Ancyent blog30 UCT 1977

 Recollections of my last year as a full-time UCT student – 1977

In 1977 I started the year registered for a BSc(Hons) in Mathematical Statistics.  For a change I ended the year registered for the same degree.

My UCT ID in 1977.  The blue background is because by then I was officially a student in the Faculty of Science (versus the yellow background when I was a student in the Faculty of Commerce – see my 1975 ID in “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976”).

My UCT tuition/residence/fees account for 1977.  I presume the “Family rebate” is because my brother Mick was also at UCT by then.  The “Staff rebate” is because I was a sub-warden and/or Math I tutor.  An explanation of some of the items is given below.  For instance, sports clubs 09 and 23 are cross country and squash.  I hadn’t run a cross country race at UCT by that stage and hadn’t been planning to run one.  I presume I signed up for that because I often met other runners at the cross country club house next to the cricket oval.

Explanation of symbols on UCT account

There were six of us in either the Mathematical Statistics or the Operations Research Honours program.  The programs were both run by the Department of Mathematical Statistics.  There were core modules that formed part of both programs, plus different modules depending on which program one was in.  Or at least that’s what the plan was supposed to be.  Because of a shortage of instructors, it wasn’t possible to offer any different modules for the two programs – we all had to do the same set of modules.  So which of the two degrees one received depended only on which program one had signed up for when registering, rather than any differences between the material we ended up studying. 

Aside on some language and other differences between South Africa and the US.  The highest proportion of differences in terminology is probably in things related to motoring.  For instance, hood = bonnet; trunk = boot; gas =petrol; gas station = petrol or filling station; traffic light = robot (that one is uniquely South African, but the others are throughout the British Commonwealth).  Even if the word for an item sounds the same, the spelling may differ, as in tire = tyre.  Gas stations here in the US usually have convenience stores.  In South Africa, petrol stations usually have a workshop attached and often also a car dealership.  My maternal grandfather, and after his passing my Uncle David, owned a chain of 3 petrol stations in the towns of Knysna, George and Oudtshoorn, along with the Ford dealership.  They originally sold Shell products.  Shell and BP shared a distribution network, and my uncle was later paid to switch to selling BP products.

Back to the Honours program.  As part of an Operations Research seminar module, we had to do a practical project.  My project involved working with someone at Shell / BP.  They wanted to optimize the placement of storage tanks so as to minimize transport costs.  Petrol was sent by rail to the storage tanks and from there distributed by road to individual petrol stations.  Optimization is one of the main applications of operations research, so this seemed like a great project.  I bought several large-scale maps covering the whole of South Africa and made various measurements on them, as well as having Shell / BP provide information about the relative costs of shipping by rail versus by road.  And then …

… it turned out that there wasn’t much optimization that could be done.  The railway network was not very extensive, limiting the places where the storage tanks could be placed.  More critical though was that, presumably because of road safety considerations, the government restricted the maximum distance petrol was allowed to be taken by road.  Consequently, we ended up being stuck with the existing locations of storage tanks, with essentially no change being possible.

We had to submit a written report on our project.  I presume mine was handwritten as that was still several years before personal computers with word processors.  I don’t think I had a typewriter at that stage.  If the graded report was returned to us, I must have disposed of it at some point, so I can’t inflict parts of it on you here.

Information sheet about the Operations Research project.

Information sheet about the Operations Research project, continued.

Math Stat / Operations Statistics Honours class 1977

In the photo above the back row has the 6 of us in the Honours class, plus a couple of interlopers, Hans(?) Dietzsch and Trevor Hastie.  I presume Hans was a master’s student. 

Trevor Hastie definitely was a master’s student, finishing his MSc in 1979 and then leaving South Africa to do a PhD at Stanford University.  He has had a very distinguished career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Hastie.  I have a couple of the textbooks he has co-authored.  When he visited Chapel Hill several years ago as part of a distinguished lecture series in our department, I reminded him of this photo.  This being a small world, Sandy, my old neighbor in Port Elizabeth, knows Trevor.  Their families usually get together whenever Trevor and his family visit Cape Town.  I presume Sandy and Trevor met at Rhodes University, where they were contemporaries as undergraduates (though in very different fields of study).

Of the other students in the photo, Gill Stein got married either during our Honours year or shortly after and became Gill Rubenstein.  Gill Mimmack (on the far right) later did an MS and PhD at Florida State University.  After that she returned to South Africa for a while.  I must have talked to her then because I remember her saying that she hadn’t liked FSU, though I don’t recall why.  She has been at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada since 2001.  https://www.ufv.ca/math/contact-us/faculty/mimmack-gillian.htm  (I hadn’t previously heard of University of the Fraser Valley.  There is another, better known university with “Fraser” in its name, that is only about 20 miles away from it – Simon Fraser University.)  I haven’t heard anything at all about the others since we graduated.  Matthew Pearce was in Driekoppen with me.   I have tried Internet searches for him several times without success.

In 1977 Uri Geller toured South Africa.  For those not familiar with Geller, he is a self-proclaimed psychic who claimed (and still claims) to be able to perform such useful actions as bending (metal) spoons and keys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller.  Classmate and fellow Driekoppen resident Matthew Pearce was definitely not psychic.  But he was a magician and wanted to try to debunk Geller’s claims of paranormal powers.  So he put on a couple of magic shows, in Driekoppen and on campus, mimicking much of what Geller had been doing.  Some people refused to believe that Matthew did not have paranormal powers, even after being told that he was doing just magic tricks.  Penn & Teller would probably have approved of Matthew’s efforts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller  

Driekoppen and UCT’s answer to Uri Geller.

Second part of the above article (the broadsheet couldn’t fit on the scanner) 

The front row in the class photo above has most of the faculty who taught us, plus the department’s secretary, Mrs. Cousins.  In “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976” I mentioned that John Affleck-Graves was the instructor for Mathematical Statistics I in 1975.  In 1977 he taught the Operations Research module and oversaw our projects.  He was finishing his PhD that year and graduated with that at the same time as we graduated with our Honours degrees.  In “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976” I also mentioned that June Juritz was an instructor for Mathematical Statistics II in 1976 .  I don’t recall which module she  taught us in 1977.  (She is now Emeritus Associate Professor June Juritz).  Cas Troskie had been the head of the Department of Mathematical Statistics since it was founded in 1965.  (It was renamed the Department of Statistical Sciences in 1991.)  Prof. Troskie’s main research interest was using statistical methods to model the stock market.  He taught a module on regression.  Although he was a pleasant enough person, he was the poorest lecturer of an otherwise good bunch.  I don’t recall which module Les Underhill taught.  Les is now Emeritus Professor L.G. Underhill.  His research interests included studying the distribution of bird species.  After retirement from what had become the Department of Statistical Sciences, Les continued to be involved with the Avian Demography Unit, which later became the Animal Demography Unit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Demography_Unit.  The latter closed in 2018, with the bird ringing component continuing https://www.ringing.africa/team.

There were at least a couple of instructors who are not in the photo but who taught modules that year, including Michael Stephens. a visiting professor from the Simon Fraser University in Canada.  I see from his CV online that he was 50 years old in 1977.  https://www.sfu.ca/~lockhart/MAS/CV_MAStephens.pdf   One of the modules he taught us was on analysis of directional data.

My running started to improve in 1977.  That was the year I became a runner rather than just someone who runs.  That may sound to a non-runner like a semantic difference.  I think it is one of attitude more than anything quantifiable such as distance or speed.  I probably ran more races that year than in all previous years combined.

My first race in 1977 was the hilly 22-mile Red Hill Road Race near the end of February, just after I had returned to Cape Town for the new academic year.  Maybe there weren’t many hills, but there was certainly one big one, over the part of the Table Mountain Range above Simon’s Town.  Two weeks later I ran the Peninsula Marathon (now the Cape Peninsula Marathon) for the first time.  It was the third marathon I finished.  Over the years I lowered my PR 3 times in the 5 times I finished that marathon (plus one DNF), including setting my all-time PR.  More on my race in 1977 after some background information.

Although the worst aspects of Apartheid would continue to be enforced for more than another decade, some tinkering around the edges had begun.  Maybe in response to sporting boycotts, the tinkering included allowing running to be open to all races.  A couple of final-year medical students, Bruce Robinson and Peter Hodson, plus some UCT alumni and friends started a new club, called Varsity Old Boys (VOB).  This wasn’t deliberately sexist – the number of women running races back then was infinitesimally small.  Part of the reason for starting the new club rather than continuing to run in UCT colors was to make it open to all races.  It was apparently the first open running club in the country.

