To run, or...

Writer's block?  It was quite a sturdy block.  It was a while since I last wrote anything.  This edition doesn't really has anything to do with "elsewhere".  Nevertheless, I hope it will motivate me to continue writing.
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Saturday 16 November was a very special day.  Gerhard, the youngest of my two boys, and I ran together for the first time in years.  It was the 5 km of the Valhalla Parkrun. 

With that in mind, and to explain why it was such a special day, I turn the clock back to January 1994.  We had just moved to Pretoria, and the schools would start in a week or so after the Christmas recess. 

Both the boys, who were still in the primary school, took part in the 1 200 m, and I thought they should make a good impression at the start of the athletics season in the new school.  I commandeered them that afternoon to go for a run.

What a shock it was.  We had just started running when they left me behind.  I realised that since I stopped playing rugby three years ago, I became extremely unfit.  That afternoon I decided it was the end of it.  I had to get off my backside and start practicing again.

Initially, the idea was to jog a few kilometres after work to get fit.  With the help of the military's sports clinic I got the right shoes and a programme to get started.  The few kilometres of walking and jogging have become a 5 km run.  That became 8 km, then 10, and then 12.

Early in November 1994, after some conniving between my dear wife, Elize, and her cousin, Daan Boshoff, I found myself, totally against my will, at the Loftus rugby stadium on the start line for a half-marathon early one Saturday morning – all 21,097494 km of it (if you are a sucker for detail).  I was surprised that I was still keeping up with Daan around halfway.  And even more so when he said I shouldn’t let him keep me back.  I stumbled over the finish line in less than 2 hours.

As some people would say, the rest is history.  By the year 2000 I completed my fourth and last Comrades Ultra Marathon, the year of the 75th anniversary[i]  of South Africa's most iconic and world-renowned road race.

Gerhard stopped running along the way. Christi continued, and ran for the rest of his school career.  During his high school years, he joined our club, and ran a few 10 km and half-marathon races with me.  And let me eat dust again.  And never stopped running.

Christi's big wish was to run his first Comrades with me.  Because of my personal circumstances, it has unfortunately never worked out.   He completed his first two in the meantime.

With my travels elsewhere, I was initially off the road for a few years.  In 2011, while working in Mogadishu, I started running again.  But never much more than 10 km at a time.   

On 20 June 2017, six months before my contract in Darfur was terminated, I thought my running-days were finally over when I tore my Achilles tendon in a running accident. After much patience and hard work, I was able to run 10 km again a year later.

And then, towards the end of last winter, Gerhard and I received a challenge from Christi. The 100th commemoration of the Comrades will be in June 2021.  And the three of us are going to do this together.

Christi asked us what our motivation would be to do such a thing.  I never answered, but if I had to, it would probably be the same as when my late mother asked me why I ran Comrades: “Because it is there”, with reference to Mallory in response to why he tried to climb Everest.

My two boys' motivations are much more nuanced and serious.  Christi said, among other things: "I had the ideal since high school to run the Comrades with Dad. As the years go by, it becomes increasingly difficult to do so, and the sooner the better – reproach is a heavy burden to carry.”  And further: “I have the need to do something "epic" with Dad and Gerhard. The nature of the challenge with regards to the distance and your current fitness levels will make it rather ‘epic'."

Gerhard said: "We enjoyed running while we were at school and I always assumed we would be running Comrades together at some stage. I don't want to look back in future and think I could have done this or that and rebuke myself because I was too lazy to do it. "

A mountain of hard work has still to be done, but Comrades 2021, here we come.

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[i] The first Comrades were run in 1921.  The Comrades were not run in 1941-1954 during World War II.