And so at last to running-related content …
Becoming a runner
The observant reader may notice that there is no mention of the word “coach” anywhere in this entry (other than in this paragraph). That’s because I have never been coached. The less charitable may say that I am uncoachable.
Maybe I always knew I’d become a runner, even long before I started running.
In 7th grade (last year of primary school in South Africa), one day I saw a number of boys running across our school grounds, strung out behind one another. It was apparently a cross country race. I wondered why I hadn’t know about it and thought it was something I would like to try. That stayed just a passing thought for a few more years.
The next year, in our first term in high school (the school year was divided into 4 terms, with vacations between each) we had to do various track and field events during the time that the higher grades did “cadets” (marching around in military style uniforms carrying old rifles that had had their mechanisms removed; an activity I loathed, of which I will probably write more in a later entry). The events we had to do were sprints, jumps and throws – no somewhat longer distance running. Those all required speed and/or explosive strength, neither of which I possessed. At the end of the term there was an inter-class track and field competition for the four 8th grade classes. Apart from the sprints, jumps and throws, there was an 800m that counted towards the inter-class competition. Anyone who didn’t do any other event had to run the mile (and nobody who did another event was allowed to run it). Results of the mile did not count towards the competition. I wanted to run the mile, but our class needed another body in the 800m and somehow I became that body. A classmate, Trevor Hall if I recall correctly, and I knew we were slow and made a pact to run together. At least I thought we had made such a pact. It may be hard to believe, but apparently I thought wrong. The race started and, as expected, Trevor and I found ourselves at the back. We ran together for a while but then Trevor must have decided I was too slow even for him and left me in the lurch. I finished dead last by a long way. I have no idea what my time was or if it was even recorded for posterity. At least I finished, which is more than can be said for another race in which I was last (or thought I was last). More on that later as it was also before the dawn of written records.
Around that time a popular method of raising funds for a good cause was to hold a “Big Walk”. The distance was typically 20 miles, with participants trying to persuade family, friends, and businesses to sponsor them for each mile they walked. While I was still in my first year of high school, our school decided to hold a Big Walk As South Africa was in the process of switching to the metric system and 30 is a larger number than 20 (and the logic might have been hence it would raise more money) this one was 30km rather than 20 miles and, I think, was called the “Kilometer Canter” or maybe “Kilometer Kanter”. (Gordon “Billy” Bauer, one of our teachers that year, wrote a song called “Grey will give us Culture; Culture with a capital K”; Grey being our school, named after a former governor of the Cape Colony, Sir George Grey. Billy Bauer also rebranded the kids’ game of cops & robbers or cowboys & crooks as Nationalists & terrorists, the National Party being the party in power during the Apartheid era.)
Everyone in the school was required to participate in the Kilometer Kanter. I have always been reticent about asking people for money, even for a good cause, so didn’t manage to get much in terms of sponsorship. The starting point was somewhere near the beachfront and the route was roughly C shaped, ending at the school. We were taken to the starting point in buses. Because the buses needed to make multiple trips to get everyone to the starting point, we didn’t have a massed start but instead could begin walking (or cantering) as soon as we were dropped off. Several of my classmates and I decided that walking the whole distance would take too long, so we ran a substantial proportion of the way. We didn’t try to run all the way, just ran for a while, walked for a while, stopped to drink at the refreshment stations, and so on. (A few of the boys in higher grades did try to run the whole distance.) The refreshments were bottles of flavored milk (Steri Stumpies – see photo, though back then the bottles were named of glass rather than plastic). Being a glutton I consumed far too many bottles. We were among the earlier finishers, but because of the staggered start it wasn’t clear how much of that was a function of when we had been dropped off and how much because of running a good deal of the way. I have no idea how much of the distance we actually ran, but am quite sure that was the longest distance in one day until about 7 years later.
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Steri Stumpies |
What remained a sore point for many of us for the rest of
our time in high school was that we were told that part of the money raised
would be so there could be hot showers in the changerooms of the new gymnasium
that was being (or about to be) built.
