Jonkershoek Mountain Challenge 19km trail run, Sunday 21 August 2011

It was when the rain beating down on the N2 heading out of Cape Town was forming little white horses just after 6:00 in the morning that I realised I was in trouble. This was clearly going to be a day to remember, especially for someone like me: someone who is still a relative novice in the world of trail running.

It’s been only about three months since I made the in-principle decision that perhaps it’s time to try something different. Too old to take up gymnastics, too young for bowls, too scared for cycling, I ended up selecting trail running.

The good thing about taking to the trails after 25 enjoyable years of road running (during which I’ve done a total of nearly 70 marathons and ultra-marathons), is that on the one hand it is actually quite different from road running (and not everyone who makes the switch, ends up enjoying it – just to prove the point) whilst on the other hand you don’t really have to acquire a totally new skill. You just have to adapt your running style a little bit, and I guess you will eventually get a bit stronger.

I proceeded to enter the Gauteng Winter Trail Series (GWTS), consisting of 4 events in 5 weekends in June and July, all of which took place on rocky routes within an hour of Johannesburg.

Not having the mountains or the forests or the seaside scenery of the Cape, you sometimes have to use your imagination to call these trails in the greater Johannesburg / Pretoria area “pretty”. When you crest a mountain in the Boland, all you see is other mountains. When you get to the top of the koppie at Groenkloof, however, you see, in no particular order, the highway, the suburbs and Unisa.

But in spite of this, trail running makes a wonderful change from road running – even if the only routes within striking distance are in relatively non-exotic locations such as Pelindaba. It makes a change to run on single tracks, designed for hikers, rather than wide strips of tarmac. It makes a change to have to watch your every footfall, lest you hit a stone and fall head over heels – which is also a great equaliser: if all you’re gonna be looking at is the 2 meters of trail ahead of you, it doesn’t really matter that you’re in Gauteng rather than the Tokai forest, because there’s no real chance to appreciate the scenery in any event.

The organisers of these trail events do, of course, drive a pretty hard bargain. Everybody knows that the entry fees are roughly double (and often more) compared to road races of similar distance, but you only realise when you do your first one that you don’t seem to get very much for it (except the opportunity to sprain your ankle). No water points, no distance markers, no marshals, only a brightly coloured ribbon tied to a bush every now and then to set your mind at ease that you did actually take the correct fork in the route a few hundred yards ago (a la Hansel and Gretel).

And in my case, after doing the first two events of the GWTS, not even a medal to give to my four year old daughter as a reward for being a good girl, looking after Mama while her father has been out since before the crack of dawn. To be an official finisher (and get that elusive medal) a minimum of 3 out of the 4 races that formed part of the series had to be completed – and I got the dreaded flu after the second one.

Oh well, perhaps next year.

But then I heard about the Jonkershoek Mountain Challenge, and I decided that this was the ideal opportunity to take my trail running to the next level (to use a cliché from the world of management speak). And the next level in this case, to be exact, was a total of 800 meters of elevation – but more about that later.

“The Jonkershoek valley is without doubt one of the most beautiful mountain scenes in the Western Cape. Massive turrets & cliffs of orange-faced quartzite hold fortress over a collection of rambling mountain streams and waterfalls. It's so magnificent that it's impossible to ignore, the essence of the place seeping under your skin into the fabric of your senses.” - so said the internet page promoting the event. And since I thought this would make a nice change from the dry, yellow grass and the smoke of the Highveld, I promptly entered the event and booked my plane ticket.

For the first time in my running life, there was also a long list of compulsory equipment.

Except for the obvious such as energy bars and backpack with “bladder” (did I mention there are no water points?), we also needed a waterproof jacket with hood, a beanie, a cell phone (to phone for help, should you break a leg and/or get stuck in a crevice), a whistle (in case there’s no cell phone reception, resort to more primal measures), and a space blanket (to preserve a modicum of body heat while they assemble a rescue party and start up the helicopter – or to create some shade and hide from the sun in the unlikely event that the Cape would treat us to hot weather, this time of the year).

In addition, we also needed to carry a first aid kit that Florence Nightingale would have been proud of. The list included, and once again I quote: “pain killers, stretch bandage, rigid strapping, safety pins x 2, super glue, tampon x 2, cable ties x 2, rehydrate sachet x 1, any personal medication.”

Whilst anyone can understand the pain killers and the stretch bandage, I was a little flabbergasted by the tampons and the super glue.

