Minimalist Misadventures

We had travelled by bus in the early morning to this point in the middle of nowhere. The sky was dark but the first signs of morning light were appearing over the horizon. The air was clear after several days of heavy rain but again the clouds were building on the horizon and I had no idea whether the day ahead would be clear or rainy. It was the Cape after all, anything was possible.

Several buses offloaded the few hundred runners that huddled around in the half light, some drinking cheap coffee provided by the organiser. We were in the middle of a very large valley and the evidence of the heavy rains of the past week was clear to see. The famed Cape fynbos was wet and the gravel shoulders of the narrow tar road were alternately stony mud and deep puddles. I looked at my watch. It was about half an hour before the 6 am start of the run. This was a standard marathon that included a run on unpaved farm roads, a single track mountain crossing and return, on tar, to our original town of departure, Bredasdorp. It was truly a mixed run and a hard one. 

The buses were used to take runners 12 kilometers out of the town of Bredasdorp to a featureless point on an unnamed and desolate road so as to keep the route to a standard 42 kilometres. My friend Trevor had suggested the night before that instead of the austere and cold bus we simply ran the 12 kilometres to the start point, thus turning our race into the first ever Foot of Africa Ultra! This proposal was not embraced with fondness by Mike and I.

Mike is my brother-in-law and much like myself, he had seen his running endeavours diminish over the previous few years and together we had agreed to run this marathon in a valiant effort to turn around our looming physical dilapidation.  So there were the three of us .... waiting .... with all the others.

The area immediately around us was pretty flat but a little further out mountains arose on all sides. I wondered where we would be running. The buses had stopped at the intersection with a small gravel road that on the left hand side was nothing more than twin tracks through the scrub. To the right the gravel road was a little bigger and headed away from us on the tar at an oblique angle. The morning was getting lighter but it was not readily evident because the clouds in the west had surreptitiously moved overhead and the last of the morning stars were now lost behind low-hanging heavy clouds. Although it wasn't light it wasn't dark either, a kind of no man's land in time. The humidity was high and it was difficult to work out if it was actually cold or not. Cold is something I do not appreciate but after some cursory deliberation I decided it was not actually cold, just a damp illusion of cold.

  

And then it started to rain lightly. What the .....! This was not supposed to happen. Despite the recent flood-like rains the worlds finest weather forecasters had predicted that at 6 am on the Saturday morning of the race, the sun would shine and it would only start raining again at the exact point I finished running. That's what they said and I believed it. Now I was getting wet in the drizzle. I looked down at my new Newton shoes. Bright red and so clean. And then I looked around and pondered all the mud that lay between me and the finish. This didn't add up to "happiness" and it also was not part of the Plan.

Clutched in my hand was a cloth bag housing my running sandals, thin hard sandals that I had made a month earlier. This little bag contained the "Plan". Both Mike and Trevor knew that I wanted to run this marathon in minimalist sandals but they also knew that if conditions were not right I would simply stick to traditional running shoes. And rain was a condition that I considered "not right".  So here I was caught between a cloud and pool of mud. The time was about 5:45am and I knew I had to make a decision fast. I looked across the road at the tog bag truck which was quickly filling up as runners dumped their superfluous clothing and other accoutrements. This truck would take all the kit to the finish and it was going to take my running shoes or my running sandals. 

Runners were starting to move a short way down the road to a point where the race would officially start. I looked around for Trevor but he had disappeared. He had recently struggled with some foot injuries and had his own demons to deal with. That's when I saw the barefoot runner. And then another runner in Vibram Five Fingers. Suddenly it seemed like this place was overrun with minimalist runners. What an insult!  Not only did I have company but I had moronic competition too. Barefoot! Across these mountains. I looked again at the barefoot bloke. No, he must be a farm kid. Or maybe he didn't have a frontal lobe. Something was amiss. Secretly I had always been quite proud of my sandals but now in the company of these fringe runners I was merely an "also ran". Just another "wannabee". My dejection must have been palpable as Mike turned to me and said "just do it, put them on".

"Should I?" I asked.

"Just do it" he said again. And in an instant I knew the rain was nothing and I knew it would never be cold and I also knew my sandals were more than the task ahead, so I quickly and inauspiciously put them on, walked over to the tog bag truck and tossed my indolent Newtons into the back.

I was ready to go and my sandals felt great. They were well worn and if nothing else they were much lighter than any conventional running footwear. We followed the other runners and grouped at a point on the road even though it was still not clear which way we would start running. I didn't care. I could run anywhere. Fortunately the light rain was really light and I thought that it may be possible that it did not turn into anything worse. Finally a gunshot went off and runners started to move. Trevor, Mike and I bade our farewells and set off. This would be my first marathon in my homemade sandals.

The Foot of Africa Marathon is a truly wonderful event. It is run in the countryside around Bredasdorp in South Africa not far from Cape Agulhas which is the southern most tip of Africa. The run itself is both a road race and a cross country race as it traverses a mountain range, and because of this it is considered quite tough. I had run this race some time earlier and when perusing my running record I found that it was a full 20 years earlier. Any memories of the run were therefore somewhat unreliable and indeed more-so because they had changed the route over the years.

Earlier in the year I had approached Mike with the idea of running this race which he readily agreed to, and then, because more was merrier, I looked up my first ever running mate, Trevor, and propositioned him too. While Mike and I lived in Johannesburg Trevor lived in Cape Town where he and I together had taken up running 26 years earlier. Trevor, in his spare time builds rockets and he sent me emails of some big things shooting up into the sky. I was impressed and to cap him I said that although I couldn't build a rocket I would modify my running sandal design and build a new one for the Foot of Africa Marathon, and with middle-class grandiosity I would call it the T. Rocket. And so we had a Plan and some Rockets.