We were required to shower after the twice-weekly PT classes and also
after participating in sport if we were riding home by bus. As at the school’s swimming pool, there was
no hot water in the showers. Well, by
the time we finished high school more than four years later, there still
weren’t hot showers. The ostensible
excuse was that the school’s electricity supply was not adequate and that until
a new electricity sub-station was constructed there wouldn’t be enough power to
heat water. I suppose I didn’t really
have much right to complain considering my meagre contribution to the
fundraising effort.
I might not have been a runner yet, but I must have taken
some interest in running. Our school had
an annual general knowledge test that we all had to take. My general knowledge was rather pitiful. How could I be expected to know the name of
the South African Prime Minister or which year the 1820 Settlers arrived in
what became Port Elizabeth (the city in which we lived)? One of the few questions I managed to get
right each year was who had won the Comrades (Ultra) Marathon that year. It helped that Dave Bagshaw won it 3 times
while I was in high school. In later
years the whole race was televised live from start to finish, so many people
became aware of who won, but this was still well before the introduction of
television in South Africa. (The
question didn’t have to specify that it was the male winner because in those
days women were still too sensible to want to run long distances.)
High school cross country
In part 1 of this saga I mentioned that at our high school participation in sport was compulsory and that in the cooler months those who didn’t manage to get selected for any other team had to run cross country. However, we all (or nearly all) had to run one cross country race each year, an intramural inter-house (a la Harry Potter books) event. There were two races, one for the younger age group and one for the rest, with 200 competing in each race (50 per house), making a total of 400 of the around 600 boys in the school. We were supposed to run the course on two separate occasions as training and then the race itself. I don’t know how I avoided running it in my first two years in high school. I didn’t deliberately try to get out of it. Maybe the leaders in my house decided I didn’t look as if I could run and so didn’t select me. I did run it in my last 3 years though, finishing 64th, 32nd, and then 6th in 10th, 11th and 12th grades, in the latter case coming in ahead of the captains of the cross country and track teams.
I’ve tried to recall the route of the school’s cross country course, but after almost 50 years many details are sketchy. The start was on one of the rugby fields, approximately where I have written an S in the image below. We had to run across the field and then up a short but steep embankment onto the next rugby field. The arrow in the lower image shows the direction we were going and the embankment is circled. In the photo it doesn’t look very steep, but from memory the slope was more than 30 degrees. I have always been a slow starter in races, so by that point was about at the back of the field of 200 runners. I don’t recall where exactly we left the school grounds, but after doing so we crossed a couple of roads and then went clockwise around the nearby golf course. From the extreme left in the image there was a fairly gentle but quite lengthy uphill stretch under trees. That was my favorite part of the course, partly because each year I passed several boys there. The uphill may have been gentle but was enough to punish those who had started too fast. After we exited the golf course property we re-crossed the roads and eventually finished on the cricket field, about where I have written an F, though I don’t recall where we re-entered the school grounds and made our way to the finish. A rough measurement on Google Maps puts the length of the course at about 3.6 miles / 5,8 km.
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Best guess as to the route of our school’s cross country course. |
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The embankment near the start of the course. The arrow shows the direction in which we started. |
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My favorite part of the cross country course. The strip of trees looks narrower than I remembered. |
A few years before the first of those cross country races our
parents acquired a dog for the family, a black Lab named Roly. (We had had another dog several years
previously.) They said that Labs needed
a lot of exercise to prevent them getting fat and that we were responsible for
Roly being exercised. I don’t know
whether I pestered our parents to get the dog or they decided it was a good way
for me to get more exercise and stop getting any fatter, but Roly became my dog
and I was the one who had to exercise him.
So most afternoons Roly and I would take long walks along the
single-track paths in the nearby veld. I
don’t think there were any leash laws back in those days. I may have used a leash for the block or so
that we had to walk to get to the trails but after that I let Roly run free,
often throwing a tennis ball for him to retrieve. At about the time I turned 16, which was also
about when I ran the cross country race in 10th grade, I decided to
run rather than walk with Roly. Then at
some point I started running the same route alone. It is ironic that Roly was partly responsible
for me getting more exercise and that eventually resulted in Roly getting less
exercise.