The organisers must have had this question from a number of people, as they provided the following explanation: “Why Tampons? Any wilderness medic will tell you that tampons are an asset to any remote field kit. A big gash that is pouring blood and needs stitches? Shove a Tampon in the cut and bandage it closed. It will work to stem the flow of blood and block the gash until we can get you to a hospital.”

“Super-glue? Works brilliantly to seal open cuts that need one or two stitches. Super-glue is non-allergic and sterile, dries like a scab and will simply work its way out of the wound like a scab does. Brilliant to stop any further dirt and infection from setting in.”

So there you have it – all seems to make perfect sense, doesn’t it?

That is until I walked into a pharmacy in Canal Walk the day before the event in order to do tampon shopping for the first time ever at the ripe old age of 46.

Did you know, dear reader (assuming you’re a man, like me) that all tampons are not made equal? Did you know that you get regular and you get super and you get a whole range of others, the details of which probably don’t really belong in a write-up of a running event?

Neither did I.

Anyway, there I stood in the feminine hygiene aisle in Dis-Chem, when this cute little sales assistant walked straight up to me and offered help with a beautiful, knowing smile on her face. And I couldn’t even use the excuse that I was tampon-shopping on behalf of my wife… I ended up taking one box of regular and one super – you never know how deep the gash might be when I fall down the crevice the next day, do you?

Shopping done, registration completed, energy drink mixed, backpack weighing in at 2.6 kg (approximately equal to the weight of a slightly premature baby at birth)…and at last it was time to put my feet up and start the mental preparation for the next day’s big race.

I guess it was a good omen when the Boks beat the All Blacks in Port Elizabeth whilst I was wolfing down my pasta that evening, but it wasn’t such a good sign when I noticed the weather starting to change a couple of hours later. Or rather, this being the Western Cape, should I perhaps say that it was in fact a change of seasons, no less?

Be that as it may, I was pretty excited when I went to bed that night and listened to the howling north-wester and the pouring rain. A few hours of broken sleep, a strong cup of coffee and a couple of rusks later, and off I went in my hired little Kia Picanto (all 1,000 cc of it), negotiating the white horses on the N2 past the airport on my way to the Jonkershoek Nature Reserve on the other side of Stellenbosch.

“Does your mother know that you play outside in weather like this?”, an ex-colleague asked me when I bumped into him at the start. I sincerely hope she doesn’t, is the honest answer – she will soon be 85, and she worries enough about me as it is… please help me to make sure that she never sees what I’ve written here?

But I was never in the army, so I do these things, for “fun”, nogal, to make up for it – sort of.

And what fun it was that day.

After 6 undulating kilometres, we hit a stretch of approximately 2.6km in which we gained no less than 700m of vertical height (out of the total elevation of 800m for the whole race) before reaching the high level contour trail. You do the math… that’s an average incline of some 25 degrees (according to the official course description, it was 40 degrees in parts) – the equivalent of a steep flight of stairs which never seems to end.

To put it in perspective, there is very little of even the renowned mountain stages of the Tour de France where the incline exceeds 10 degrees – basically because they don’t really build roads any steeper than that (most French cars wouldn’t be able to ascend such inclines).

Another way of looking at it: 700m of elevation equates to approximately 230 stories of the average building. Not that many buildings have 230 stories, however (except perhaps in Dubai); it’s a little more than twice the height of the Empire States Building, for example. It also happens to be a very similar vertical height gain to a climb up the front face of Table Mountain, starting at the cable car station (off Kloofnek Road) and following Platteklip Gorge up to Maclear’s Beacon.

This stretch of 2.6km took me more than 45 minutes (and I am normally able to walk quite comfortably at a pace of under 10 minute per kilometre… but I learnt that day that rock climbing is not the same as brisk walking).

Cresting the highest point did not fill me with quite as much elation as I had anticipated – on the contrary, it ended up being somewhat of a shock.

Nothing could have prepared me for the conditions that we would experience once we got to the high level contour trail, with our lungs burning and our legs aching. An ill wind was blowing, the rain was coming down sideways, it was absolutely freezing – it felt like we were caught in a blizzard.

