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.