by Tim Noakes and his colleagues. At least one of them ended up being published, with the full text being available online at https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1251399/. As described in the article, we had to deplete our bodies’ carbohydrate reserves and then be on a low carbohydrate diet for two days while continuing to train as usual before the experiment. Running while carbohydrate-depleted is NOT fun. What we are willing to do in the name of science! The article notes “On the experimental day they ate a standard breakfast (an egg, some cheese and a cup of milk) at 06.00 and then ran cross-country in groups of 2-3 from 07.00 till 09.00. The average distance covered was about 22 km.” According to my logbook it wasn’t “cross-country”. Instead, it looks like I did 1 hour on a treadmill at 12 km/hr followed by an hour on the road. A short while later we had to consume one of three things, nothing, or 100 g of alanine or 100 g of (pure) glucose. I did the experiment twice, once consuming the alanine and once the glucose, with 3 days between the two parts. For the carbohydrate depletion I ran a hilly 36km race on the Saturday, then ran 12 miles on the Sunday, with the first day of the experiment being on the Monday. I had a bad experience on the glucose day, the description of which even made it into the published article (on page 365):
There were no symptoms suggestive
of hypoglycaemia during or immediately after exercise, although one subject
felt faint and sweaty about 3 1/2 h after the ingestion of glucose. His serum
glucose concentration at 14.00, approximately 30 min before the onset of
symptoms, was 2.0 mmol/l. An hour later, when the faintness and sweating
necessitated the early termination of the investigation, it was 3.7 mmol/l. The
subject felt normal again after eating a 50 g bar of chocolate and some
sandwiches, and the episode was ascribed to a reactive hypoglycaemia.
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| Abstract of the Journal of Physiology article. (Full text at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1251399/.) |
A week after seconding Bruce in the Cango Caves Marathon I ran the Peninsula Marathon for the second time. Even though I again had to make a pit stop (I presume just for a #1), I placed 11th in 2:37:22.
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| One of the sights on the Peninsula Marathon route, the Lower North (gun) Battery, on Main Road between Glencairn and Simon's Town, about 2.5 miles from the finish line. As mentioned in “Ancyent blog31 national service through initial training 1978” this is where “Gunner” Mead’s gunnery teams sometimes practiced. (Image from Google Maps a few years ago. When I looked at Google Maps in January 2026 there appeared to be a newer gun, not just less rust, but a different shape to the turret and the gun itself.) |
Five weeks later, on April 14, I started (and finished) the
Two Oceans (ultra) Marathon (56 km / 35 miles for the first time. As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973
and 1974” I had signed up for the race in 1974 but had an injury and didn’t
even get to the starting line. The race
was traditionally held on the Saturday of the Easter long-weekend (the Friday
and Monday were both public holidays).
Parts of the race are quite spectacular, especially Chapman’s Peak
Drive, which is a fairly narrow road with steep cliffs above and below, and with
views of the Atlantic Ocean and Hout Bay (as well as the Karbonkelberg,
mentioned in “Ancyent blog31 national service through initial training 1978”,
beyond Hout Bay). There is quite a long
climb to the highest point on Chapman’s Peak Drive, at about the 20-mile mark
of the race, a long downhill into Hout Bay, followed by another long climb
through a tree-lined road to Constantia Nek.
The standard marathon mark is somewhere along the latter stretch.
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| Schematic of the Two Oceans route in 2023, with the elevation profile showing the climb up and down Chapman’s Peak Drive and up to and down from Constantia Nek. In recent years the start and finish have moved somewhat from 1979, with the finish now being on the rugby fields on the UCT campus. |
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| Running up Chapman’s Peak Drive with Graeme Dacomb near the 20-mile mark in the Two Oceans (ultra-)Marathon. It looks like we were both wearing New Balance 320 running shoes. There have been some years in which the race had to be re-routed because rock falls had closed Chapman’s Peak Drive, as mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Oceans_Marathon. |
(The observant reader will have noticed in this photo and
earlier ones that I am wearing a sweatband.
I have always tended to sweat a lot and need a sweatband to keep the
sweat out of my eyes. At the start of a
run I usually had it wound around a wrist, but then put it on my head once
sweat started bothering me. At that
point fellow-runners sometimes said “Now he is getting serious” but I used to
do that even on a relaxed run. The small
white thing in my shorts is a handkerchief.
