Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 100, November 2017 | Page 26

TRAIL RUNNING
Grateful
to be
Running
After two freak injuries, Samantha Schoeman is incredibly
lucky not to be permanently paralysed, or to have lost a leg, but
both times she fought back to fitness, and even took up trail
running along the way… in spite of what the doctors said.
– BY SEAN FALCONER
Having recovered, Sam went back to one of her
greatest passions, riding horses, until a second freak
accident. While training a young horse in 2012, she
fell off and fractured her patella, and the doctor that
cleaned the injured knee apparently missed some
dirt in the wound. “A week later I was in hospital with
potentially fatal gas gangrene, systemic septicaemia
and some of the worst pain I have ever experienced.
I had to have an emergency knee op, followed four
months later by another op, and not a day goes by
that I don’t thank my lucky stars that my leg didn’t
need amputation!
to do the Otter Trail Run marathon in 2015, so I said I
would if I could get in, even though my longest run up to
that point was just 10km! But then I got in, and thought
oh hell, what now?”
So Sam, who is the younger sister of Olympic
swimming gold medallist Roland, ran the Bastille
28km down in the Cape, followed by the Crazy
Store Magaliesberg Challenge 35km, and duly lined
up for the Otter Marathon, but once again things
didn’t go to plan. “That year’s race is now known as
the ‘Snotter-Otter,’ because it rained non-stop, and
they pulled all of us backmarkers off the course at
the first checkpoint, just 8km in, because the route
was getting flooded. I was livid at the time, because
the entry was not cheap, and I had prepared myself
mentally for running on the rocky coast, due to
my fall in 2009, but I do understand it was a huge
responsibility for the organisers.”
“After Otter, I needed another knee op, because I
had developed osteochondrosis, where the cartilage
in the knee peels away, and before the op, the
doctor warned me that I may not be able to run
again. He added that even if the op went well, I
would likely need a knee replacement in my 40s if I
kept on running, but I told him I’m going to need a
Back on her Feet
To rebuild the strength in her knee, Sam started walking,
and before long she was regularly doing 5km, but she
saw everybody around her running and wanted to join
in. “I hadn’t done any running at school due to asthma,
but now I started, bit by bit, and fortunately my knee and
lungs held up. Soon I was hooked and absolutely loving
it, and in 2014 I decided to challenge myself with some
short trail races. Then a friend jokingly challenged me
26
ISSUE 100 NOVEMBER 2017 / www.modernathlete.co.za
replacement anyway, so why stop doing something
that I enjoy, and he said OK.”
No Holding Back
In the meantime, Sam started a new business,
BabaGrub, which makes home-made meals for
babies and toddlers, and she’s currently getting a
new venture going, The Grub Hub, to make prepared
meals for athletes. “I do everything myself – the
cooking, packaging and delivery – and I’m hoping to
bring in a partner soon to grow it.” Earlier this year
she also returned to running after more than a year
out of action, but experienced chronic pain when she
increased her mileage. “The physio said my muscles
and joints were seizing up because my stabilising
muscles had atrophied, so I am still busy with a rehab
programme, because I want to get back to running
crazy races.”
“Next year I really want to do the Isimangaliso Trail in St
Lucia on the KZN North Coast, and hopefully in 2019 I
will go back and avenge my Otter run, because it’s the
only race I have not finished! But I am just grateful to
have my leg, to be relatively pain-free, and to be able to
run and do things the doctors told me I would never be
able to do! Whatever the future holds, I know that I am
so much stronger than I ever thought I was.”
I
t’s probably a bit of an understatement to describe
36-year-old Sam Schoeman as accident-prone… In
2009, while on holiday in Herold’s Bay, she slipped
off a cliff, fell about two stories and landed on her back
on the rocks below, and was then washed into the sea
by the waves. After 10 minutes of being pummelled
against the rocks, her boyfriend spotted her, dived in
and rescued her. “At the hospital they said my back was
just bruised, but a week later I was still in pain, and when
they rechecked my X-rays, they found I had broken
the transverse process off my L4 vertebrae. That’s the
little wing on the bone where the ligaments attach,”
says Sam. “Thankfully, after six weeks, the orthopaedic
surgeon back in Pretoria said the bone fragment looked
to be sorting itself out, so no operation, but by all
accounts, I could have been paralysed!”