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! 44 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.