The map below shows where I ran with Roly (and later by myself). It was always the same route, out, loop (off the left edge of the image) and back. In those days there were no roads south of the blue line. (Even after the roads were laid it was several more years before houses were built.) The red oval is about where the photo below was taken (also from Google Maps.) Probably a year or two later there was a German shepherd dog at about where I’ve drawn a red X. The dog often used to charge out into the street to try to attack me. For a while I carried a child’s wooden baseball bat to fend off the dog, once or twice needing to give it a tap on the snout.
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Route when running with Roly (and later alone) |
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About where the route hit the trails, with the arrow showing the direction on the outward leg |
How long was the route?
Probably a little over 2 miles / 3 km.
I didn’t have a stopwatch but sometimes worked out my approximate time
from an ordinary analog wristwatch. On
those occasions it was never under 15 minutes or over 20 minutes, though there
was quite a bit of variability from day to day.
I probably ran most days on which I didn’t play sport at school. Occasionally on weekends or holidays I would
run the route in the late morning rather than in the afternoon (and maybe
sometimes both morning and afternoon).
My times when I ran in the morning were usually slower than when I ran
in the afternoon.
A few years later my parents gave me the watch in the photo. It has a stopwatch function, with the upper button starting and stopping the second hand and the lower button being to reset it to 0. The small dial in the lower part of the face indicates the minutes – up to 30. Once I started doing long runs many years later I had to keep track of how many multiples of 30 minutes had elapsed. I probably used that watch for well over 5 years, before getting my first digital watch in about 1979, well after the start of recorded history.
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Seiko watch with stopwatch function. It still works, though one of the buttons doesn’t spring back out. I’m sure a watch repair shop could fix that easily. |
After I’d been running for a year or two I came to the
realization that my favorite part of rugby practice at school was when we had
to run around the field a few times to warm up or cool down.
High school track
My performance in the school’s cross country race when I was in 12th grade must have attracted the attention of the powers-that-be as it led to me having to run a few track races. A couple of weeks after the inter-house cross country there was an inter-house track and field competition. First there was a 3,000m race on a separate day from all the other events. I had to run the 3,000m for my house.
All my running to that point had been in soccer boots with molded rubber studs (cleats). The image below is the closest I could find on the web to what my boots looked like when new. On the day of the 3,000m I lined up with the rest of the field on our school’s cinder track. (The track has gone the way of the dinosaur. There is no track visible on Google Maps now and so I presume the school uses a nearby municipal synthetic track.) Tommy Dean, the school’s head groundskeeper, saw my boots and said I couldn’t run in those as they would damage his track. I showed him the soles, which were smooth because the running I had done had worn the studs down completely. So he let me run the race. I have no idea what my time or position were other than that I finished somewhere in the middle of however many took part. The next day at school a teacher who I don’t think had ever spoken to me stopped me in the corridor and said something like “You ran a disappointing race yesterday.” I don’t think I said anything in response, partly because I hadn’t been disappointed – I hadn’t gone into the race with any expectations. Also, I was surprised that a teacher who I didn’t know had expectations of me based on one cross country race. I had gone through school trying to stay under the radar. So I wasn’t quite as invisible as I had thought.
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Soccer boots with molded rubber studs |
On the day of the rest of the inter-house track meet I may have run a distance relay, but don’t recall what distance.
Despite the “disappointing” 3,000m I was selected to run for our school in a couple of competitions against other schools. No-one suggested I should train with the track team, so I just continued with my usual runs. I wouldn’t glorify them by referring to them as training. Apart from one day when a friend, Jeremy Clampett, and I did a run from school, all my running was on my own. Again, I don’t recall what events I ran at those track meets, though I think it may have been more 3,000m races and distance relays. I’m fairly sure I didn’t run any solo race shorter than 3,000m. I have no recollection of how I placed and even back then don’t think I was ever told my time for any of the events, if my times were even recorded.
At about that time I got my first pair of real running shoes. They looked very similar to the ones in the photo below. I wore through several similar pairs before more substantial ones became available.