Although running clubs and races were now allowed to be open, some clubs, particularly those in Pretoria, continued to restrict membership to White runners for another several years.  I’ll write more about that when I get to my move to Pretoria in 1980.  Further, some people of other races also continued to stick with having separate clubs and events.  That was especially the case among the “Coloured” community in the Cape Town area.  Many of their clubs and races were affiliated with the South African Council on Sport (SACOS).  As noted in the following article, “Under the slogan “no normal sport in an abnormal society,” SACOS embraced the strategy of non-collaboration with institutions sponsored by the apartheid regime.”  https://daily.jstor.org/fighting-apartheid-with-sports/.  Just because they were not collaborating on an institutional level doesn’t mean they were necessarily antagonistic on an individual level.  For instance, back in the late ‘70s two of the guys who sometimes ran with our group were the brothers Christy and Willy Davids.  Willy belonged to a SACOS-affiliated club.  Although he had no concerns about running with us, he didn’t run races that would previously have been restricted to White runners.  Christy, on the other hand, joined VOB.  He later received a track scholarship to a US university.  (I spoke to him a couple of times at cross country meets when we lived in Seattle.  By then he was coaching a team at a college in Idaho, which is why he was at the cross country meet.  The last time I heard from him he was working in real estate in Eugene, Oregon.)

Back in the ’70s and ’80s the winners of the Peninsula Marathon were a who’s who of the local and (later) the national running scene.  Most internationally-famous was 1982 winner, Mark Plaatjes, who later sought political asylum in the US and won gold for the US in the marathon at the 1993 World Championships.  The race started at the Green Point Stadium, near downtown Cape Town, and then went fairly close to due south to Simon’s Town, with much of the course being on Main Road, finishing at the SA Navy Sports Ground in Simon’s Town.

The 1977 version was won by Bruce Robinson of VOB in 2:30:47, followed by team-mate Peter Hodson in 2:31:40.  (More on those two later.)  The first woman ran 3:42:14. 

As in my first marathon I had intestinal issues.  Somewhere beyond the halfway mark I needed to make a pit-stop.  There were no porta-potties back then, so I ran into a convenience store and was directed to a toilet outside the back door.  Despite the stop I managed to finish under 3 hours for the first time, running 2:54:58, for 35^th position in the field of nearly 200.  (In subsequent races, to try to avoid having to make a pit-stop, I used to take a small dose of an anti-diarrhea medication – just a small part of the dose recommended for someone who actually has diarrhea.  Subsequently, although I occasionally needed to make a pit stop to urinate, I don’t think I ever again had to stop for a #2 in a race.) 

Soon after the 10 km / 6 mile mark in the 1977 Peninsula Marathon,  I don’t recall the names of the two team-mates with me in the photo and another team-mate who finished just behind me doesn’t know either.  The results below don’t help.  I recognize most of the names there but not who I think these may be, possibly Dave Pitman and his brother, whose name escapes me.

This may be the building on the right in the photo above, on Main Road, Rosebank.  Photo from Google Streetview.

Schematic of the Peninsula Marathon Route.  The 1977 route was the same as the 1982 one.

That was the first race for which my name was in the results in a newspaper (see report below).  From the lack of a byline, I presume that report was in The Weekend Argus.  A few days after I wrote that sentence I found that I had another clipping of exactly the same report (identical wording) but laid out differently and with the byline “By Dan Retief”.  There used to be multiple editions of The Weekend Argus every Saturday, from one that appeared early in the day through the “late final” edition which was printed late enough to contain reports on the afternoon’s major sporting events .  I have included both versions below.

Cape Town had (and probably still has) two daily English-language newspapers, The Cape Times and The Cape Argus.  The former was a morning paper and the latter an afternoon one.  Both were published six days a week, Monday to Saturday.  The Saturday edition of the Argus was The Weekend Argus.  It had multiple separate pieces, much like many US newspapers,  Cape Town also had an Afrikaans-language newspaper, Die Burger (literal translation “The Citizen”).  Port Elizabeth also had two English-language newspapers, The Eastern Province Herald in the mornings, and The Evening Post in the afternoons, both also published Monday to Saturday, plus the Afrikaans-language Die Oosterlig (literal translation “The Evening Light”).  As noted, these papers were published 6 days a week.  There were national, rather than regional, newspapers that were published on Sundays, such as The Sunday Times.  (My father was a great newspaper reader, so in Port Elizabeth he subscribed to both the local English newspapers and on Sundays 2-3 of the national papers.  After my parents moved to Pretoria he also had a subscription to a couple of English newspapers and a local Afrikaans newspaper Beeld (literal translation “Image”).

I am not going to include every newspaper clipping with my name (unless I have a separate set of entries devoted to my running career).  But I will show some of the more memorable ones or those in which I want to point out something.  Along with this first one I will add some things about many of the runners in the results, a few of whom I have already mentioned and others I may mention later.

First thing to note is that what appears in parentheses after each name is an indication of the club to which they belonged.  Back then, 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 the local provincial governing body.  One also had to run in the official club colors of one’s club.  Over the next few years I tried to argue, unsuccessfully, that these requirements imposed a financial burden on those with low income who wanted to run races.  As already mentioned, VOB is Varsity Old Boys.  The club’s singlet had blue and white (vertical) stripes.  Def is for Defence (South African Defence Force, that is, the military).  I think SACC was for South African Coloured Corps (military units for “Coloured” people; unlike White men, they were not conscripted but could sign for a full-time permanent position).  CH is for Celtic Harriers.  Their singlet had green and white hoops (horizontal stripes) like those of the Celtic Football Club in Scotland.  UCT is for UCT. 😊 The club singlet is dark blue with white trim and UCT in white on the front.  PAC is for Pinelands Athletic Club.  I see on their website that they were formed way back in 1937.  SH is for Spartan Harriers.  I won’t go through all the rest other than that US is for Universiteit Stellenbosch.  Many sports-related links between UCT and US were suspending because of the latter university’s support for Apartheid.  For instance, an annual road relay race between the two universities did not take place for a number of years.  (It was revived in the 1980s – more on one of those events when I get around to writing about that decade.)

Unlike in the US, races in South Africa didn’t give awards in 5-year age groups.  Typically, they gave awards (often cash) to the first 3 overall, the first three veterans (age 40+), and the first three juniors (under 20, I think).  Once there were more women and older people they added awards for the first three women, and later additional 10-year age groups for men and women.  As noted, 40+ was referred to as veteran, 50+ as master (as opposed to master being 40+ in the US), and 60+ as grandmaster.

As reported in the clipping, there were nearly 200 finishers in 1977.  By the next time I ran this race, in 1979, there were 858 finishers, 31 of them being women, within the official cut-off time of 4:30.  That was the most common cut-off time used for marathons for many years.  It was the qualifying time needed for entry into the 55-mile Comrades (ultra) Marathon which, as I mentioned in “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976” was the largest and most prestigious race in the country.

Race report on the 1977 Peninsula Marathon in The Weekend Argus.

The same report in a different edition of the same newspaper.  From the statement “A look at VOB 10 years ago” this copy must have been re-printed in a club newsletter in 1987.  (I have just this page, not the whole newsletter.)

On to comments about people in the results: 

Later that year I began training regularly with Bruce Robinson and Peter Hodson (1^st and 2^nd).  More about that a little later in this episode.  John Korasie (4^th) and I were team-mates when I did my national (military) service in 1978-79.  I was a conscript, but John was regular army – as a “Coloured” man he was not subject to conscription.  Several years later he died in an accident in the “operational area” near the South West Africa (now Namibia) / Angola border.  At least the official line was that it was an accident.  It may instead have been during a military operation.  

John Korasie is in the middle in the photo.  As was often the case, my last name was spelled incorrectly.  Photo was 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”].”  Rajan Naidoo was an Indian and so, like John Korasie, was not subject to conscription.  Although Jasper Ward was White, I think he may have signed up as a regular rather than as a conscript.

Don Hartley (5^th) is the only local runner who has won both the Peninsula Marathon and the Two Oceans (ultra) Marathon.  Not only did he win both in 1972, but he repeated the feat in 1973.  I didn’t know until decades later that, apart from being a great runner, Don was an accomplished mountaineer.  He is an artist and often posts photos of his art on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/don.hartley.180.  I have an anecdote about an interaction I had with Don.  It was a few years later, on the day of the Two Oceans Marathon, which was traditionally on the Saturday of the Easter weekend, starting at 6 AM, with a noon cut-off.  I think it was when I was recovering from an Achilles tendon operation, wasn’t yet back to running long distances and wasn’t paying much attention to the running scene.  I think I had been out of town and may have arrived back in Cape Town on the morning of the race.  That afternoon I went for a short run, part of which happened to be along the Two Oceans Marathon route, though that isn’t relevant to the story.  As I was going past the St. James Hotel (according to its website, it became the St. James Retirement Hotel in 1990) someone called my name.  I turned and saw Don coming out of the hotel’s pub and running after me.  He asked if I knew who had won the race that morning.  I said I didn’t.  I thought it a little sad that a former winner of the race was drinking in a pub without having any idea of who had won.  I was also surprised that one of my running heroes not only spoke to me but even knew my name!