I was never any good at blowing snot rockets. So I usually ran with a handkerchief tucked
into my shorts. If you look carefully
you may also see that my race bib looks smaller than Graeme’s. That’s because I hated having a big thing
flapping around on the front of my singlet and so usually cut off any
extraneous material.)
From the 16, 28, and 42 km splits in the results below,
Graeme and I must have run together until shortly before the marathon mark. After that I must have been struggling
because I was nearly 6 minutes behind him at the end. He was more experienced than me at longer
distances, having run Two Oceans in 1975 and 1976 (as well as having finished
the 55-mile Comrades Marathon in the same two years; he went on to finish those
races a total of 10 times each). In 1979
he finished in 3:33:33, with me trailing in at 3:39:16. VOB placed third in the team event. Team scoring was based on the first three
finishers from a club, with Graeme and me being the second and third VOB
runners home. That was the 10th edition
of the Two Oceans. Fellow VOB member
Hugh Amoore, who had been in Driekoppen with me back in 1973 and may already
have been UCT’s Registrar by then, earned race number 1 in perpetuity by being
the first finisher to have completed the race 10 times.
Although I ran it just three times, Two Oceans is my favorite race. When I signed up for it in 1974 there wasn’t a qualifying time requirement (otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to sign up as I hadn’t yet run a marathon). By 1979 it was necessary to have run a marathon in under 4:15 to qualify and the cut-off time to be an official finisher was 6 hours. Now the qualifying time is 5 hours for a marathon (and corresponding cut-offs for longer races), and one has to complete the race in under 7 hours to be an official finisher. Back in the day there was just one event – the ultra. Since then a half marathon and trail runs of two distances (16 km and 24 km) have been added.
In 1979 there were 1,008 official finishers, of whom just 10 were women. Now entry is through a lottery (for South African residents) and there are around 11,000 runners in the ultra plus another 16,000 in the half marathon. According to the 1979 results booklet, there was a group of 97 runners from Germany, Holland, France, and Belgium who did not qualify for the ultra but were allowed to run the last 16 km of the course after the ultra runners had all passed. There was apparently a breakdown in communications which almost led to packing up of the feeding tables, marshals and traffic police before the visitors had completed their event. Deric Derbyshire (the running reverend from Port Elizabeth mentioned earlier) is credited with having helped avoid disaster.
At least one of the visitors must have qualified for the ultra. I remember a chubby German runner starting right in front at the start clutching a small glass water bottle!
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| Cover page of the 1979 Two Oceans results booklet |
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| First page of the actual results, with Graeme in 14th and me 25th. |
Three weeks after Two Oceans I ran the Western Province
Marathon Championships, finishing 5th in my best time to that point,
2:33:47. The 4 ahead of me were all from
Universiteit Stellenbosch. Most of the
local runners who would usually have been ahead of me did it just as a training
run, with their focus being on the Comrades ultra on May 31 (the traditional
date back then, which was the Republic Day holiday during the Apartheid era).
After his own success using Arthur Lydiard’s marathon
training program, Bruce Matthews started using it to coach other local
runners. He modified the program
somewhat, shortening it to 12 weeks as he felt 16 weeks was too long for
someone below elite level. Many of the
runners he coached managed to improve substantially, not just in the marathon
but over a variety of distances. Arthur
Lydiard toured South Africa later that year and Bruce was able to meet and gain
insights directly from the great man himself.
In 1979 I was again chosen to represent the Navy in the SADF cross country championships in Voortrekkerhoogte. That year the SADF Marathon Championships were held at the same venue. I think the former was in the afternoon and the latter the next morning. I was signed up for both races. A team from Cape Town travelled to Pretoria by train for the events. There were two of us who were officers, so we stayed in the Officers’ Mess, apart from the rest of the team. The other guy was a fairly senior officer. He was running just the cross country race, in the veterans or masters category. On the afternoon of the cross country race, we waited as the Mess for the transport to take us to the race. With typical military efficiency, it didn’t show up. Someone had presumably forgotten about the two officers on the team. The other guy was spitting mad, having travelled all the way from Cape Town just for that race. I was much less concerned, because running a 12 km cross country race the day before is not exactly ideal preparation for a marathon. In the marathon I finished 4th in 2:44:26 and won a gold medal as the Navy’s marathon champion.