Now we were running the Foot. There were no distance markers and I was struggling to work out my pace. It didn't really matter because whatever my pace, it was too fast. I hadn't run a marathon in 6 years and I knew that the tough course ahead was going to test me. For the first few kilometers things were fine and I was pleased that my sandals felt better than I could have imagined. I was quite exuberant and even managed to chat to a couple of other runners that expressed interest in my footwear, my T. Rockets. We were running on farm roads that were very stony at times and always very undulating. The long uphills were gentle but long, and the short downhills were mostly a bit sharper but always shorter than the uphills, and so we gradually gained height rising above the valley floor. The weather was pretty good for running. A few drops of rain came down but it never caused a problem and after an hour or so things got drier. The temperature was also fairly mild for a while. Finally a distance marker at the 10 kilometer point showed that I was indeed probably running a bit faster than I should and my thoughts of slowing down got serious impetus when we suddenly came upon a tape across the road. This was the end of the fun run. We were directed off the road onto a barely discernible track that led literally straight up the mountainside to our right. 

This track was nothing more than a small watercourse with the run-off of the previous weeks' rain streaming down the sandy channel. The water was dark and brackish contrasting strongly against the whitish sand underfoot. This sand was nothing more than sea sand and so the going got tough in the soft wet riverine furrow. One had to run in straddle mode with feet on either side of the burbling sprite. I was scared of slipping and vainly crimped up my toes hoping to grip the sides of the waterlogged trench. Somehow it worked and slowly we gained altitude finally exiting the rut onto a vague jeep track higher up the mountain. We were getting close to the top and the views around us were widening beyond the 180 degree point. Beauty was everywhere and my gaze back south searched for the hidden tip of Africa but the air was still a little hazy with cloud and mist. But this too began to break up as we headed northward across the top of the mountain range.

Running over the top of the mountain was exquisite as we were far from civilisation and the vistas were now a full 360 degree extravagance. The Cape fynbos, renowned for its beauty was in full splendour and the air was, as they say, like champagne. We passed the halfway mark somewhere near the highest point of the run and I was mildly ecstatic.

Then the downhill running started. I think it was about 5 kilometres of downhill running. Down, down, down to a small hamlet called Napier. Five kilometres that crushed my mild ecstasy.  Running in thin uncushioned flat shoes is pretty different to big well sprung traditional running shoes. This difference is noticeable at all times but none so much as running downhill. In fact the difference when running downhill is not only about the shoe it is also about the way we run. It was for me, as I discovered with each painful meter of descent, inordinately hard.

My running pace down the mountain was probably slower than my earlier pace up the other side. I tried to save what ever was worth saving in my legs but I wasn't sure what would be left if I ever got back onto level ground. My watch didn't help much is it no longer served the purpose of timekeeping it was a mere mocking device that showed the extent of the ever growing lapsed time. Things around me seemed to remain the same, I was going nowhere, but the time was always advancing. We eventually ran through Napier which is a very pretty place but to me, at the time, it was one big bad rollercoaster ride. The hills in Napier are ridiculous for such a small village and I wondered why on earth they had populated a place where going to the village centre was akin to a mountain expedition.  And then, after the final desperate descent at the periphery, this village spews you out like a spent husk with only the big tar road back to Bredasdorp remaining.

That is when my feet started to reject me. My unsupporting sandals, the unforgiving soles, no longer felt quite as funky as they had earlier. I wondered about the barefoot runner. The farm roads and mountain path were both a lot softer than this tar. My feet also now had about 35 kilometers in them as well as one big mountain crossing. It just made things worse. I could prove all of this because my arches were collapsing, my toes were straining, and a mild tension was building up in my achilles tendons.

Running back to Bredasdorp was not easy. And it was not much fun other than the farm labourer that yelled out "Haai Meneer, hou met die plakkies!" The sun had come out. It was hot. The road was always going up, or so it seemed and there was a fair amount of heavy duty traffic.  Sometimes the gusts of air turbulence from passing trucks would knock me sideways. But slowly, very slowly I inched closer to Bredasdorp, finally entering the town together with a burst of happy Saturday shopper traffic, and of course another hill.

This was the hill that 20 years earlier had reduced me with cramps and spoilt my chances of a silver medal by a mere minute or so. And as I crested this hill and lengthened my stride for the last kilometer to the finish I was struck down with cramps yet again. They say lightning never strikes the same place twice yet this ominous sign proved otherwise. My hamstrings were cramped badly and I hopped around knowing instantly that there was no easy way out of this predicament. The finish line was about 1500 meters away and it could now take a long, long time to get there. My watched laughed at me ..... again.

But get there I did, and feigning some casual strength I accelerated across the last muddy field before entering the finish arena. And so ended my first minimal sandal marathon.

I never again saw the barefoot runner after about 5 kilometres into the race and I never saw the Vibram Five Fingers runner other than at the start. After finishing I collected my bag filled with vivid red Newtons and slowly walked back to my hotel which incidentally meant following the last 1500m of the race route. I knew that I was OK. The walk back helped. Everything was fine. Tomorrow would harbour some aches and pains but nothing more. As I was walking in tired contemplation, another runner, still running to the finish, called out to her mate alongside her, "There he is, there he is. There's the runner in sandals!"  As she passed me she asked "Did you run all the way in those sandals?" and I shouted back "Yes, yes I did".