Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 120, July 2019 | Page 44

Su-yen and Carla,
up for any challenge
had gone off to alert him that he was now ahead of a
runner, and should turn back. It was only then did we
hear them whistle back to us. What a blessed sound...
we had made contact!
Carla: We eventually made it out of the mess we were
running down, just to find ourselves on a ledge with
an incoming tide. There was nothing we could do,
nowhere we could go. For the first time, we realised
this may actually be a DNF. In fact, it could quite
possibly be a DNL (Did Not Live)! The best we could
do was sit and wait for the tide to go out, and for the
sun to come up. Huddled under a space blanket,
we chatted away while trying to stay awake. It was
around 3am. “I hate the Transkei,” I said.
Sigh, we just made a hash of it, going along one path,
retracing our steps, going along another, hitting raging
waves crashing on rocks and sheer cliffs, retracing our
steps again and trying another route until we finally
stumbled high enough to see headlamps lighting up
the next climb. I have never been so happy in my life
to see fellow runners, but was also a little worried, as
it meant the last group with the sweep were probably
now in front of us. We screamed, we yelled, we
whistled, and boy did we run to keep up. We even
came crashing down a mountain that wasn’t a path to
try and shorten the distance between us.
Carla: After many extra kilometres, we made it to
the final aid station. Only 14km to home. We can
manage 14km on our own... We don’t need to wait
for Rhys the race sweep… We aren’t that bad… Ha!
Unfortunately, we were that bad. And we made our
biggest error yet. We got absolutely and completely
lost again, but we could see three headlamps in the
distance. We ran after them as fast as we could.
We ran down a cliff into cycads. We fell into dongas
and holes. We grabbed onto thorn bushes and got
strangled by vines. At times I could no longer see Su-
yen, because I am too short. But why did it seem like
they were trying to get away from us? Why weren’t
they stopping? Well, it turns out they were confused
by how bright our headlamps were, and they thought
we were chasing them, and coming to rob them!
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Su-yen: Oddly enough they seemed to be moving
faster, almost like they were trying to get away. We
followed as best we could, and as we came down yet
another steep incorrect path, arriving on a cliff shelf,
they just kept going. We whistled some more, we
flashed our head torches with SOS signals, we called
and they seemed to stop, observe us and then turned
and left. Our hearts sank. Could they be fisherman
that had nothing to do with the race?
We later discovered they had been running away from
us, because they thought we were ‘skibengas’ out to
rob them, as we were moving too fast down unlikely
paths, and that our head torches seemed too bright to
belong to runners. It was sheer luck that Rhys thought
to glance at his GPS tracker and discovered the alarm
The foot wash that
gave the girls (too
much) hope
ISSUE 120 JULY 2019 / www.modernathlete.co.za
Carla: Then we saw headlamps coming towards us.
They were flashing us. They were coming to rescue
us! We sat on that rock for an hour and a half, but
the heroes of the day, Tommy and Rhys, came for
us. They threw us from one to the other through the
incoming tide. They got smashed against rocks, but
we were safe.
Su-yen: We sat on that rock for an hour and a half as
the sea raged at our feet, licking our toes. We couldn’t
tell what was happening, as the headlamps up ahead
just seemed to be bobbing about for ages. We found
out later that Rhys and Tom were working out a plan
to come get us, and finally two headlamps bobbed
Su-yen: The next section wasn’t so bad, we only got a
little lost and managed to get ourselves to the next and
final checkpoint along the route. It was here we made
our greatest error of judgement... in spite of the fact
that we had got lost countless times. Or the fact that
we had no functional navigation device. Or the fact that
the satellite tracker that allowed the race organisers to
know where we were had been playing up all day and
was not sending loud enough warning bells. Perhaps
we were just tired. But instead of saying, let’s just get
warm and wait for the next group of runners to come
through, and then stick to them like glue, we believed
that we could easily navigate the final 14km to the dirt
road. I mean, how bad could it be?
Su-yen: We were standing on a ledge at the base of
a mountain, with the tide coming in and no obvious
way of getting off without climbing again. All we
wanted was for the sweep to come and sweep us off
the cliff to safety. I did try to persuade Carla we could
make it, but she wasn’t keen to jump into the sea,
to what she considered certain death. I was a little
more optimistic, but we were a team, and we had to
make good decisions, especially given how poor our
decisions had been up to this point. Then Carla found
to her horror that her space blanket was missing from
her pack. I had mine, so we wrapped ourselves up
and decided to stay put, now that our position was
known.