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My first “proper” running shoes looked much like these. The company that became ASICS was called Onitsuka Tiger back then. |
Several years later the designers of running shoes went
through a phase during which they seemed to think that the thicker the sole the
better. I had a pair that may have been
like the ones below or maybe had an even thicker sole. The thick sole wasn’t very flexible and
running in them was unpleasant. Just one
of the many running shoe “innovations” that didn’t really pan out.
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The thicker the sole the better? Cadbury's “First Law of Chocology” used to be “The thicker the chocolate the better.” Thicker definitely better for chocolate, less so for soles of running shoes. |
On to university
First year students, particularly those who would be living in dorms, were required (or maybe just requested) to arrive a week before classes started, for Freshers’ Week. That was probably when we had to sign up for classes (no online signing up in those pre-Internet days), as well as learning how to drink irresponsibly. (The legal drinking age in South Africa was probably 18 even back then, but I never heard of anyone being asked for proof of age.)
Towards the end of Freshers’ Week there was an intra-mural track competition. I was persuaded to sign up for the 800m, 1,500m and 3,000m. On the day of the meet I was starting to come down with a bad cold or the flu and so withdrew from the 800m, but not the other two races. The 1,500m was very literally not memorable – I don’t remember what it was like or where I placed. In the 3,000m I managed to place second to Graeme Brodrick, who was not only from my res, but had also attended my high school. He had been a year ahead of me and had either first done his national (military) service or, if I recall correctly, spent a gap year in Australia. Second place was much better than I had ever achieved in any type of athletic (in the broad sense) event.
Although the Freshers’ Sports event was quite early in 1973 – late February or the beginning of March – I didn’t run another race that year. I did continue to run when not playing other sports and usually ran with one or two other students from my res.
Our res was officially then known as Driekoppen Residence, informally known as “Belsen”, with the official name changed to Kopano after 1994 https://www.news.uct.ac.za/article/-2011-03-23-kopano-lives-up-to-its-name).
More on the “Belsen” nickname from https://docspike.com/download/uct-building-names-register_pdf:
The original Driekoppen was erected
in 1945 near Driekoppen Inn on the De Waal Drive, Mowbray, which the Government
gave to UCT as a "temporary" students residence for about 300 male
ex-servicemen. When the students returned from war they were somewhat dismayed
by the similarities between the accommodation that they were given and the kind
of quarters at the war front which they did not want to be reminded of. It has
been said "the austere bungalows surrounded by barren and dusty earth and
barbed wire fencing, took their minds back to infamous prisoner-of -war camps
in Germany. Because of this irony the residence immediately earned itself the
name BELSEN, a name which stuck to despite objections by UCT authorities.
Source: Origins of Names of
Buildings at the University of Cape Town, Mr M. Musemwa (Department of History
UCT, 1993).
My first fairly regular training partner was a fellow Belsen resident, Steve Harle. We ran together quite often in 1973 and 1974. In 1974 I signed up for the Two Oceans (ultra) Marathon (35 miles / 56 km), which is traditionally held on the Saturday of the Easter weekend. That was more than a little crazy because by that stage I had probably never run as far as 10 miles. A year or two later the race introduced a qualifying standard – one had to run a (standard) marathon in under 4:15 in order to be allowed to sign up for the Two Oceans. (The race web site doesn’t mention when the qualifying time was introduced, though it does say it was relaxed to 4:30 in 1998 and then to 5:00 in 2001.) Considering my lack of long distance training it is probably fortunate that I developed an injury and was unable to start. Steve asked if he could use my number and I agreed. We were such novices in terms of running that we didn’t know that that was a no-no. Steve hadn’t done much more training than I had but managed to get to 20 miles before dropping out. Considering that he was running as me, it is probably good that he did not finish. I was eventually able to run Two Oceans, in 1979, 1983, and 1984. It is the longest race I have run and is probably my all-time favorite event.
I think Steve moved out of Belsen after 1974. He continued to run but in 1978 he and his wife were tragically murdered by an escaped convict when they were on a hiking trip. As 1978 is well before the Internet era Google doesn’t currently turn up anything related to their murder. A while back a search did find a mention in a book, Ghosts of South Africa by Pat Hopkins. From the book:
In November 1978, three schoolboys were exploring the shell when they
came across the body of a woman and her dog.
