I’m not quite sure what brought it on.

Per­haps it was turn­ing 46 – edg­ing towards a half cen­tury and a last chance to cling to a glim­mer of youth­ful­ness. The seed was planted by my gor­geous Kiwi friend with the toned, tanned legs and a pen­chant for Boot Camp.

“Come on, it will be fun!” she enthused. Fun?

I mulled it over for a few days and then an old spark of com­pet­i­tive­ness was rekin­dled. Per­haps this old girl wasn’t so old after all.

We decided five kilo­me­tres would not suf­fice – far more chal­leng­ing was to com­mit to 10km in the annual Bridge to Bris­bane run.

 

There is noth­ing par­tic­u­larly pro­found about run­ning a 10km race. Sea­soned ath­letes regard the dis­tance as a mere train­ing run — a lit­tle jog to get the cir­cu­la­tion going.

And it’s not as though I’ve never run the dis­tance before. I am not, what one would call, a com­plete novice. I have run the dis­tance many, many times. In fact, if I should be so bold, in ‘my run­ning days’ I have run a lot further.

At the peak of my run­ning years, I ran the Two Oceans ultra-marathon in Cape Town — pounded the breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful (if you had any energy to actu­ally look) scenic route for 56km. Regarded as the most pic­turesque ultra marathon in the world, the route fol­lows a more or less cir­cu­lar route, start­ing in New­lands, through Muizen­burg, Fish Hoek over Chapman’s Peak and Con­stan­tia Nek, even­tu­ally fin­ish­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of Cape Town cam­pus. I still have the T-shirt to prove I fin­ished and sur­vived to tell the tale.

I ran two marathons prior to that — and count­less 10km, 5km and 21km fun runs and Exec­u­tive Relays. Hardly a week­end went by when I wasn’t par­tic­i­pat­ing in some sort of run­ning event. I even did the Cap­i­tal Climb one year — a gru­elling 15km climb from Pietermaritzburg’s City Hall to World’s View — then a fast trot down again.

But then I got mar­ried and shortly after­wards, had my first child. The lack of sleep dur­ing the ensu­ing years and chil­dren meant that run­ning held about the same appeal as stick­ing draw­ing pins into my eye­balls. I still exer­cised, but now out of a fever­ish need to get babies to sleep rather than the enjoy­ment of a morn­ing jog.

Over the years, I gave a half-hearted attempt to rekin­dle my run­ning flame but it never quite seemed the right time to start again. So I walked instead. I had, in essence hung up my run­ning shoes with­out much fan­fare at all. It was sim­ply time to call it a day.

And yet, here I was, once again, prepar­ing to do my first race since arriv­ing on Aus­tralian soil 13 years ago — my first race ever since a fun run some 19 years ago. And so began my hap­haz­ard train­ing sched­ule. I was inter­ested to note that where I once ran come rain or shine, mid­dle age had turned me into a decid­edly fair weather run­ner. Too cold — no, I’ll give it a miss today. Too hot — no way, couldn’t pos­si­bly go out in this heat­wave … cof­fee and a chat, you asked? Yes please. I was the princess of excuses.

 

Weeks went by and I wasn’t exactly clock­ing up the mileage. But I did have a secret weapon. We live at the end of a cul-de-sac and the only way out is up a hill so steep and long it takes my lit­tle Yaris a few gear changes to reach the top. The undu­lat­ing ter­rain there­after means that no run is a walk in the park. There is no reprieve. I fig­ured that run­ning up this hill and the hillocks there­after meant my out­put was at least dou­ble those train­ing on a flat route. So when I ran 2km, I men­tally dou­bled this dis­tance. My max­i­mum train­ing run was around 3km in length but I con­vinced myself this was actu­ally 6km in terms of energy expenditure.

The date loomed. I was still not that con­cerned as I was cer­tain my body would remem­ber it was once an effi­cient run­ning machine. I was totally opti­mistic that some­how, my mus­cles would oblig­ingly snap to atten­tion and carry me the dis­tance with ease. Com­pared with 56km, 10km was a breeze. This body would surely not let me down.

Apart from the scant train­ing prepa­ra­tion, there was the small mat­ter of run­ning shorts. I hadn’t donned a pair for at least a decade and a half — was I coura­geous enough?

My deci­sion to apply lash­ings of fake tan­ning lotion was partly for rea­sons of van­ity and partly for the good of all in the race — my run­ning part­ner in par­tic­u­lar would be blinded by the reflec­tion of my lily-white freck­led pins, I rea­soned. There was no way I was going to look like a reflec­tion wait­ing to happen.

Polit­i­cally incor­rect it may be but there is no get­ting around it; a tan hides a mul­ti­tude of sins. I can­not think of a sin­gle per­son who doesn’t look bet­ter with a tan other than the porcelain-skinned Nicole and a few other alabaster skinned souls.

 

There was a slight con­cern, how­ever. The last time I had attempted to fake a tan, was while camp­ing at More­ton Island. My beauty ther­a­pist sister-in-law had offered an all-over spray tan which looked great for approx­i­mately 10 min­utes until I began to itch. I spent five sleep­less nights scratch­ing. There were enough sand flies to carry away the entire camp­site but it was not the annoy­ing bugs that were the prob­lem, it was the fake tan­ning lotion. I was clearly aller­gic. I don’t find camp­ing exactly com­fort­able at the best of times but endur­ing a night of scratch­ing took it to an entirely new level of discomfort.

I had tried sev­eral brands there­after with the same result. As insane as it may sound, I decided to take my chances and lather up. This, in spite of a friend’s rather bru­tal obser­va­tion that it wouldn’t really mat­ter any­way because no-one would be watch­ing the mid­dle aged woman with white freckly legs. She was absolutely right but van­ity pre­vailed. I would take my chances and fake tan – and bare the con­se­quences later.