Andrew Greyling of the Pretoria Marathon Club on the left and Don Hartley in the green and white singlet of Celtic Harriers.  That must have been the 1980 edition of the Peninsula Marathon.  The photo was on the cover of the booklet for the 1982 event.  I am reasonably sure neither ran the 1981 race.  I’ll probably mention Andrew again when I write an episode about when I lived in Pretoria.  Sadly, he later committed suicide.

 

Pat O’Brien (6^th) was the first veteran, that is over 40.  Over the next few years, I would often be quite close to Pat in races.  His wife usually came out in support, driving to various points on the course and standing at the side of the road as we went past.  She had a unique saying that she called out to encourage not just Pat but also others in his vicinity: “Run happy!”  Back then I was puzzled by how “Run happy” could be compatible with running hard.  In more recent decades I have come to appreciate that more.  It is certainly better than the usual lies “Looking good” (when I am feeling like crap) or “You’re nearly there” (sometimes even before the halfway mark).

Eric Bateman (8^th) was a medical doctor who later became an international expert on lung diseases.  Some of the clinicians here in the US with whom I have collaborated on studies of COPD and asthma have spoken very highly of Eric.  At least a couple of them visited Eric in Caper Town and one hosted Eric and his family when they visited Los Angeles.  Eric was an accomplished runner, including being part of a world record setting team for a 24-hour relay (more on that below).  A silhouette of him running was adopted as the logo of Varsity Old Boys running club (see image below).  He died unexpectedly early in 2025 while undergoing a minor cardiac procedure.  How minor?  He was expecting to be able to travel to an international conference just a few days later.  Not many doctors are important enough to warrant an obituary in a journal as prestigious as The Lancet: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01247-4/fulltext.  A few other articles and obituaries: Eric Bateman  https://spnafricanews.com/eric-bateman-was-a-leading-south-african-ultra-distance-athlete-and-physician-of-global-significance/, https://ginasthma.org/in-memoriam-a-tribute-to-professor-eric-bateman/, https://www.ersnet.org/news-and-features/news/eric-donn-bateman-obituary/.  The European Respiratory Society (ERS) is one of the world’s leading societies for people studying lung diseases, the other main one being the American Thoracic Society (ATS).

Silhouette of Eric Bateman as the Varsity Old Boys club logo.  “Imbaleki” (Zulu for runner) was the name of the club newsletter.  I have included the first paragraph to show that in those pre-historic times newsletters were typed on typewriters!

Gary Craye (11^th) is another of those I started running with later that year.  Steve Harle (12^th) I mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” as being my first regular running partner.  Roger Cameron (13^th) had been club captain of the UCT cross country club a year or two earlier and presumably joined Pinelands Athletic Club after graduating from UCT.

Bruce Mattews (18^th) later became one of my regular training partners.  Over the next few years I probably ran more miles with Bruce than I have done with anyone other than Mark Lang, with whom I ran most Sundays from the time we moved to Chapel Hill in 1998 through the middle of 2024.  Bruce and I once won a 30km race together, finishing in a deliberate dead heat.  Bruce later emigrated to New Zealand.  When our son Steven and his family visited New Zealand in early 2024 they had lunch with Bruce.  (Steven hadn’t previously met Bruce.)  Bruce was a double world record holder in the 24-hour relay (more on that below).  He is quite a character.  Once, when we were running together, with several other people around us, we were going past Pollsmoor Prison (which is where Nelson Mandela spent time after being moved off Robben Island).  I think it was in a race, though it may have been just a training run.  Bruce ran off the side of the road to the wire fence around the prison grounds, jumped up against the fence and jerked himself around as if he was being shocked.  The other runners around us thought the fence was electrified, but it was just Bruce being Bruce.

Peter Bradford (20^th) mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” as the brother of Helen Bradford, the top student in my Mathematics III class.  Peter Sullivan (23^rd) – for a few years he was one of the last two runners who had completed the Two Oceans Marathon every year since its inception.  In the 12^th running of that race he became the last man standing and he eventually finished the race 30 times, the first 28 of which were in succession.  Tony Robertson (24^th) was mentioned in “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976” in the caption of a photo from the Stellenbosch Marathon the previous year.  

Solly Epstein (26^th) was a medical doctor who later emigrated to Philadelphia here in the US.  He and Bruce Matthews were great friends.  Bruce visited Solly at least a couple of times, including when Solly was terminally ill with cancer.  (Bruce usually called me to chat when he was in the US.  He was never close enough to Chapel Hill for it to be feasible for us to get together.)  I think Hugh Gilberg (29^th) was another medical doctor.   There proportion of medical doctors in the running community was quite high in those days, when there were many fewer runners.  That was probably because of a combination of their interest in health and because running could be fitted in around a demanding medical career.  Leo Benning (32^nd) was a good veteran runner for many years.

In 35^th is obviously Yours Truly.  Stephen Granger (39^th) was a team mate who had finished a couple of minutes ahead of me in the previous year’s Stellenbosch Marathon and is mentioned in the caption of a photo from that event.  He later wrote race reports for The Argus newspaper for many years.  Hugh Amoore (57^th), brother of Tom Amoore (mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”) and was, along with Peter Sullivan, one of the last two remaining runners who had completed the Two Oceans Marathon every year.  He ran the first 11 in succession and after that completed a further two.  Hugh had been a sub-warden in Driekoppen in my first year there.  He later became UCT’s Registrar, a position he held for many years, eventually retiring in 2015.

Tim Noakes (66^th) is another medical doctor who, as I mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” once described me in a referral letter to another doctor as being “totally unathletic”.  I don’t think Tim practiced medicine after doing his internship, instead moving straight into sports medicine / exercise physiology research, a field in which he achieved international recognition.  Tim wasn’t afraid to challenge orthodox ideas.  Often his hypotheses were confirmed, for instance that for long distance runners drinking too much (hyponatremia, or water intoxication) is more dangerous than dehydration.  In other cases the jury is still out, such as his opinion on the dietary benefits of animal fats.

Six days after the Peninsula Marathon I dropped out of a 24-hour relay.  Back then 24-hour relays were quite popular events.  The format was that each person on the team ran one mile before handing off to the next person.  Once all had had their turn to run a mile the first person ran the next mile, and so on.  The order had to be kept constant.  If someone missed their mile, they were eliminated and the team had to continue without them for the rest of the 24-hour period.  The most common size of a team was 10.

A few years later two of my regular training partners, Bruce Matthews (mentioned earlier), and Graeme Dacomb (who was a sub-warden in Driekoppen with me in 1977), set a world record for a 2-man team, running a total of 201 miles.  The next year they recruited another clubmate, Eric Bateman (also mentioned earlier), and set the record for a 3-man team.)  The two-man record by Bruce and Graeme is mentioned towards the end of this article, with a photo of them running together (not in the relay).  https://ultrarunninghistory.com/24-hour-two-man-relay/#:~:text=By%20the%20early%201980s%2C%20a%20few%20ultrarunners%20had,team.%20The%20known%20world%20record%20was%20193%20miles.

The 24-hour relay that I did in March 1977 was on a grass track marked out on what I think was the Villagers’ Club rugby grounds.  According to my logbook I ran 20 miles before dropping out with a knee problem, which persisted and severely curtailed my running for several weeks.

I think Graeme was part of our 10-man team in 1977 and also dropped out.  It is perhaps just a coincidence that the two of us who dropped out that day ended up having the most successful running careers.  Graeme had already had some success prior to that, having been a national-level cross country runner in high school in what was then Rhodesia.

I didn’t run another race until July.  That was when I ran my first cross country race in 5 years, after not having done one since the annual inter-house event in high school.  The race was the annual South African Universities (SAU) Cross Country Championships, the equivalent of the NCAA Cross Country Championships in the US.  South Africa has few universities relative to the US, so each (White) university could send a team to the SAU meet without needing to qualify through a regional meet.  The Afrikaans-language universities generally had well-organized cross country and track programs.  Back then UCT’s cross country club was student-run and didn’t have a coach or a budget for travel.  If the SAU meet was not in Cape Town, the UCT team usually comprised whoever was willing to pay their own way. 

In 1977 the SAU meet was held in Port Elizabeth.  It was during UCT’s winter break, so I was back home and thus didn’t need to travel (or need accommodation).  I don’t recall who else from UCT was there or even if we had a full team.  The race was a very flat multi-lap event on grass sports fields at the University of Port Elizabeth (now the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University).  The distance was about 7 miles, but I don’t recall how many laps we had to run.  I do know that I quite narrowly avoided being lapped by the winner, Andries Krogmann of Universiteit Stellenbosch.

Riëtta ran in that SAU meet too.  She was a first-year student at Universiteit Pretoria.  That was the first time we were present at the same event, though it would be nearly 4 years before we actually met.

Most teams stayed for Port Elizabeth’s annual Mainstay Relay a few days later.  That was a road race with legs of varying distances.  According to my logbook I ran a 9-mile leg.

