Your weekends start really early. Like really early. So early that even in the mild Durban winters, your breath fogs up when you exhale. And you’re only six years old so this is still a novelty. You eat your breakfast out of a Tupperware in the back of the car, fumbling for the light so you can see how many mouthfuls of Weetbix are left.
Leaving the car all bundled up in your warmest gear, you’re marched across a damp field in the dark to the running club’s tent. The smell of Deep Heat grows ever stronger as you near the mass of bags while runners ready themselves for the marathon. You get left with some snacks and a relative stranger, tasked with making sure you don’t run off. And then, you wait.
You’d wait anywhere from 3:43 (mother’s Personal Best) to 5:30 (a bad day) which, when you’re six, is about three days. The first day or so is cold and dark, but the boredom and subsequent mild abandonment issues are the worst of it.
Nevertheless, the sun does come up. Sometimes, you team up with the other leftover children scurrying about. When I was older, we’d make proper use of the round black bins and entire Test matches would break out. The problem was, just as the third innings got underway, it would be time to go home. Test match abandoned. Disappointment all around.
Other activities included water sachet wars, which ranged from polite spraying to throwing unopened sachets at maximum velocity to twisting several of them together for a weapon of mass saturation.
However, this drenching took a back seat if there were sports drink sachets. Then, the goal was to procure as many as possible on the sly. One time, a friend and I split about 80 or so at the end of a productive morning, more isotonic drink than any hyper kid should ever have access to.
Then came the Comrades Marathons. So many of them. Countless were spent at the side of Old Main Road in Kloof, where supporters would break out their camping gear along a beautiful stretch of verge under the trees. The mornings were filled with the smell of bacon and eggs on a raft of skottles, while a seemingly endless hubbub of fast then not-so-fast participants went by.
If we got bored of the smelly mass, there were trees to climb and train tracks to play on. There, I learned you could make a R1 coin the size of a R5 coin and make rocks disappear. Eventually, turning back my attention to the road, I’d see my mom for a bit, trot along with her and she’d be so happy.
You see, during those dark and lonely mornings, my single mother was fighting her own battles. She started running when I was a toddler and immediately found it lifted her mood. Then when divorce turned her life upside down and she was juggling a career and parenthood alone, running taught her direction and confidence, while the running club offered a community. Eventually, the ultramarathons that followed gave her a sense of accomplishment and recognition.
Now, no less than 31 Comrades later, she is far from those early days of being a struggling single mom. As for me, I can still smell the Deep Heat…
A collection of original texts 