When the time finally arrives for some long anticipated event, there is an air of surreality to the experience.
OutDoor with Rosie Mitchell
All the more so when the happening has required months of intensive preparation.
Boarding the plane, Cape Town bound, it was hard to believe this moment had crept right up on us, the final three weeks of tapered training passing in a haze of frantic last minute work.
With delight, I encountered a rarely seen snake on my penultimate Harare session, a species seen only once before, and a specimen of such large size, this time, hardly ever seen at all, since they live almost all the time underground.
The Schlegel’s Beaked Blind snake is harmless, and in my view, very pretty, though most folk look at me sidewise when I describe any snake that way! This one, a metre long, as big as they can get, was also extraordinarily fat.
Looking it up, I discovered this to be typical of the fully grown individuals, who hardly ever come up to the surface — once again, I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time! Not far from here, we had recently seen a Purple Glossed snake, also one of the blind snakes, a rare sighting, and attractive, too.
We did our last evening training session of any notable length, barring short jogs and intervals to “sharpen” the running muscles this week, from Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens at the foot of Table Mountain — a beautiful place.
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In 45 minutes, and in anticipation of my up-coming assault in the 22km trail run on the Devil’s Peak end of this mammoth mountain, I managed to run, hop and climb my way up Skeleton Gorge to the beginning of the table top, and one of the reservoirs, built at the end of the nineteenth century — which, however, was empty.
The golden evening light was beautiful, the climb, at speed, challenging and fun. I enjoyed the series of ladders conveniently placed to help hikers up a particularly steep section!
Registration for two oceans Registration was a well-oiled machine. This year, the ultramarathon (56km) is fully subscribed with 11 000 runners.
Add the 16 000 half-marathon entrants, the 800 trail runners, plus over 1 000 more, in various fun, friendship and children’s runs on the periphery, and the three-day expo which has now moved to a larger venue, the International Conference Centre, and the magnitude of the Old Mutual Two Oceans Marathon is clear!
Securing a place in the half-marathon and the trail run was challenging, and the last 10 000 places in the half-marathon which opened to novices in January sold out in less than two days.
And now, I’m putting my feet up, ready for my first big day, tomorrow’s trail run!
Virtual coach offers invaluable tips on marathons
Old Mutual, amongst the multiple ways it funds and supports the Two Oceans Marathon and other events around it, engages a “virtual coach” annually, to prepare training programmes tailored to differing abilities and target times, and to answer queries via an online forum.
On sending a query in January to virtual coach and well-known ultra runner Norrie Williamson, we discovered this to be a rapidly answered, very useful facility. Email correspondence and very useful advice followed, and shortly after arrival in Cape Town, we had a coaching session with Norrie, finding him to be as friendly, helpful and modest in the flesh as he had been “virtually!”
The Scottish accent took us entirely by surprise, since we’d been expecting a South African — which indeed he is, but he grew up in Scotland and has the wry, dry wit I always associate with the Scots.
The elected meeting place was Cape Town airport, on his arrival, since his schedule was not surprisingly hectic this week; he was on duty full-time at the three day Two Oceans Expo, and also, running both the trail and half-marathon! This was a fascinating couple of hours.
A rapid examination of our current running shoes was all that was needed to isolate any problem areas, which related entirely to occupations requiring spending several hours a day at computers, and all the hazards to the human skeleton and musculature, entailed therein!
In both our cases, our unbalanced posture at our desks (very common, of course!), he assessed, had resulted in a slight favouring of one leg above the other, and a cascade effect from there, as happens in the human body, over time, with muscle imbalance, stiffness, and the end result, of less than super-efficient running.
The session moved to the practical, outside Mugg and Bean coffee shop, which no doubt amused those paying attention, as we ran up and down for further assessment of running style, and were given pointers and corrections as to the way forward, then tried them out!
We thoroughly enjoyed our time with this delightful coach, and learnt a huge amount of things that were new to us. His knowledge and passion for his subject were inspiring and we left full of confidence for race day and future running.