The week that included the SAU cross country and the Mainstay Relay was the first time I managed to run 70 miles (112 km) in a week.  I strung together 8 consecutive 70-mile weeks, followed by one of 85 miles in the last full week before the 1977 Stellenbosch Marathon.

Many South African running clubs held weekly time trials.  These were somewhat like Parkruns in that they were weekly and free.  But they were on weekday evenings rather than Saturday mornings, usually on roads and sidewalks rather than trails, and most were not 5 km.  Although there wasn’t a standard distance, the most common one was 5 miles / 8 km.  Some were unconventional distances, such as the 6.6 km of the Phobians club in Pretoria.

I think it was after the SAU cross country that I started running regularly with Bruce Robinson and Peter Hodson (1^st and 2^nd in the Peninsula Marathon earlier in the year).  They used to run laps of the UCT cricket oval at lunchtime on weekdays, with a few other runners tagging along.  The others were faster than me, so I was usually at the back of the group, struggling to keep up.  (Most of the times I have run in a group I have been at the back and have kept quiet.  The latter was because I seldom had anything to say rather than because I was out of breath.)  Trying to keep up with Bruce and Peter on weekdays plus the higher mileage helped me improve substantially.  In that period I also ran the Celtic Harriers 5-mile time trial most Wednesday evenings, recording successive times of 30:54, 29:24, 29:32, 28:55, and 28:59.  Three days after that last one, on August 27, I ran the Louis Botha 24 km race, averaging under 6 min/mile, which I had never managed prior to the 29:24 in the Celtic Harriers time trial.    

I have included the report on the Louis Botha race below in order to make a few comments about the report.  From the byline “By C C Savage” that report must have been published in The Cape Times.  Charlie Savage submitted race reports to The Cape Times for many years.  I think he had been a good runner in his youth, but by that stage was elderly (though perhaps younger than I am now), was rather portly and I think he had gout.  Charlie also served as an official at most races, often being the official starter.  He used to shout “Line up! Line up!” when it was time for the race to start.

Brian Mather (4^th) must have been in his late thirties because soon after that he became one of the top veteran (over 40) runners in the country.  He was originally from Scotland and later moved back there.  Roger Cameron (8^th) must have changed clubs from Pinelands to VOB since the Peninsula Marathon.  Clive Owen (9^th) later became one of the top runners in the Cape Town area.  Several years later his wife Shireen occasionally used to run with Riëtta

Cape Times report on the 1977 Louis Botha 24 km race.  According to my logbook there were just 70 finishers that year.

After the string of higher mileage weeks I eased off for a few days before the 1977 Stellenbosch Marathon on September 10.  I had a dream race, feeling comfortable all the way.  The only slight hiccup was letting a cyclist get under my skin.  On a long, very gradual downhill I was running near someone who had a friend riding a bicycle next to him.  There was just enough of a slope that the cyclist was able to match our pace without needing to pedal.  That he was able to stay alongside us without putting in any effort whereas we were working quite hard was annoying.  I eventually told him to f– off with his bicycle.  I ended up dropped my PR by about 19 minutes, running 2:36:02 for 12^th place out of the 198 who started.  I finished in front of several of the runners who had been ahead of me in the Peninsula Marathon 6 months earlier, including Bruce Robinson! 

Map of the multi-lap Stellenbosch Marathon course.  (The same image is also in “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976”.)

I loved the old 6-lap Stellenbosch Marathon course through the picturesque college town.  But as the running boom started to be felt in South Africa, the number of runners and the broadening range 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.

For several years the marathon T-shirt remained almost identical.  I don’t seem to have the one from 1977 but am sure that apart from the date it looked like this.  “Isotonic game” was a powder that one dissolved in water to make a sports drink, essentially the South African equivalent of Gatorade.

My time in the marathon was good enough to qualify for the SAU Marathon Championships and probably also the national marathon championships.  The previous two years the Stellenbosch Marathon had doubled as the national championships but in 1977 that event was held a few weeks later in another city.

My father offered to pay for me to travel to the championships.  I decided not to go because there wasn’t enough time to recover between the races, especially as I was suffering from a tight Achilles tendon.

As I will probably detail in future episodes, at least I had several subsequent opportunities to qualify for and compete in national championships at various distances, though was never even close to the front of the pack in those races.  The observant reader may notice here and in those later episodes that, although I did well enough to qualify to compete at various national championship events, I make no mention of having had a coach.  That’s because I have never been coached.  The less charitable may say that I am uncoachable.

I had recovered sufficiently from the marathon to be part of a group that ran the 35-mile Boland Trail on November 19.  I don’t recall who all was in the group, though I am reasonably sure it included Bruce Matthews.  Although I have found several links to the Boland Hiking Trail, it appears to have changed since 1977.  Back then it was 35 miles in one direction, whereas now the longest route is a loop that is shorter than that.  We dropped cars at the end where we would finish and then drove to the end where we started.  The trail was mostly single-track and traversed a few mountains.  The scenery was spectacular – see these links for some relatively recent images: https://petergroveswebsite.com/SA-BolandTrailDec2011-1.htm; https://petergroveswebsite.com/SA-BolandTrailDec2011-2.htm; https://petergroveswebsite.com/SA-BolandTrailDec2011-3.htm.

November is late spring in South Africa, so it was quite warm.  Back in those days there wasn’t an easy way to carry water while running.  Bilharzia (schistosomiasis) is endemic in southern Africa, so drinking water from streams is not advisable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosomiasis.  By about 26 miles I was quite light-headed, presumably from dehydration.  So I took a short cut of a few miles along a reasonably flat gravel road while the others took the official trail, which went over another mountain.  With no cell phones back in those days, there wasn’t any way for the others to check that I was okay making my own way to the finish.  In addition, we had to trust our (paper) map reading skills to ensure we ended up at the right place.

(A couple of years later a group of us with a few changes in personnel set out to run the Boland Trail again.  That occasion must have been in winter.  Conditions were terrible, with persistent cold rain.  There wasn’t much in the way of bad weather running gear available in South Africa in those days and several of us didn’t even have gloves.  After a few miles most of us decided that discretion was the better part of valor and turned back to the start.  My hands were so cold that it took me a long time before I managed to turn the key to unlock my car (no push-button door openers back then).  Two of the guys who were more appropriately dressed and tougher than the rest of us decided to continue.  Then first one and later the other decided that they had had enough and came down off the trail, separately.  I asked Bruce Matthews what he recalled about what happened after that.  He responded: “I think it was just luck that we got Mike North.  We went to the spot where we were supposed to come off the trail, and there he was on the other side of a raging stream.  I recall [Graeme] Dacomb and I holding hands as we stepped into the water and managed to catch a wasted Mike as he lunged at the last moment.  He confirmed that Tim [Biggs] had taken a left and was probably in Stellenbosch.”)

Towards the end of 1977 a fellow Driekoppen student wrote the list below detailing my various roles or duties.  A few were “formal” such as “sub-warden” and “big brother” (the latter because my brother Mick was also in Driekoppen).  The “owner of big room” was because sub-wardens (and house committee members) had larger rooms than other residents.   I presume the “5 cent supplier” referred to providing change for the pay phones.  I mentioned playing corridor cricket back in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” but have no idea what the “ice hockey team (winter)” refers to.  I have never played ice hockey in any form (and have never even skated, either on ice-skates or roller-skates).  The “future sailor (1978)” implies this was written close to the end of the academic year.  However, I don’t recall exactly when I received my call-up papers to do national service in the Navy (and I don’t have a copy of those call-up papers).  The word under the black rectangle is a regular English word, but it was used in some slang sense that, if I ever knew what that sense was, I have long ago forgotten.  When doing an Internet search, I discovered that the word is (or was) sometimes used as a derogatory/racist term to refer to Asian people.  Although I don’t know what the South African slang from back in 1977 meant, it couldn’t have been in that sense if used to refer to me.

My official and unofficial roles in Driekoppen in 1977.

I presume that I had finished final exams just before we ran the Boland Trail.  After that I headed home to Port Elizabeth rather than waiting for graduation.  So I graduated in absentia again.

Cover page of UCT 1977 graduation program.

UCT graduation 1977, Faculty of Science PhDs included because the first one listed is John Affleck-Graves, who I have mentioned a few times. 

UCT graduation 1977, BSc(Hons) graduates, including Yours Truly.  The BSc after our names is because we had previously graduated with a BSc.

UCT graduation 1977, BSc(Hons) graduates continued, to include my classmate and magician Matthew Pearce, mentioned earlier.  I don’t know why he managed just a third class pass.

Along with the one for my BSc, the degree certificate for my BSc(Hons) has spent decades rolled up in the blue plastic tube shown in “Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976”.

Transcript covering all my years at UCT, including an unfinished MSc (because I did one at UNISA) and PhD.

Meaning of the symbols on the transcript.