Six kilometres away, a group of hikers came across a campsite, in the
middle of which was the body of a man. 'Boland detectives are still
"completely in the dark" today about the motive for this gruesome
double murder of Mr and Mrs Steve Harle in Bain's Kloof and the whereabouts of
the killers,' reported the Argus.
"We're as puzzled as you are," said Colonel Izak van der
Vyver, Divisional Criminal Investigations chief in the Boland.
'The bodies of Mr Harle and his wife Jane, both twenty-four, were found
in the Happy Valley section of Bain's Kloof on Saturday morning - more than six
kilometres apart. Mr Harle, a sixth-year
medical student at the University of Cape Town, was found by mountaineers a few
metres away from the small red tent the couple had pitched near Junction Pool
in the Witte River. He wore a T-shirt
and shorts and had been stabbed several times.
Blood smears and a bent aluminium tent pole inside the tent were
evidence of a violent struggle on the two sleeping bags. Schoolboys found Mrs Harle's body in a corner
of the desolate Spookhuis [ghost house].
She was on her back, her legs drawn up and had been stabbed twice in the
left side of her chest. Beside her was
the couple's small dog Otto. It had been
stabbed between the shoulder blades.'
A few days later, an escaped convict, John Smith, was arrested and
charged with the murders. He was found
guilty, sentenced to death, and executed.
Since the tragedy, hikers have reported seeing the ghost of a fleeing
woman and her dog near what remains of the Spookhuis.
Although I signed up for Two Oceans, without getting to run it, and started at least one race, I don’t think I finished any races in 1974. Over the years I have dropped out of a number of races, but this is the only one I am embarrassed about. Two of the top distance runners at the University of Cape Town at that time were Dave Levick and Edward “Tiffy” King. Dave had won the Comrades (ultra) Marathon the previous year and Tiffy later excelled at Ironman-distance triathlons. In 1974 Dave and Tiffy decided they wanted to run a fast 3,000m. I don’t know why they wanted to run it on the main campus rather than at the university’s track (where the Freshers’ Sports meet had been held) or at a municipal track. A grass track was marked out on one of the rugby fields and the 3,000m race was held one evening. One side of the field was reasonably well lit, but the order end was quite dark. I was one of several students who decided to join Dave and Tiffy for the event. The race got under way and soon I had drifted way back in the small field. There were just a handful of spectators. After a few laps I thought I was being mocked by a group of the spectators, because I was so slow and partly on account of the purple singlet I was wearing. My (then) fragile psyche couldn’t handle the mocking, especially as I thought I was dead last, so on the dark side of the field I slunk off the track and disappeared into the night. I later realized that I probably hadn’t been last, that Francis Thackeray may have been behind me. He might have been one place ahead of me, in which case I need to apologize belatedly for abdicating last place to him. Regardless of whether I was last or next-to-last, I should have completed the race. [This memory led to me tracking down Francis, who went on to have a distinguished career as a paleontologist. https://www.wits.ac.za/news/latest-news/research-news/2019/2019-10/new-research-supports-hypothesis-that-asteroid-contributed-to-mass-extinction.html Although he remembers a race on a track marked out on the rugby field, he doesn’t recall any more details than I do. Several years later when I had moved to Pretoria I sometimes ran with his brother Mike, who was a much more talented runner than Francis. Mike has also had a very distinguished career, particularly in the field of development of lithium batteries, initially in South Africa and later in the USA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_M._Thackeray]
Without having any notes or other running-related
memorabilia from those early days to work from, I am unsure of exactly when
some of the events described below occurred.
I think it was also in 1974 that Tim Noakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Noakes used to hold a running injury clinic one evening each week. He would have been a final-year medical student at the time and so may have been able to give advice but not formally diagnose or treat injuries. There was so little known about running and running injuries back then that a medical student with an interest in running could know as much as anyone about running injuries. I went to see him about a knee injury. Perhaps it was what had prevented me from starting the Two Oceans Marathon. Tim wasn’t able to do anything for my injury, but gave me a (sealed) letter to take to another doctor, probably at the student health service. Part of what makes me think that this was in 1974 is that he gave me a referral to someone else rather than being able to treat me. I didn’t go to see the student health doctor and some time later decided to look at what Tim had written. It is the one piece of memorabilia that I would most like to have kept. In it he described me as being “totally unathletic”. That was rather harsh, considering I had been running with some regularity for a few years by then. On the other hand, another factor that makes me think this was in 1974 was that I hadn’t yet lost the flab that had earned the nickname “Fatty Couper” and so didn’t look much like what most runners looked like back then, before the running boom brought a wider range of body types into the sport.