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| Photo in the S.A. Atleet/Athlete magazine of September 1979. Translation of the caption: “Defence held a very successful marathon championships with more than 160 participants starting. The race was won by Jasper Ward (far left) in 2:23:41. Chris Ebersohn (second from left), who was taking part in his first marathon, was second, followed by John Korasie, Dave Cooper [sic] and Rajan Naidoo. (Photo: Hoofstad [literal translation “capital city”].” (This photo is also in “Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977”.) |
About a month later I ran the Stellenbosch Marathon for the
fifth time, finishing 21st in 2:33:48, just one second slower than
the best time I had managed to date (back in May).
In 1979 I qualified for the South African Marathon Championships and was selected to run for the SADF team. The race was held in Port Elizabeth, so I was able to spend a few days at home. It would be the last time I saw the inside of that house.
Earlier that year my father had been offered the position of head of the department of anesthesiology at the Medical University of South Africa (MEDUNSA; now the Sefako Makgatho Health Sciences University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefako_Makgatho_Health_Sciences_University). Under Apartheid MEDUNSA was a medical school for aspiring Black doctors. It is situated in Ga-Rankuwa, which is about 33 miles north-west of Pretoria. My father had spent the previous 22 years working at a hospital for Black patients and this was his first academic appointment – just about 6 months before my first academic appointment. He started in his new position in the middle of 1979. My brother Ian was in his final year of high school, so my mother and Ian stayed behind in our old house in Port Elizabeth until after he had finished his final exams. While on his own in Pretoria for 6 months my father boarded with old friends from Port Elizabeth, Hank and Jerice Doeg. Hank and Jerice had two children, Stephen and Phillipa. Phillipa was still in high school. I don’t recall whether Stephen was already at university. The reason for the unusual spelling of Phillipa (as opposed to Philippa) is that when Hank went to register her birth, he couldn’t remember how to spell the name they had decided on!
On the Wednesday 10 days before the SA Marathon Champs there was a marathon in Pretoria, the Jacaranda Marathon. Partly so as to visit my father, I managed to arrange to fly to Pretoria on a military airplane, probably a Lockheed C-130 Hercules. The airplane was fitted with canvas seating, so comfort was somewhat below that of economy class on commercial flights these days. October 10 was on a Wednesday in 1979 and it was a (now defunct) public holiday in South Africa, Kruger Day. It was named for the old Boer military leader and politician, Paul Kruger who, towards the end of his life was State President of the independent Boer republic, the Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek (English: South African Republic), which became the Transvaal province when it was incorporated into South Africa after being defeated, along with the Orange Free State in the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog (Second Anglo-Boer War). Kruger was regarded as a hero and almost mythical figure by White Afrikaners. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Kruger
I signed up for the Jacaranda Marathon without knowing anything about the route. Pretoria is known as the “Jacaranda City” on account of all the Jacaranda trees lining its streets. I didn’t know anything about the topography of Pretoria other than that on a map it looked flat. 😊 It isn’t – especially not the fairly early miles of the marathon. (After moving to Pretoria a few months later I regularly used that part of the course for hill training!) In addition, the average altitude of Pretoria is somewhere over 4,000 ft and I had flown up from the coast the previous day. Probably because of those two factors, by 20 miles my race was run and I dropped out.
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| Jacaranda trees in bloom in Pretoria. (From Wikipedia which says I must include the attribution “By Paul Saad - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52988522”.) |
The Jacaranda Marathon was the second time Riëtta and I were at the
same event, though it would still be about 18 months before we met. It was her first marathon. She told me a couple of years later that she
had been struggling near the end when someone offered her a beer. She has never been much of a beer drinker,
but she drank some and that perked her up enough to make it to the finish.
I flew on a commercial flight to Port Elizabeth on the Thursday or Friday. Being a sucker for punishment and back at sea level, I entered a 23 km race on the Saturday (October 13). I must have recovered reasonably well from the marathon because I ended up finishing 3rd.
A week later was the SA Marathon Championships. I managed my fastest time to that point, 2:32:11, finishing 34th of 71 starters (56 finishers) and was the first member of the SADF team home. According to my logbook I went through halfway in 1:13:12, so my second half was substantially slower. Maybe I would have done better if I hadn’t run the other two races in the previous 10 days. However, the first half of the race had a substantial net altitude drop whereas the second half was much flatter, so part of the slowdown was because of the course. Few, if any, people passed me in the second half.