 

Back home in Port Elizabeth I won a race for the first time (if one ignores the Belsen Beer Race).  It was a small out-and-back 10-miler on December 17 which I finished in 59:45.  I won a magnificent prize of 3 cans of fruit juice (I think it was guava juice).  The organizers must have bought a 6-pack to use as prizes, giving 3 to me and the other 3 to Jorrie Jordaan who not only finished second but was also the first veteran.

Next up, off for two years of national service fighting against (or for, depending on one’s perspective) the forces of evil.  As was the case at the end of high school, I wasn’t in a hurry to move on to the next phase of my life.  However, perhaps because I had been called up to the navy rather than the army, I wasn’t feeling anxious about my impending military career.

 

 

Ancyent blog29 UCT 1975 and 1976

Recollections of my next two years at UCT – 1975 and 1976

At the end of the 1974 academic year several of my friends, including Dave Clark, Terry Weyer, and Peter Hofmeyr, moved out of Driekoppen.  After that my circle of friends included several new students from other countries in southern Africa, among them Steve Moss from Botswana, Rich Kime from Malawi, and several from Zambia.  A couple of the ones from Zambia were on my floor and were smokers.  In those days there were no restrictions on smoking in buildings.  What was particularly annoying is that they would smoke in the bathroom.  The humid air in there seemed to make the smell worse, or maybe just hang around longer after they had left.

At the beginning of 1975 I was still trying to hedge my bets between Business Science and regular Science.  As can be seen on my UCT ID card below, officially I was still registered for a BBusSc.  I considered adding a major in Economics, which required doing Economics III.  For that course one had to choose three (or maybe it was 4) modules.  Two of the options were mathematical economics and econometrics.  I went to ask the head of the department if I could take both of those.  He said yes, BUT that each counted as just a half module, so together they would be just one of the modules I needed.  If both had counted as full modules I might have taken Economics III.  Another reason not to was that in talking to the department head he pointed out that I was confusing micro- and macro-economics.  If after two years of doing economics I couldn’t get that straight, I was probably not cut out for the field.  (He didn’t say that, but I was rather embarrassed about making such a mistake.)

I was interested in astronomy, but UCT didn’t offer an undergraduate major in the subject.  There may have been a single course, probably on descriptive astronomy.  (There is now an undergraduate major in astrophysics that has been offered since 2006.)  I later discovered that academic astronomy is mostly a combination of applied math and physics.  UCT may have offered an MSc and/or PhD in astronomy back in the day.  If so, I think it required one to have majored in physics, math, and/or applied math at undergraduate level.  One can currently do an MSc or PhD by thesis in astronomy or a BSc(Hons) or a coursework MSc in Astrophysics & Space Science.

Until looking at my end-of-year results I had forgotten that I had completed Introduction to Management Accounting (and managed a first class pass).  That year was also the first time I took a statistics class.  As I mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”, my friend Pat Wong Fung, who I had met on the train when heading to UCT the first time, was partly responsible for suggesting this class, and so put me on the track to becoming a statistician.  Someone else who shares part of the blame is the instructor for that first class, John Affleck-Graves. 

You may not have noticed, but I didn’t mention the names of any of my instructors from my first two years at UCT.  That’s because I don’t remember any of their names or in fact anything else about them.  I do remember those from the statistics classes, maybe in part because I had each of them for more than one class and also interacted with them later in my career.  John was a great lecturer and will be mentioned again when I get to 1977.  He later moved to the UCT School of Business (which is not related to the Department of Business Science) before emigrating to the US in 1986.  He then, worked at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana until his retirement in 2019, by that stage having spent the previous 15 years as Executive Vice President of the university.  I did manage to make contact with him several years ago and so was able to thank him for spurring my interest in statistics (but I didn’t follow him into the field of finance).  https://news.nd.edu/news/executive-vice-president-john-affleck-graves-to-retire/

My UCT ID in 1975.  The yellow background is for the Faculty of Commerce, because I was still a Business Science student at the beginning of that year.

In the part “Ancyent blog24 High school, grades 9 and 10” I mentioned that on turning 16 we had to get a government-issued ID card (see below).

Government-issued ID card after I turned 16.

About 5 years later the ID cards were replaced by ID documents.  The document was referred to as the “book of life” because it was supposed to incorporate all one’s official documents, including one’s registered address, driver’s license(s), and (if married) one’s marriage certificate.  With the new ID we were also issued new ID numbers.  The numbers were in the format YYMMDD SSSS RR Z where the YYMMDD is for the year, month, and day of one’s birth, SSSS is a sequential number from 0000 to 4999 for females and from 5000 to 9999 for males, , the RR indicates one’s race/tribal group (00 for White people), and the M is a check-digit of some type.  According to the following Wikipedia page the first digit of the RR indicates whether one is a citizen, permanent resident, or refugee.  I don’t think that was the case back in the day – race may have included tribal affiliation for Black people, in which case more than a single digit would have been needed for race/tribe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_identity_card. 

Cover of the (then) new South African ID document.

Table of contents of the ID document.  Although the “Record of voting” was supposed to be on pages 48-49, as seen in the next photo a stamp indicating I had voted in a referendum in 1983 was on the page showing my particulars.

Page of the ID document with my particulars.  I had a haircut just before the photo was taken!

Page of the ID document with my driver’s license.  The original date of issue was soon after I turned 18 (the earliest one was allowed to have a driver’s license.)

Page of the ID document with my marriage certificate.  Riëtta has the same one in her ID document.  All the other information was included at the time the ID was issued.  This certificate was added later – I didn’t even meet Riëtta until 1981.  More on that when I get to the 1980s.  For now I’ll mention just that the wedding ceremony was in a language I didn’t understand, si I don’t know what I agree to. 😊

Although I wasn’t a Driekoppen sub-warden at the start of 1975, at some point in 1975 the Warden, Prof. Cumpsty, appointed me as one.  I don’t recall why this happened part of the way through the year.  Maybe one of those who had originally been appointed moved out of Driekoppen.  At some point I also became one of the tutors for Math I.  Both of these roles came with a small stipend (and perhaps also with a contribution towards tuition and/or lodging).  I continued as a sub-warden until I left UCT at the end of 1977.

Around that time a few of us became wine snobs for a while.  On several occasions we went wine-tasting on the Stellenbosch Wine Route.  It looks like there are now several sub-routes, but I think there was just one back then.  https://wineroute.co.za/  We usually returned with a good selection of wines.  A highlight of each trip was stopping for the cheese lunch at Lanzerac https://lanzerac.co.za/.  Lanzerac still exists, but its cheese lunch does not.  As noted at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1775812375816033 “Lanzerac’s famous cheese lunches of the past are well remembered by guests who had visited the Estate over that time, with many stories reencountered with nostalgic enthusiasm.”

Although I had a car from either 1974 or 1975, I seldom drove anywhere, other than the long trips back home to Port Elizabeth.  The only accident I have had to date was on one visit to the Stellenbosch Wine Route.  I misjudged a turn at a traffic light and clipped another car very lightly.  There was hardly a scratch and certainly nothing that needed repairing.  So we didn’t get the police or insurance companies involved.

(About 4 years later I came close to having another accident in the same car.  That was genuinely an (almost) accident rather than anyone’s fault.  A car stopped very suddenly in front of me.  I jammed my foot down on the brake pedal and … nothing happened.  Complete brake failure.  Fortunately I was going slowly, and I usually keep an appropriate following distance.  By steering into the kerb (curb for Americans) I avoided hitting the other car.  When I had a mechanic look at the car the next day, he said that there was a hole in the hydraulic brake line and that all the fluid had leaked out.  He said it looked like there had been a rust spot and that the sudden pressure when I hit the brake pedal hard must have knocked the rust spot out.  I was fortunate.  I had just come down a steep hill with a T intersection at the bottom.  If the brakes had failed there I could have ended up in the ocean.)

Earlier I mentioned that the new students in 1975 included Steve Moss and Rich Kime.  Rich was from Malawi and was studying quantity surveying.  Every afternoon he used to retire to his room to do some “thinking”, that is, to take a nap.  After many years working as a quantity surveyor Rich retired to the small Karoo town of Prince Albert.  Steve was British, but living in Botswana (where he also currently lives).  He was very keen on motorcycles and had a Honda Gold Wing   On one trip between Botswana and South Africa he went off the road and crashed.  He was relatively unscathed, other than a badly broken leg.  He spent a few months with that leg in plaster of Paris.  The bike was a write-off, but he soon had a new one.  On local rides in the Cape Town area, Rich was often a pillion passenger on Steve’s bike.  (I never went on Steve’s bike.)  Steve also subscribed to some motorcycle magazines, which I sometimes looked at.  I remember Barry Sheene as being one of the top international motorbike racers of that era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Sheene.