In the early ‘70s Ferdie le Grange was the top marathon runner in South Africa, setting several South African records. His final record was 2:12:47, in April 1974. At that stage it was the fastest marathon ever run in Africa and the seventh fastest in the world that year. After that he retired to concentrate on his final-year medical exams. The next year he did his internship at the hospital in Port Elizabeth where my father worked. My father wanted me to meet Ferdie to get some tips on running. I declined, partly because I was very shy and partly because I wasn’t serious about my running. I was just running for my own amusement rather than training with any intention of trying to improve. Not being interested in meeting Ferdie is one of the few regrets of my life. Being the world’s worst conversationalist, I have no idea what I would have said to him if I had met him.
First marathon
The fellow students with whom I had run most frequently must have moved out of our res at the end of 1974. One of the new students who moved in the following year was Steve Moss, originally from Britain but whose family had moved to Botswana. Steve and I ran together quite frequently, not going very far and often running quite late in the evening. Later that year we both signed up for the Stellenbosch Marathon. I think the race was officially the South African Marathon Championships for that year because it was divided into two races. The “A” race was for those who had qualified for the championships and there was a “B” or citizen’s race for other runners. The two races were held in the afternoon on the same course, 6 laps through the picturesque college town of Stellenbosch, with each lap including a section on the synthetic track in the university’s stadium. The two races started at different times – I think the “B” race started 30 minutes after the main event. At that point in the Apartheid era whites and blacks were allowed to compete against one another only in an “international” event. Mike Tagg of Britain was invited to make the race “international” and duly won the race in 2:19:47. (The next year South Africa was suspended from the IAAF and so international athletes could no longer be invited.)
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Stellenbosch Marathon route. I’m not sure if this was the exact route used in 1975 or if this was from some other year. "Isotonic Game" (the race sponsor) is a sports drink. |
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1975 Stellenbosch Marathon T-shirt |
After 5 laps of the race I needed to make a “pit stop” in
the toilets deep inside the stadium somewhere.
That was already further than I had ever run and when I resumed after
sitting for a few minutes my legs started cramping whenever I tried to break
into a run. So for the last lap I was
reduced to walking interspersed with short attempts at running. (That’s rather like the last several miles of
my most recent marathons.) I eventually
finished in about 3:27. I don’t think I
ever knew what my official time was.
Steve was a slower runner than I was and he finished about 15 minutes
later in what must have been about 3:45.
He didn’t know what his time was because the time-keepers had packed up
the finish line and disappeared.
Time-keepers disappeared before 3:45 into a marathon and this the event
for the “slow” runners in the “B” race?
In most marathons these days well over half the field is still out on
the course at 3:45. For instance, in the
most recent marathon I ran, the 2017 Richmond Marathon, the person who ran exactly
3:45:00 placed 889 out of 4,250 finishers.
I loved that old 6-lap course. But as the running boom started to be felt in South Africa the number of runners and the broadening race of paces made it impractical, with slower runners being lapped potentially multiple times, particularly in the year it was increased to 7 laps (I think because of construction on part of the old course). After that it became an out-and-back race held in the morning.
Belsen Beer Race
This was the first race I won (and the only race in which I have “cheated”).
Beer mile? A beer each lap for a single mile on a flat track? What kind of wimpish modern event is that? Back in the day it was 9 beers in 3 miles up and down monstrous hills. (It was either 8 or 9 beers, I don’t remember which and using Google maps to approximate the length of the route puts it at about 2.85 miles / 4.60 km.)