I heard that the wind got up to 50 knots that morning, I understand that the modified temperature (including wind chill factor) at the top of the mountain (which is well above the snow line) got down to minus 23 degrees. To be clear however, the numbers quoted are in respect of the 30km event (which took place at the same time) – and these superheroes climbed to an altitude no less than 500 meters higher than us 19km plodders (and hence they would have experienced stronger winds, and colder temperatures – leading to one 30km participant suffering a severe attack of hypothermia, requiring her to be brought down the mountain by Metro & Wilderness Search and Rescue in an exercise which took more than eight and a half hours).

Suffice it to say, however, that even lower down the mountain it was still bitterly cold and more than just a little bit breezy…

Soon after we had started our descent, I realised that my right shoelace had become undone. At first I couldn’t find anywhere to stop (it’s single track, remember, and there’s a whole procession of mountain goats behind me, all trying to get down to a bowl of hot soup at the finish line as quickly as possible). So there I am, running in freezing, slippery conditions, down a slope, worrying about stepping on my own shoelace. And when I eventually found a little bit of space to stop and a rock to sit on, I was shocked to find out that my fingers were practically frozen. I don’t know exactly how long I battled to tie that shoelace, but it felt like an eternity.

Onward and downward we went, the mountain towering upwards to our right, and what felt like the edge of the precipice on the left. It may not have been quite as life-threateningly dangerous as it seemed to me, but I had visions (nightmares?) of slipping in the mud and tumbling down the cliffs, ending up in a place where my cell phone wouldn’t work, my frozen fingers wouldn’t be able to find my whistle, and not even a tampon or two would give me any comfort.

As a result, I was running (rather slowly, I have to say, but running still) with my right arm stretched out, in order to move my centre of gravity towards the mountain… just in case I slipped and fell. “Eerder bang Jan as dooie Jan”, as we say in Afrikaans (“better safe than sorry” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it).

The next thing we had to contend with, was crossing all the mountain streams at the back of the mountain. According to the official course description, “the trail crosses in and out of a few indigenous forested gullies that need careful negotiation over wet rocks and roots”.

Romantic as that may seem, it certainly wasn’t as much fun as it sounds.

On a day like we had out there, you realise exactly how the gully got there in the first place – the landform created by running water, rushing down the hillside. Which is exactly what we had to negotiate on about eight or nine occasions, I reckon (I stopped counting after three).

At the first mountain stream, I was still trying to do some rock-hopping, fooling myself into thinking that I could keep my socks (if not my trail running shoes) relatively dry. At the second stream, there was no such luxury: it was about half a meter deep, there were no protruding rocks, we had to get to the other side, and I learnt within a fraction of a second that, when faced with only one option (however unpalatable it might appear), it doesn’t take you long to decide accordingly.

A couple of deep breaths and a few very wet steps later, and it was onwards and downwards again. And it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it: by the time of the next crossing, the “decision” comes naturally to Just Do It, Nike-style, and immerse your feet without thinking too much or worrying about it at all. In 25 years of road running, I don’t believe that I’ve ever had to do anything similar?

The last part of the race was mostly Jeep-track (a euphemism for pretty rough roads – not recommended for your average Mercedes ML or Audi Q7 or BMW X5, but pretty smooth going in the context of trail running).

It was an amazing feeling of achievement to reach the finish line. It took me a shade over two and a half hours – the slowest 19km of my life, even though I managed to finish in the top third of the field (44^th out of 141 competitors).

I guess it doesn’t beat a Comrades or Two Oceans or one’s first ever marathon, but the combination of terrain, elevation and conditions made it one of the most memorable runs of my life. And one of the most enjoyable ones as well, in that slightly perverse sense that only participants of endurance events will really understand (a friend told me that I would have enjoyed the army when I told him this – but I think that may be pushing it…)

I never saw how beautiful the route was, by the way, I never noticed the “massive turrets” or the “orange-faced quartzite”. Apart from focusing on the 2 meters ahead of me at all times, as one does, the pouring rain and the mist meant that there wasn’t much visibility out there in any event.

Perhaps I’ll have to go back next year and do it again, therefore; perhaps I’ll have to go and appreciate the scenery. Perhaps I’ll even tackle the 30km next time (assuming that I can graduate into a slightly more proficient trail runner in the next 12 months).

At least this time I won’t have to buy any more tampons: I still have a supply which will probably last for the rest of my trail running career. Does anyone know whether they have an expiry date?

Voetstoots van Tonder

4 September 2011

Postscript

The official race report can be found here

Race photographs can be found here

The official web page of the event can be found here