The day dawned after a rather rest­less night of imag­ined itches and panic at not wak­ing on time. I had for­got­ten how early one had to rise to get to a 6.25am start – par­tic­u­larly to a race attract­ing 45,000 run­ners! I had set my alarm for a ruth­less 4.15am, allow­ing plenty of time to ren­dezvous with my run­ning part­ner whose gra­cious hus­band had agreed to drive us to the start.

I left behind three sleep­ing chil­dren and a hus­band groan­ing with the body-aching effects of flu.

“Do my legs look orange?’ I asked as he raised his throb­bing head to whis­per good­bye. Had run­ning turned me into a ruth­less nar­cis­sist? I would address that later. Right now, there was a race to run.

 

Traf­fic was sparse as we drove through a sleepy city until we reached the out­skirts and approached the start. It soon became snail pace as a steady stream of cars merged. Most car­ried eager beaver run­ners and there were the occa­sional bleary-eyed, bemused party goers befud­dled by the unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally large flow of Sun­day morn­ing traffic.

We finally reached a point close enough to walk to the start and joined a sea of fel­low run­ners in an assort­ment of out­fits and sport­ing a vari­ety of body types. There were plenty of freckly white legs, I noted. And they were not being herded into their own category.

Run­ners stretched as far as the eye could see and I noticed with some panic that the toi­lets had a 200m queue of run­ners both ways. I would take my chances and ‘knuyp’. Weak blad­der would have to be dis­ci­plined. There was another rather wor­ry­ing con­di­tion I had to con­tend with. In the past few weeks I had been grap­pling with the pesky remains of Guardia, a stom­ach bug that caused run­ning of a dif­fer­ent kind. I was slightly panic stricken at the thought of hav­ing to find a loo in the mid­dle of indus­trial Brisbane.

Enter­ing a race of such mag­ni­tude can be rather a let down, I dis­cov­ered. There we were all dressed up (some of us tanned) and with nowhere to go, yet. We shuf­fled for half an hour before finally being able to break into a rea­son­able trot. Some new tech­nol­ogy since I last entered a race meant that our lit­tle mag­netic disk we had tied to our run­ning shoes only acti­vated our time as we crossed the start line.

The first few kilo­me­tres went rather smoothly, in spite of being passed by a woman at least 20 years our senior.

“She prob­a­bly has the time to train,” my part­ner in crime reassured.

Not so assur­ing were the com­ments she relayed from a pass­ing motor cyclist head­ing in the oppo­site direction.

“I’m sure he said ‘Go fat bot­tomed girls!’” exclaimed my friend breath­lessly, within earshot of a pass­ing male jog­ger. Per­haps he was deflect­ing the sex­ist remark or was sim­ply a quick thinker – or per­haps my friend did indeed hear incor­rectly but as he passed, the fel­low run­ner said, “the guy on the Harley? No, he said fol­low the yel­low brick road.”

 

Now I don’t know which story is cor­rect, but some­one is telling a tall story. “Fat bot­tomed girls” sounds noth­ing like “fol­low the yel­low brick road” if you ask me.

As both of us should be so lucky to be fat bot­tomed girls, we ignored the com­ment and passed a bat­man looka­like and two nubile fairies com­plete with pink wings. We waved to a troupe of beam­ing women on bongo drums.  A kilo­me­tre later and we encoun­tered a group of veg­e­tar­i­ans with a plac­ard encour­ag­ing us all to become veg­e­tar­i­ans — ‘It’s eas­ier than you think. Become a veg­e­tar­ian’ read one innocu­ous sign. I felt hon­oured they’d decided we were healthy can­di­dates for their cause.

We were both far­ing well. So far so good. No need to walk yet. And no gur­gling stom­ach. At the out­set, we’d given our­selves the option of bail­ing. Well, not actu­ally stop­ping, but walk­ing. This was a fun run and we would only run as far as we were able. No more. If that meant walk­ing the last five kilo­me­tres, so be it. We were passed the age of wor­ry­ing about what oth­ers thought, weren’t we? But there was no harm in try­ing, was there? “Remem­ber, if we can do five, we can do ten, I mut­tered breath­lessly as we edged over the 5km mark.

Com­pet­i­tive­ness pre­vailed and we didn’t walk, save for a few short stops at the water tables and yours truly for a few squirts of sun­block at the sun­block sta­tion — oh and a few strides up a par­tic­u­larly nasty incline. I com­mented that there were not crowds of peo­ple to cheer us on – and the area was rather indus­trial, save for the small stretch along the river. I noted that apart from being a fair weather run­ner, I had also become a fair scenery run­ner. My next run if there was one, would per­haps be through a for­est, or a dap­pled glen….

We reached the 9km mark and all was well apart from increas­ingly painful legs. Yes, my limbs had remem­bered they once ran 56km at one stretch, but they were also recall­ing the pain. We hero­ically ran the last kilo­me­tre, cross­ing the fin­ish line with rather lit­tle fan­fare. No strains of Char­i­ots of Fire, sim­ply a loud­speaker voice telling us to keep mov­ing as there were thou­sands oth­ers fil­ing into the sta­dium behind us. But we had made it.

Later that day, show­ered and sated, com­fort­ing cup of tea in hand and ensconced in a comfy arm­chair, fam­ily fed and watered, I sent a text mes­sage to my run­ning partner:

“Can’t walk. Legs itchy. How r you?”

She replied: “Stiff as a board but sat­is­fied and proud we did it!”

Me too!

© Lois Nicholls