I presume this race was held in each of the first three years that I was in res, but I didn’t try to take part until the 1976 edition. At that point I reckoned that I was probably a better drinker than most of the good runners and a better runner than most of the big drinkers and so would have a reasonable shot at winning the race.
On the Google Maps image below I have indicated the approximate route. S/F is where the race started and finished, at the front entrance to our res, and we went in a clockwise direction. The route didn’t go through any buildings – there has been some construction in the intervening 40+ years. The numbers 1, 2 and 3 show where we went over or under roads. The number 1 is a pedestrian bridge just outside our res, on the way to the main campus. Back in those days probably fewer than 5% of students used the bridge rather than just walking across the road. I don’t recall whether we were required to use the bridge in the race. Number 2 is at a tunnel under a large road and number 3 is another pedestrian bridge over that road. We definitely went over that one (more about it later). The oval that I have drawn on a field quite close to number 2 is where the 3,000m race that I dropped out of was held. Bright daylight in the image, unlike during the 3,000m race.
A substantial number of students took part in the event, very few tried to run it, with the majority treating it as a social outing. I wasn’t the only one who took it more seriously though. The first of the photos below the image of the race route was at what was probably the site of the third or fourth beer, at which point I broke away from the competition. That was shortly before we went under the tunnel marked on the map with a 2. One cannot see it clearly in the photo, but the T-shirt I am wearing is from the 1974 Two Oceans Marathon and has a cartoon of a runner trying to hitch a ride from a passing whale. The guy in second place chugging on a beer was from Zambia and was one of the bigger drinkers. A little further on we passed what was the Groote Schuur Zoo (which I have marked on the map as “Zoo”). Although it had still been open a year or two previously it may have ceased operation by then. A Wikipedia entry says it closed “sometime between 1975 and 1985”. It definitely closed well before 1980, even though for many years after that runners referred to various routes as going past the zoo. I found this YouTube video about the zoo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=CkCDnhCzn9w&feature=emb_logo
Those of us who were competing were supposed to keep our beer down until we finished. But at the point marked with an X on the map, the combination of about 6 beers and trying to run fast became too much for my stomach and I involuntarily unloaded its contents into a bush. I was well clear of any other competitors and there were no helpers nearby to see. So I’m admitted here (but not for the first time) that I cheated. Just after the finish I fertilized another bush.
Having emptied the contents of my stomach, twice not much alcohol made it into my bloodstream and so I was reasonably sober afterwards. The same could not be said of those who treated the event as a social outing. Because they had been walking, there had been plenty of time for alcohol to get absorbed by the time they reached the pedestrian bridge marked with a 3 and many of them were quite drunk. At least one emptied his bladder off the bridge. Unfortunately someone in a convertible with the top down happened to drive under the bridge at just that moment. An official complaint was lodged, which is part of the reason the event was banned the following year and so I was unable to defend my title. Also, by dinner time that evening many of the students were very drunk and there were big food fights in the dining hall.
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Map of the beer race route. |
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Breaking away from the competition |
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The pedestrian bridge at the point marked 3 on the map |
I sometimes say that the reason I started running longer
distances was so that I cold drink more beer without putting on weight. But as I became fitter my tolerance for
alcohol decreased and so I ended up drinking less beer.
Later that year history began
The first entry in my log book is for Monday, 5/31/1976. That it was May 31 is not a coincidence. (May 31 was the traditional day of the Comrades Marathon back then. It was held on what was an annual public holiday that is no longer celebrated – Republic Day.). On that day I ran what I wrote down as 8 miles. I don’t have a record of the time (this was still before digital stop-watches, at least ones affordable by impecunious students), the route or who I ran with (if anyone).
The first entry for a race was for the 1976 Stellenbosch Marathon, on 9/18/1976,. The event again had an “A” and a “B” race (this was the last time there were two separate races). That year the “B” race was banished to the early morning and an out-and-back route mainly through the scrubby sand dunes that can be seen in the photo. I finished in 19th position in 3:00:09, the other three in the photo managing to get under 3 hours.
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Stellenbosch Marathon 1976. From left to right in this little group Tony Robertson, Trevor Thorold, Yours Truly, Stephen Granger (who recently reminded me that he and the other two finished in under 3 hours). |
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