Steve, Rich, and I went hiking together a few times.  One hike was nearby, walking from Driekoppen and then up the side of Table Mountain closest to UCT.  Although there weren’t any technical parts, we did have to use our hands to climb up some sections.  Near the top, one of us (I don’t recall who) put his hand in a small indentation and noticed that it had ice in it, presumably the remnants of a snowfall on the mountain.  Although snow on the top of the mountain is not unusual, it is much rarer in the city.  It does get a dusting occasionally, but not in the total of about 10 years that I lived there.  Apart from the small handful on that hike, I didn’t touch snow until we moved to Seattle when I was 35.  Our first winter there was the first time I saw snow falling.  (It was exciting for a few hours and then a nuisance when the whole city was snowed in.)

Another hike was in the Jonkershoek mountain range near Stellenbosch, about 30 miles from Cape Town.  That one may have involved camping overnight.  I remember just one incident on that hike.  We were walking single file along a narrow trail.  Steve was in front and suddenly dived off the trail to his right.  He had realized he was about to step on a puff adder.  Puff adders are highly venomous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puff_adder.  What makes them worse is they are very lazy – “sluggish” is how the Wikipedia entry puts it.  Most snakes move away when they hear a person approaching.  Not puff adders.  They just lie there waiting to be stepped on.  After Steve had picked himself up out of the bushes, the snake was still there.  How close had he come?  The impression of the heel of his hiking boot was visible and if he had put the front of his foot down it would have been on the snake!  Steve took a photo to prove it.  I recently asked him if he still had the photo.  If he does, he hasn’t been able to locate it (yet). 

A longer hike that we did that was further from Cape Town was the Otter Trail.  Websites that I have looked at recently say it is a 5-day hike and give the distance as 42 or 45 kilometers (26-28 miles).  It has become very popular, and it is hard to get a permit.  Apparently only 12 hikers are allowed to start each day.  There are now huts to sleep in overnight.  https://www.sanparks.org/parks/garden-route/what-to-do/activities/otter-trail   This video shows some of the spectacular scenery, including river crossings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C-fgbP-OMI.  Another website with photos and a short video: https://besthike.com/where-is-the-best-hike-in-africa/otter-trail/.  When we hiked the trail in the mid 1970s either permits were not required, or we just did it without permits.  Back then there weren’t huts.  We did the whole trail in 3 days (2 nights).  We should probably have gone slower and spent more time looking at the scenery.

Something more sedentary that we did together was to go to see/listen to Rod McKuen and Magna Carta (not “The” Magna Carta as written in the program below) at the 3 Arts Theatre in Cape Town.  Rich was a Rod McKuen fan.  I liked (and still like) Magna Carta and have a few of their vinyl albums, plus one in my iTunes library.  The one in my iTunes library was from a live concert (in Bergen, Norway) in which they used electric guitars.  In the concert we went to and on my vinyl albums, they played acoustic guitars.  The version of The Bridge at Knaresborough Town that they played in Cape Town was particularly memorable and better than other versions I have heard, including this one on their Songs from Wasties Orchard album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eI740fnzXI&list=RD0eI740fnzXI&start_radio=1.  I presume I drove us to the concert.  If I’d been on my own, I would have left at the interval as I had no interest in listening to Rod McKuen. 

Concert program, Magna Carta opening for Rod McKuen.

Description of Magan Carta (not “The Magna Carta”) from the program.

In this photo Steve Moss is in the middle and Rich Kime on the right.  On the left is George Nowack – more on “Big George” below),

George Nowack (pronounced Novack) was one of the students from Zambia who started at UCT in 1975 (and in George’s case didn’t return the next year).  Geroge was a Character with a capital “C” – maybe even the whole word needs to be capitalized.  The article below is only a slight exaggeration.  Big George stopped going to classes almost as soon as the academic year began.  Regardless of whether he obtained a degree, he apparently had a job lined up back in Zambia as race-course bookie working with a family member.  So he spent the year at UCT socializing.  The part in the first sentence of the article about “running from notice to notice” was because other students used to sign George up for any opportunity posted on a Driekoppen noticeboard.

Who is Big George?  Article from the 1977 edition of a Driekoppen magazine called Threads.

Big George, continued.

One evening several of us were sitting chatting in Steve Moss’s room.  Suddenly the door of the room alongside opened and Hylton Hobbs, whose room it was, came rushing into Steve’s room with blood streaming from his throat.  He had cut himself in an apparent suicide attempt.  I rushed off to fetch the assistant warden, who was a doctor, while the others tried to help Hylton.  Fortunately the cut wasn’t very deep.  As the sub-warden responsible for Hylton and other students in Blue block, I was told later that the incident was more a cry for help than a genuine suicide attempt.  I don’t recall what happened to Hylton directly after this but do know that he was back in Driekoppen soon afterwards and was a sub-warden himself in 1977..  Hylton was studying law (and went on to qualify as a lawyer).  He was from Uitenhage, the smaller city near Port Elizabeth where I spent the first few years of my life (see “Ancyent blog19 Early life -- birth to about 6 years old”).  Years later I saw in the in memoriam section of UCT’s alumni magazine that Hylton passed away in 1992.  No reason was given and there wasn’t an obituary.  As he would have been just 35 or 36, I have often wondered whether he had committed suicide.

Something that Hylton wrote about me.  I don’t know whether it was before or after the above episode.

I had forgotten about Hylton’s interest in heraldry until I recently tried again to find some information his life after UCT.  I thought I was getting somewhere when I found this article on heraldry by a Robert A. Laing https://upjournals.up.ac.za/index.php/historia/article/download/1746/1636.  The article references one by Hylton:

H L Hobbs, “Lion, Lyon or Leeuw: a Comparative Look at the Development of the Law of Heraldry in South Africa”, Responsa Meridiana, 3, 4, August 1977 Reprinted in Arma, Nos 79-80, 1977

Robert Laing was a past President of the Heraldry Society of South Africa and in his article he states “I inherited Hobbs’ heraldic library and correspondence.”  So I thought he might know what had happened to Hylton.  I looked for contact information for him, without success and eventually found that he had passed away in 2007: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10228710863177412&set=p.10228710863177412&type=3.  So the trail appears to have gone cold. 

Occasionally, when we wanted to have a drink in a more upscale setting than student-oriented pubs, some of us took the suburban train to downtown Cape Town, to have a drink in the Van Donck Room, a lounge at the top of the Heerengracht Hotel.  That hotel no longer appears to exist, or maybe it has been rebranded.  It was one of the taller downtown buildings, so the lounge on the top floor offered a good view over the city and the harbor.  (From something I found online, it looks like the lounge was on the 34^th floor.)  We usually went fairly late in the evening.  Because it was quite expensive, we had just one or two beers, sometimes followed by an Irish coffee.  The lounge had a dress code – jackets and ties were required.  A bunch of us went there to celebrate my 21^st birthday, which was in 1975.  The photo below may have been from that occasion.

A group of us in the Van Donck Room.  Clockwise around the table, from left: Steve Moss, Andy Hofmeyr (younger brother of Peter, who I mentioned a few times in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”), Yours Truly, Hylton Hobbs, Rich Kime, Mike Padgett, obscured is probably Rob Beare, George Nowack, and then someone whose name I have forgotten (maybe Malcolm Bruce).

I think the Heerengracht Hotel was in the tall building in this photo (found somewhere on the Internet).

Train on the suburban line from downtown Cape Town to Simon’s Town.  This is the line we rode on to get to downtown, though not on the section that is next to the ocean.  (Photo found somewhere on the Internet.)

Not sure where this one was.  Because we were wearing ties, if it wasn’t at the Van Donck Room it may have been a formal dinner at Driekoppen.  Standing, from L to R, Andy Hofmeyr, Harry Campbell, Yours Truly.  Mike Padgett in front.

Harry Campbell, in the photo above, was a medical student who had been in Driekoppen with me since we both arrived at UCT in 1973.  In 1975 he and I (and sometimes one or two others) used to go for a quiet drink at the Glendower Hotel.  It was a residential hotel, that was later acquired by UCT and turned into a student residence call.  The Glendower had a lounge, with comfortable chairs.  They put bowls of peanuts out on the tables, which is where I became addicted to eating peanuts when drinking beer.  More on that later.  (At the Van Donck Room there were also bowls of peanuts on the tables.)  The lounge at the Glendower was quiet.  There were mostly just a few elderly people, who may have been permanent residents, with very few students.  Although Harry was a medical student, he smoked occasionally, mostly when drinking.  He smoked Consulate cigarettes which were sold in a tin rather than a cardboard or paper packet.  Although I know that Harry qualified as a doctor and then went on to specialize as a radiologist, I haven’t been able to find contact information for him, despite several searches over the years.

Steve Moss and I often used to run together quite late at night.  We didn’t go very far, maybe just 2-3 miles.  I don’t remember the route, so can’t estimate the distance using Google Maps.  When I was at home in Port Elizabeth during vacations, I also often ran late at night.  On one such occasion a St. Bernard (dog) came up behind me and nipped me on the shoulder!