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| Race T-shirt from the 1979 SA Marathon Championships, which I still have after more than 45 years. |
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| S.A. Runner magazine’s report on the race. |
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| S.A. Runner magazine’s report on the race, continued. Many Black people adopted a “White” name, as done by race winner Gabashane ‘Vincent’ Rakabaele. |
Eleven days after that marathon I ran a 3,000 m steeplechase
race on the track. I have never been any
good at jumping or hurdling and the barriers in a steeplechase are high! By the last few laps I was climbing over the
barriers using my hands.
In late November I completed my seventh and final standard marathon
for the year (not counting Jacaranda, which I did not finish, or the Two
Oceans, which is an ultra marathon).
Previously the most marathons I had finished in a year was two, in each
of 1977 and 1979. The only other year in
which I finished as many as seven marathons was the very next year, 1980. The race was the Kellerprinz Winelands
Marathon. Kellerprinz was a winery in
the Stellenbosch area. It looks like it
no longer exists. The Winelands Marathon
looks like it is still going strong but is now sponsored by “Sportsmans
Warehouse”. I think the course was
relatively tough and I had run too many races, including a couple more shorter
ones since the steeplechase. I finished
in “just” 2:37:32. We (VOB) won the team
prize, with the 4 scoring runners all being committee members – club chairman
Andy Black in 5th, club captain Bruce Matthews in 7th,
vice-captain Graem Dacomb 8th and me (newsletter editor or “Member
without Portfolio”) 9th.
A week later I picked up a calf muscle injury which
curtailed my running for a while – more on that when I write about 1980.
Finding gainful employment
With my initial two-year period of national service drawing to a close I needed to start thinking about the next phase of my life. Along with some of the other statisticians at IMT, I had been attending statistics seminars at my alma mater, the University of Cape Town. I was reasonably confident of being able to get an appointment as a lecturer in UCT’s Department of Mathematical Statistics. In fact, I was so sure that I would be there that several months before the end of my service in the Navy my brother Mick and I leased an apartment together in Rondebosch, near UCT. Mick used to complain, probably only partly in jest, that when preparing food I liked to clean up before I had even eaten the meal. For the remainder of my time in the Navy I commuted to IMT from Rondebosch. I had been driving 20 miles each way between Simon’s Town to Rondebosch to run with other people. So this was essentially just reversing the direction of my commuting (and reducing the distance I needed to travel for weekend races and training runs.
I also applied for a position in the Department of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, partly because, as noted earlier, my parents had just moved to that city.
I don’t recall having a formal interview for either position. The faculty at UCT knew me well as a former student and a regular attendee at department seminars. Professor Danie Schultz, who was on the faculty at UNISA, was the external examiner for UCT’s Department of Mathematical Statistics and so would have visited UCT after the final exams to fulfil his duties as external examiner. Maybe I had an interview with him then or perhaps he just asked the UCT faculty about me.
UCT did indeed offer me a position and so did UNISA. The offer from UNISA was substantially higher. UNISA is a distance-learning institution, using just ordinary mail back in those pre-Internet days. So I wouldn’t have to stand in front of a class. On the other hand, it provided materials in both English and Afrikaans and I would need to become much more proficient in the latter language. At the time UNISA had several outstanding professors in the statistics side of the department. They would have fitted in well at top universities anywhere in the world. A couple of them did later move to the US and Europe and some others spent sabbaticals at highly-ranked departments internationally.
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| UNISA offer letter. |
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| UNISA offer conditions. |
After much vacillation, I accepted the offer from
UNISA. On December 22, 1979, I deserted
my brother Mick and moved to Pretoria. I
can claim to have been way ahead of my time, doing something that now seems
quite commonplace – I moved back in with my parents.
That also meant relinquishing my role as VOB newsletter editor. Below is the first page of my last issue. I don’t recall whether it was me or someone else who wrote the comment near the end that my “loss will not be felt”.
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| My last issue of Imbaleki, though not my last time editing a running club newsletter. By the next time I had access to a word processor. |
I ended my initial two-year period of national service in
the Navy without ever going to sea, unless one counts a day on a sailboat in
False Bay or puttering around within the harbor confines on a harbor patrol
boat.
Next up, my first spell working in Pretoria and meeting Riëtta (plus my one and only victory in a marathon).
