Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 101, December 2017 | Page 24

ROAD RUNNING
Run
With Us
Audrey (left) and Zoe
in the Knysna Half
From deciding to get back into shape, a journey of four years has seen
friends Zoe Riley and Audrey Hattingh discover the joys of running,
make new friends, get to see new places and challenge themselves, and
along the way they have inspired many others to start running as well. –
BY MANFRED SEIDLER
R
unning has a way of getting into the heart and soul, because not only is
it healthy and good for you, but it’s also great fun. That’s what Zoe Riley
and Audrey Hattingh, two long-time friends from Johannesburg, have
found since they took up running in 2014, but while their own personal bests
and race finishes have given them great satisfaction, their biggest achievement
is undoubtedly having inspired many others to take up running as well. Zoe’s
husband Rob and Audrey’s husband Gareth are now running, and their friend
Jacqui Carr and her husband James are running, plus the various kids, and other
friends and family, and work colleagues...
Not only that, but it also ties in with Zoe’s work. She is a financial broker
specialising in medical aid schemes, and part of her portfolio is to encourage
people to sign up for packages that reward them for being healthy. Having worked
with Discovery for many years, she says the Vitality packages just made sense
to her, to the extent that she wanted to buy into it herself. “I always felt that if I
am going to sell the product, I need to be able to believe in it, so I decided to try
out the Vitality programme myself. That led to the two of us starting to exercise
together, then do our first parkrun, and eventually to start running races.”
and we got in our training!” That day proved a life-changing experience, and
for the next year, every Saturday without fail, Zoe and Audrey would be on the
Modderfontein start line. Later, however, merely showing up every weekend at the
parkrun was not enough... They wanted to become more involved, so they put their
names down to become part of the volunteer programme.
“After 20 runs, Event Director Wayde Morsink encourages participants to help out
and marshal on run day, so we contacted him and put our names down, but then
heard nothing for a long time,” says Zoe. “Then one Friday evening, at around
10pm, I received an SMS asking if we could help the following day. It just so
happened that Audrey was with me at the time and we immediately agreed. The
following day we helped with the marshalling, but afterwards I went to Wayde and
had a chat with him. I told him that sending SMS’s out at 10pm the night before
clearly meant that he needed some administrative help, so I ended up becoming
ON THE RUN
Parkruns have taken South Africa by storm since being introduced in November
2011. They offer a safe, free and fun way for the whole family to exercise and
socialise, and today there are more than 120 parkruns taking place every weekend
all over South Africa, with the total number of registered participants numbering
nearly 450,000. Being based in the Bedfordview area of Johannesburg, the closest
parkrun for the girls back then was at Modderfontein, about 15km up the highway,
and that’s where the girls headed to start their New Year’s running resolution.
“Our first parkrun was on the fourth of January in 2014, and it was so much fun,”
says Audrey. “We loved every minute of it,” echoes Zoe. “Our families came out,
we had coffee afterwards, it was just a really pleasant way to spend the morning,
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ISSUE 101 DECEMBER 2017 / www.modernathlete.co.za
Audrey and Zoe
running the Peninsula
Half in Cape Town
It all started eight months after the birth of Zoe’s second child, when she felt she
needed to get back into shape and started going to the gym, with Audrey agreeing
to join her. “We just felt that it was time to do something again. Work, family, kids
had all been the priorities, but once things had settled a bit, we felt it was time to
do something for ourselves, so we headed off to gym. It was great because not
only were we training, but we were also able to share quality time with each other.”
However, soon gym workouts were no longer enough…