In those days I used to stay up late.  Although I usually had early morning classes, I was never late for a class.  But on weekends I did often sleep until well into the morning.  On one occasion I woke so late that I missed lunch!  A year or so later I started going to bed earlier and waking up early, which is something I have done ever since.  In my remaining years in Driekoppen I used to like to read The Cape Times before the dining hall opened for breakfast.  Driekoppen used to get 3 copies of the newspaper.  For a while someone else was getting up early and removing one of the papers from the common room.  A fellow sub-warden and I (Graeme Dacomb, who we will meet again later) managed to catch the culprit and get him to desist.

I don’t recall whose idea it was, but Steve and I both signed up for the 1975 Stellenbosch Marathon, which took place in September.  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 Coetzenburg Athletics 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 White and Black athletes 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.)

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.

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 several 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 disappearing before 3:45 into a marathon that was 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.

Why didn’t we take note of our own times?  That was before the days of digital wrist watches and analog watches with a stopwatch function were rare.  I don’t recall whether it was before or after that when my parents gave me the watch in the photo below.  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 I had to keep track of how many multiples of 30 minutes had elapsed.  I used that watch for several years, before getting my first digital watch in about 1979.

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.

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 on the continent of Africa and also 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 running just 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.

At that stage running was still something I did when not playing other sport, rather than being my primary sport.  By 1975 I had stopped playing organized rugby and soccer, but several of us from Driekoppen often used to play touch rugby on the cricket overall in the afternoons.

In “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974 “ I mentioned the pram (US: stroller) relay race from downtown Cape Town to the UCT campus that was part of Rag Olympics.  There I included a photo taken at the start, with me in the front row.  Below is a photo of Driekoppen’s whole team.

Driekoppen pram race team in 1975.  In case it is not obvious, I am on the right in the front row, with a white sweatband around my neck.  (Even now I still usually run with a sweatband, to keep the sweat out of my eyes.)

Not a Rag event, but a more serious one, or at least one that some teams took seriously, was a pedal car race.  There was a university pedal car race series to which several major universities sent teams with very sophisticated cars.  If I recall correctly, each event lasted for 6 hours.  I don’t remember how many were on each team.  It may have been six.  The report below doesn’t provide information about either the duration or the number in a team.  The top teams not only had good cars and very fit drivers, they also had well trained pit crews.  Their driver changes were slick operations – the incumbent being dragged out of one side of the car while the next driver hopped in from the other side.  (I think drivers had to change after each lap.)  The race at the University of Cape Town was around the university’s administration building, Bremner Building, shown in one of the images below.  Several of us from Driekoppen managed to get a hand-me-down car from one of the teams of engineering students.  In the race the car developed various mechanical issues.  For instance, it had 10 bicycle-style gears but after an hour or two something failed and we were stuck in one gear for the rest of the race.  

A report on the pedal car race.

Yours truly in action.  “Playaway” was the name of our sponsor.

View of the side of our car at rest, with some of the faster cars in the background.

Bremner Building, University of Cape Town.  (Image from Google Maps.)

I think it was in 1975 that I was invited to Bryan Heine’s wedding.  I mentioned in “Ancyent blog19 Early life -- birth to about 6 years old” that Bryan and I were in nursery school (pre-school) together.  After that we were at Grey from grade 1 through grade 12, but I hadn’t seen him since we finished high school.  His wedding is the only one of either a school or college friend that I have attended.  It must have been when I was at home during one of UCT’s vacations because I definitely did not travel back to Port Elizabeth just for his wedding.  Most of the few people at the wedding who I knew were either otherwise occupied (Bryan) or were there with partners.  There was just one other high school friend who was there on his own, Allan Marshall (sp?).  Allan said he had just been released from a tuberculosis sanitarium.  Allan and I chatted for a while and I drank four beers in double-quick time and then drove home.  Four beers would probably have been enough to put me over the legal limit for driving.  (I don’t know if there was an official limit at the time rather than just the judgement of a police officer.)  I drank the beers in such a short interval and then left right afterwards, taking back roads for what was probably just a two-mile drive home.  So I may have been home before most of the alcohol was absorbed.  Nevertheless, that is an episode I regret.  It is now decades since I last drove after having had even a single drink.

Bryan’s father later died in a fishing boat accident.  At least I think it was at some time after the wedding, though all I am sure of is that it was before my parents moved from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria at the end of 1979.

I mentioned in a few previous episodes that South Africa didn’t have a television service before 1975.  Maybe the government realized that TV is a wonderful propaganda tool.  The state-controlled SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) launched test transmissions in 1975.  I think these were initially for two hours each evening.  In January 1976 the service was launched officially.  There was a single channel, with programs in both English and Afrikaans.  Half the broadcast time each day was in each language, with the one being first alternating from day to day.  Because of the cost of producing TV shows, in order to have sufficient material for the Afrikaans part of the service, some imported programs were dubbed into Afrikaans, including ones from English-speaking countries.  For the first couple of years there was no advertising, with the cost of the service funded through a license fee.  Additional channels began service in the 1980s and towards the end of that decade the first channel that was not controlled by the government came into service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_in_South_Africa#Introduction_of_television.

In Driekoppen the common room became the television room.  There was just one TV for the whole residence.  During the 1976 Olympics the only coverage was a half-hour highlights package each evening.  For that we all crowded into the common room.

My parents were opposed to TV.  They thought it was a waste of time. When I was at home during vacations, I sometimes went next door to the Stirks, partly to see Sandy and partly to watch TV.  I remember watching the men’s and women’s Wimbledon finals at least one year.  As Wimbledon is during the northern summer it was during UCT’s winter break.  I think the finals were the only matches that were shown in South Africa.  (After my parents moved to Pretoria at the end of 1979 they bought a TV.  Later my father became quite attached to some programs, such as the sitcom The Golden Girls.)

In the mid-year exam in Mathematics III I managed a stunning 7%.  That kept my record intact of failing the mid-year exam in Math every year.  We had been told that the mid-year grade would not count towards the final grade.  Why put in any effort if it is not going to count for anything?  Well, it turned out that it did count towards something – to earning a d.p. certificate to be allowed to write the final exam.  I ended up having to do a special assignment, which I completed satisfactorily.

At the end of the year I managed first class passes for all the courses I finished that year including Mathematics III.  That completed the requirements for a BSc degree.  Having obtained a first class pass in Mathematics III, I was awarded a distinction in Math.  If one achieved a distinction in all one’s majors the degree was also awarded with distinction, even if “all” was just a single major as in my case.

Results at the end of my third year, which earned me a BSc.  Note that the date is in the format DD/MM/YY, rather than the US version MM/DD/YY.  So the date is early in 1976, giving results at the end of 1975.

Cover page of the graduation program.

Order of the ceremony.  “Die Stem” (literal translation “The Voice”) was the South African national anthem until the end of the Apartheid era. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Stem_van_Suid-Afrika   Part of it is included in the current anthem which is a hybrid from a few sources and in a few languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_anthem_of_South_Africa.

The page with the list of BSc graduates that includes my name.  Among the others with distinction in Mathematics, I mentioned Helen Bradford in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”.  Another is Marc Chimowitz, who was with me in Driekoppen, went on to medical school, then moved to the US, where he is now a highly respected professor of neurology.  Although I haven’t worked with him, we have some mutual collaborators.  (The asterisk * indicates the degree was conferred in absentia.)

Because I didn’t attend graduation, my degree certificate was mailed to me some time later.  It was mailed in a blue plastic tube (see photo below), where it has lived ever since.  I have never had any of my degree certificates framed or put them on display, not even the one for my PhD.

The degree certificate for my BSc.  The somewhat strange bands of color are because, having been rolled up for about 50 years, I struggled to get it to lie flat on the scanner, despite placing a heavy book on it.

The tube in which some of my degree certificates have lived for several decades.

Now I had a degree, but what next?  I had identified several careers that held no interest for me, including physician and math teacher.  But I was still searching something I not only could do but wanted to do.  My next thought was to try electrical engineering.  UCT offered two electrical engineering programs, one in light current and the other in heavy current.  The light current one seemed interesting.  I had already completed the required first-year classes except for chemistry.  So in my first year in the program I signed up for Chemistry I, Mathematical Statistics II (keeping my statistics option open) and some of the second-year engineering classes.

Engineering students were required to spend 6 weeks working in an engineering workshop in the long summer break between the first and second years of the program.  The workshop didn’t have to be of the same type as the program one was in.  So in my case it didn’t have to be an electrical engineering workshop.  Bill Stirk, our neighbor in Port Elizabeth, worked at Bus Bodies (later Busaf), which made buses used by public transport companies around the country.  I think he was the company secretary.  I know he didn’t work on the technical side.  Nonetheless he was able to arrange a job of the right kind in the company’s tool-shop (the unit that produces the dies used for forming the various metal parts of the bodies of the buses). 

