Modern Athlete Magazine Issue 127, February 2020 | Page 16

THE RUNNING
MANN
By Stuart Mann
Scratching a Seven-year Itch
After taking a lengthy break from running the Voet van Afrika Marathon, I returned to one of my all-time favourite
races and found that it is still just as great as I remember.
Marathon #228 / Voet van Afrika #11 / 12 October 2019
stopped for lunch and the Old Running Mann realised
that he was without his iPad. It turned out that he left
it in the airport trolley, but fortunately the good people
at Europcar had found it and were safeguarding it.
This made me realise that travelling with your parents
is not that different from travelling with your kids –
and thus I prevented any further mishaps by taking
stock of all the peripherals my father took with him on
each outing, and followed this up with routine checks
before each subsequent departure: “Have you got
your phone? Have you got your shoes? Have you got
your top?” and the like.
I duly managed 10 in a row at Two Oceans and
Knysna, but the arrival of my second daughter meant
that my 10th Voet was delayed by one year. When the
gynaecologist pronounced the due date as being Voet
Marathon race day, a dedicated runner like myself
politely enquired as to the accuracy of his predictions.
A former runner himself, the gynae looked at me in
disdain and said, “I wouldn’t book flights, if I were you.”
In fact it is rather appropriate that my daughter was
to blame for me missing my 10 th Voet in a row, since I
blame my own father for my fixation with these races.
Voet, Knysna and Oceans were the three races he ran
year after year, and once I started running, I thought
that instead of just following in his footsteps, it would
be even better to run them together. I managed to run
all of them several times with the Old Running Mann,
and subsequently inherited his permanent numbers in
all three races.
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Running the 2003 Voet with my dad
Trucking Good Fun
The race starts at 6am, just as dawn breaks, about
9km outside Bredasdorp on the quiet Elim Road,
amongst prime Overberg farmland. Fortunately,
we were greeted with a cool, overcast morning,
which would make the gruelling journey over the
Soetmuisberg, down into Napier and back to
Bredasdorp slightly easier than the usual swelteringly
hot conditions the Southern Cape dishes up at this
time of the year.
Father-Son Road-trip
After my 10 Voet, I decided to ‘see other people,’
but seven years later, this was an itch that needed
scratching again, and so the time was right for
another trip to the Southern Cape. Once again, I
can lay the blame motivation on the Old Running
Mann – my father was visiting us from England and
purposefully timed his visit to coincide with the Voet
(as well as his granddaughter’s birthday, of course).
th
Now the journey south is a long one from Gauteng:
Fight the Fourways traffic to catch a two-hour flight
from Lanseria, collect the rental car from Cape
Town airport and then a further two-hour drive to
Bredasdorp. Our trip was largely uneventful until we
ISSUE 127 FEBRUARY 2020 / www.modernathlete.co.za
Being a point-to-point race, the race has a unique
method of handling transport logistics, using farm
trucks to shuttle us like lambs to the slaughter (or
cattle into battle, as I prefer). I was told later that they
were actually “Grain trucks,” but I bet they tell that
story to all the naïve little lambs.
A truckload of 21km runners
naively cheer on marathoners
B
efore I started running there were three
marathons that I wanted to complete: Two
Oceans, Knysna and the Voet van Afrika. I’m
pleased to say that I managed to place large ticks next
to each race in my first year of running in 2002. Later,
there were three marathons that I wanted to complete
10 times to earn a permanent number. No prizes for
guessing that the same three races made the list.