This column by Simon Gear first appeared in Runners World SA in March 2010
Maybe it’s that we spend a lot of time on our own. Perhaps it’s that we do what we do when cyclists are still in bed and cricketers are still coming home from nightclubs. Maybe it’s that the pain that we inflict, we inflict on ourselves. Because lets be honest, it’s easy to be brave if you’re Bakkies Botha. And even being on the receiving end of a Dale Steyn snorter is about getting hit while you’re awash with adrenalin. I’d pop in a soccer example but you only have to look at the average footballer to see him collapse in a ball of agony. No heroism there, I’m afraid.
Running strips you bare and then rebuilds you into something harder, leaner and altogether more interesting. Stand two endurance athletes next to each other at 8am on a Sunday morning. One of them is immaculate in brand-covered lycra, two grands worth of sunglasses on his head and a 25 buck coffee in his hand. The other is wearing his RAC Tough One T-shirt from 1998 and still has 5 kays to go. You know which one you are.
Running has never managed to undergo the gear revolution that makes every other sport a major financial undertaking. If you’re measuring the worth of your day by the mud on your calves and the sweat down your back, rating yourself in the mirror doesn’t really come into it. I love the fact that running colours are earned, not bought. While every cyclist has at least one set of World Champ hoops in their cupboard, and the entire population of Golf-dom look like preppy Tiger-clones, the only runners you ever see in Olympic kit are… Olympians. When you’ve roused yourself in the winter dark to make a 6:30 start, or you’ve splashed straight through a muddy puddle to avoid losing the half a yard a side step would have cost you, you know how much those colours are worth. Far more than you could ever pay at Sportsman’s Warehouse.
The higher up the heap you climb as a runner, the less you need. Have a look at the top guys in your club. Nary a GPS or a R500 breathable fabric shirt among them. Holey shoes, old socks and faded pollies and you’re all set to hand out a lesson or two in sub 3 minute kays. If you browse through any list of Comrades green numbers, or Run For Life 1000 milers, what will strike you immediately is that these are people who have found themselves. And there’s no emulating their dress sense because you can’t buy an Ohlsson’s sponsored Jo’burg marathon t-shirt, circa 1986, even if your wife would let you. They dress for comfort and speed. That’s style.
“So how do we attract more people into the sport?”, you lament. How do we make it young, funky, hip? We don’t. If you want hip, go buy yourself an i-Thing. We don’t need to attract youngsters to our sport, they find it on their own. In fact, most parents of three year olds I’ve seen spend more time trying to get their kids to run less, not more. All we need to do is stop the schools killing running off before it gets a chance to blossom.
In private schools, the spring athletics season is being squeezed out of existence between the end of rugby and the beginning of cricket. Public schools have seen a gradual erosion of effort and so inter-high times are stagnating and dropping. I can’t believe this malaise. Athletics is the cheapest school sport on the planet. Your school can be unelectrified, stuck in rural Limpopo and filled with a hundred kids to a class and there is no excuse for not having a world class cross country side. It’s the great leveller and yet schools are leaving it behind. Maybe that’s the reason why . Could it be that our top private schools are afraid that they can’t compete against the tough kids from the other side of the tracks? Maybe, but they don’t even bother competing against each other any more.
The passion for running and the oddities that come with it are bred in early varsity at the latest, but preferably in the impressionable teen years. If we lose school athletics, sure, we may still return to run as flabby 30 year olds but we’ll wear garish shirts and sip cappuccinos instead of beer. We won’t remember what it was to turn a quarter on spring-fresh legs with wings on our heels . And without that memory, all we are left with is Sunday morning trudgery and expensive shoes.