Below is a photo of one of the buses in Port Elizabeth that was assembled by Bus Bodies.  The ones I rode in primary school were of an older design that had the entrance at the back, where there was just an open platform without a door that could be closed.  Those had a conductor who collected fares.  While the bus was moving between stops the conductor would sometimes hang onto a pole at the entrance and lean out over the road.  By the time I was in high school most of the busss were like the one in the photo, with the door at the front.  I don’t recall whether by that stage the driver collected fares without needing a conductor to do that.  The “CB” at the start of the license plate shows that this was in Port Elizabeth.  Back then license numbers in the Cape Province started with two or three letters followed by a variable number of digits.  The letters denoted the city or town where the vehicle was registered.  “CA” was for Cape Town and “CB” for Port Elizabeth.  (The car I took over from my mother was CB 93581.) 

Double decker bus assembled by Bus Bodies.  Photo found somewhere on the Internet.

The 6 weeks I spent working in the tool-shop was the only time in my life that I had to punch a time card.  I spent the whole of the 6 weeks shadowing one of the young apprentices (whose name I have long forgotten).  I learned a lot in the 6 weeks – not much about engineering but plenty about the kinds of people who work in jobs that require them to punch time cards.  It was a worthwhile and positive experience.  (A few years later I learned a lot from working with professional engineers.  More on that when I get to write about my 2 years as a conscript in the SA Navy.)

I knew that while working in the tool-shop I would be on my feet for long hours and so would probably be too tired to run, at least on weekdays.  That may have been the motivation to go on a crash diet.  For those six weeks I restricted myself to a few pieces of hard candy and a small evening meal each day.  The 6 weeks were split into two sessions, interrupted by the Christmas / New Year holiday period.  Even during that break I ate very little.  I have no idea how much I weighed before I started the diet or how much weight I lost.  Although I have report cards from primary school that record my height and weight, that information is not on my old report cards from high school.  So I don’t have any record of what I weighed after I stopped growing (taller).  An interesting thing I discovered after that diet was that my stomach seemed to have shrunk.  Eating a normal size meal was uncomfortable for quite a while afterwards.  That made me think that although anorexia nervosa may start out as being an entirely psychological condition, it may later become physically difficult to eat larger amounts.  This was the only time in my life in which I have dieted.

By the time I returned to UCT at the start of the 1976 academic year I had lost most of the flab around my waist that I had been carrying since early childhood.  For the first time I wasn’t embarrassed to be seen without a shirt!  (I still don’t feel comfortable without a top though.  Even when it was hot enough that most of my running partners ditched their tops, I still always wore at least a singlet.)

My brother Mick had finished high school at the end of 1975.  He was also accepted at UCT, to study social work.  Not only was he also at UCT with me in 1976, he was also in Driekoppen and even on the same floor of Blue block!

As I mentioned above, I registered for an engineering degree in 1976, including for some second-year classes.  That didn’t last very long.  One of the electrical engineering classes was called something like “Fundamentals of Electrical Measurements”.  Within the first several days it became clear that the instructor assumed we had all being making electrical circuits through high school and were very familiar with the various measuring instruments.  I hadn’t and wasn’t, so was completely lost.  I suppose I should have buckled down and done the hard work to get up to speed.  But I took the easy way out and decided to quit the engineering program.  At least I was still registered for Mathematical Statistics II, which would enable me to do a BSc(Hons) degree in that subject the next year.  I have not had any regrets about quitting the engineering program, but don’t know why I dropped the Chemistry class too.

Mathematical Statistics I, which I had taken in 1975, was taught by just one instructor, John Affleck-Graves.  I think we had several instructors for different parts of Mathematical Statistics II.  (A photo in” Ancyent blog28 UCT 1977” shows the students in our class that year plus the department’s instructors.)  One of them was June Juritz, who was the first and only female instructor I had as an undergraduate.  I hadn’t even had a female teacher in high school!  June’s husband was a professor in the Physics department.  I don’t recall which module she taught but something she told us has stuck with me.  She was collaborating with researchers who studying domestic violence.  She said that what they had found was that domestic violence occurred almost equally across most levels of society, from the very wealthy right on down, rather than being mostly an issue among those whose day-to-day life was a struggle.  I have since heard something similar from other sources.

Photo of (some) 1976 Driekoppen residents.  In case you don’t recognize me, I am 6^th from the right in the front row.  Norman Adami, mentioned in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” as later being CEO of SABMiller Americas, is 3^rd from the right in the front row.  Peter Leon, whose article complaining about the lack of political interest in Driekoppen I included in “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” is 5^th from the right in the front row, next to me.  My brother Mick, who was in his first year, is 7^th from the left in the second-last row.  If not for the names given below the photo, I might not have recognized him! 

It may have been in 1975 but I think it was probably some time in 1976 that I started drinking on my own in my room in the evenings.  Most evenings I had 4 beers and a large packet of salted peanuts.  We had a fridge on our floor in Blue block, so I could keep beer cold.  (I hate warm beer.)  I used to read novels while drinking.  Every few days I replenished my stocks of beer and visited the local public library for a fresh supply of books.  I am sure I read every book by P. G. Wodehouse that was in was in that library (or our local one in Port Elizabeth).  I continued drinking by myself most evenings for the rest of my time in Driekoppen (and beyond).

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 10 beers in 3 miles up and down monstrous hills.  (It was at least 8 beers but something I saw recently said it was 10.  Either way, it was a lot, even just in terms of volume.  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 Driekoppen, but I didn’t try to take part until the 1976 edition.  (A friend who was a medical student and later qualified as a doctor won in one of the previous 3 years.)  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 chance of 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 Driekoppen, and we went in a clockwise direction from there.  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 Driekoppen, on the way to the main campus.  Back in those days, when going to and from classes, 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 the site of the 1974 3,000m race that I dropped out of (see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”.  Bright daylight in the image, unlike during that 3,000m race. 😊

Although 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 (which I didn’t even start, see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974”) 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”). 

Those of us who were competing were supposed to keep our beer down until we finished.  But next to the base of the Rhodes Memorial – the point marked with an X on the map – the combination of at least 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 admitting here (but not for the first time) that I cheated.  Just after the finish I fertilized another bush, this time in front of at least some witnesses.  But as that bush was behind the finish line this was not grounds for disqualification.

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 the alcohol to get absorbed by the time they reached the pedestrian bridge marked with a 3.  So, 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 be driving 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. 

Map of the beer race route.

Breaking away from the competition.  Rob Beare was in second place at that stage.  I don’t recall where he finished.

This may have been the last beer stop.  The guy holding two beer bottles is my brother Mick, who was a freshman and was helping with the event.

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 could 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, though not less often.

The first entry in my running 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.  Comrades was the largest and most prestigious race in the country.  Back then it was held on what was an annual public holiday that is no longer celebrated, Republic Day, that celebrated South Africa having become a republic on May 31, 1961.  (A referendum about breaking ties with Britain had been held the previous year.  Voting in the referendum was restricted to White people, with 52.3% voting to become a republic.)  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).  Distances were all guesstimates, in those days before GPS.  I always tried to estimate conservatively.  Some runs were from the cross-country club-house at the cricket oval.  Several routes from there had commonly accepted distances, for instance “Jack’s” that went up into the Newlands Forest was regarded as being 6 miles; and the out and back to the top of Constantia Neck was taken to be 13 miles.  For 14 of the next 15 weeks leading up to the 1976 Stellenbosch Marathon, I managed 50 miles per week.  For most weeks in that period, I recorded the distance I ran each day but for some weeks I recorded just the total.  In order to reach 50 miles each week I sometimes did two short runs in a day.  In that 15-week period, the only run of longer than 9 miles that I did was the 13 miles to Constantia Neck and back on one occasion.

(I inherited my father-in-law’s running log books.  His first entry was for June 28, 1975.  I don’t know how long he had been running before that.  By that stage I had been running for about 5 years.)

The first entry in my logbook for a race was for the 1976 Stellenbosch Marathon, on 9/18/1976,  As in 1975, the event had an “A” and a “B” race (this was the last time there were two separate races).  Unlike in 1975 when both races used the same course but started at different times (see “Ancyent blog28 UCT 1973 and 1974” in 1976 the “B” race was banished to the early morning and an out-and-back route mainly on a road through the scrubby sand dunes that can be seen in the photo below.  I finished in 19^th position in 3:00:09, the other three in the photo managing to get under 3 hours.

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).  Tony was several years older than the rest of us and was the unofficial leader of our informal training group.

Back to academics.  As I mentioned earlier, I had started the year registered for a degree in electrical engineering, but soon dropped those classes.  I was left with just one course, Mathematical Statistics II.  With such a light load I managed to be the top student in the class, earning the class medal.  (I presume a class medal was awarded to the top student in each class.)

Result of the only class for which I remained registered in 1976.

Class medal for Mathematical Statistics II in 1976, showing the cover of the box and the two sides of the medal.