Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 121, August 2019 | Page 27

Less than a year ago, Nuno Miguel Morais was
firmly in the grip of alcoholism, with his life rapidly
spiralling out of control. Thankfully, he hit rock
bottom and was able to start the recovery process,
using running as one of his recovery tools, and he
has quickly become an inspiration to many others
struggling with substance abuse. – BY SEAN FALCONER
A
t the beginning of April, Nuno Morais (49)
woke up one morning and told his daughters
Isabella (12) and Alexandra (10) that he had
decided to run to Dullstroom. Just like that, for no
particular reason, he just felt like running some 300km
from home in Edenvale, Johannesburg, to the small
Mpumalanga town, where a friend had a B&B. “I had
no real plan, just picked up a backpack from a friend,
packed a few things, then headed out. I had been
advised to go via Cullinan, north-east of Pretoria,
so that first day I ran to Hatfield in Pretoria to stay
over at a cousin, and that night we worked out my
route. In the end I decided to go via Bronkhorstspruit,
Emalahleni, Middelburg and Belfast.”
Nuno covered 105km the next day, staying overnight
in Bronkies, but when he tried to leave at 4am the next
morning, he found the road too dark and dangerous,
so turned around and tried again later. Unsurprisingly,
he had a number of other misadventures along the
way. “On the road from Emalahleni to Middelburg, I
stopped at a garage for water and asked where the
next garage was. They told me it was just 10km away,
but it was actually 40km, and I ran out of water later
that day. Then a cop van pulled up next to me, and
my first thought was I’m in trouble, but they just asked
if I was OK. I told them I had run out of water, and
luckily they had some for me.”
Averse to
Running
The reason Nuno
undertook this run, and
many others since then,
is because he is a former
addict who is using running
as part of his recovery from
alcohol abuse. And he has not
just taken up running for himself,
he has covered a prodigious amount
of mileage in the last few months while
running for charities and worthy causes, and
in the process inspired all around him. Ironically,
for somebody that now runs twice a day, Nuno says
he has never been much of a sportsman, and never
like running before. At school he only ran cross
country because he had to, and did the 1500m once
a year at athletics day. “My brother was actually a
good runner. He raced against Johan Fourie, and
ran a sub-30 for 10km, so maybe genetically I have
some of that, too. Then again, he is now a big, fat
chap, working as headmaster at St Peters College
in Joburg, while I’m now the runner in the family! But
jokes aside, he is very open and supportive about my
addiction and recovery.”
Nuno was born in Mozambique, and lived there for
five years before the family moved to Portugal. A
year later they settled in South Africa, and he has
lived in Edenvale since then. After school he opened
an export company with his father, specialising in
transporting goods to Mozambique, then started a
company producing anti-theft gear-locks for cars, but
says that fad fell through, so he went into real estate
till about 2007. Next he went into catering, and says
that is where things began to go off the rails.
“I was cooking ready-made meals, often with wine in
the recipe, but over time there was less and less wine
in the food, because I was drinking it all. Eventually I
couldn’t function properly anymore, and had put on a
lot of weight from all the drinking, so my wife, Lauren,
said take some time off and concentrate on the girls.
But it was actually the worst thing I could have done,
because I was just lazing around, and my drinking
got a lot worse. So I stopped catering altogether
about two years ago, and checked into rehab for the
first time.”
Finally arriving in Middelburg at 8pm that night,
drenched after being caught in the rain, Nuno says he
woke the next day with really sore feet, so he duck-
taped the bottoms of his feet to offset the tendinitis
and set off for the last 35km shift. “That was a long,
tedious eight-hour walk!” he recalls. Then, having run
315km in four days, he stayed over at the friend’s
B&B, caught a lift home the next day, and two days
later was out running again.
That first treatment didn’t stop the drinking, so he did
rehab a second time, but again he went back to the
bottle. “I thought I was fine, and could handle drinking
again, but things just got worse. I would drop off the
girls at school, then stop at Spar to buy two litres of
wine and down them on the way home! I would make
my wife breakfast and see her off to work, then carry
on drinking. It got so bad that I was making trips to
the bottle store every few hours, and life was just a
series of blackouts. My daughter sat me down one
day and threatened to no longer see me, but still it
couldn’t stop me, and eventually my wife told me to
leave in late August.”
“A friend told me to go to the Vaal Dam and sort
myself out, but on the way I smashed a bottle of
vodka and ended up getting lost, eventually driving
into a township where people were rioting. I made it
to a nearby town, but there I got two flat tyres, so I
just slept in my car in front of a church. The next day
my brother came to help me fix the tyres and I told
him I was still going to the dam – but first I picked
up another bottle of vodka and smashed that. I have
no real memory of the next few days at the dam, but
eventually I headed home and slept under a table in
the garage. When I woke up, I was feeling really sorry
for myself, because I had lost my family and been
kicked out of the house, and I decided this can’t go
on, so I phoned my brother again and asked for help.
He came to pick me up and drove me to rehab.”
Making it Stick
Nuno says he checked in to rehab on the first of
September, but it took two days for him to sober
up enough before he could start taking medication.
Two weeks later he joined a rehab mate in doing a
24-hour fast – the friend was Jewish and celebrating
Yom Kippur – and after that Nuno fasted regularly. He
also began walking, then tried running, and in spite of
being totally out of breath at first, it gradually began
to get easier.
“Eventually three of us would run around the block
regularly, about 600m, and I started to lose weight.
I had ballooned to 122 kilos from all the drinking
and the anti-depressant meds I had been taking, my
resting heart rate was well over 100, I had high blood
pressure, and the doc said my liver was in terrible
shape. He warned me that if I carried on drinking the
way I had been, I would probably die. That was a
sobering thought.”
At the end of the intense 30-day rehab period, Nuno
checked into a halfway house, where he was able
to go on with his life while still being treated and
surrounded by fellow addicts on the same path.
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