THE RUNNING
MANN the running mann by STUART MANN
Naval-gazing in the Cape
As regular readers of this column know , I love running marathons and ultra-marathons , and thus I regularly travel all over South Africa to get my 42.2km fix . In February , I was in Cape Town for the 54th edition of the Peninsula Marathon , and I had a great run , in spite of not knowing quite where the start was .
Marathon # 245 / 20 February 2022
A fast and flat route that most of the other Cape Town marathons borrow from
Running marathons is hard , but organising them is much harder , and post-COVID events have additional challenges , like reduced field sizes , staggered starts and a plethora of government regulations to comply with . However , the Peninsula Marathon took compliance one step further this year . Most marathons give you an actual map , or road names and local landmarks , to ensure that you make it safely to the start , but the Peninsula organisers ensured that there was no danger of breaching COVID regulations on the maximum size of outdoor gatherings by only providing a suburb name , Green Point , as the race ’ s starting point .
Sidenote : I think the organisers missed a trick by not further obfuscating the marathon start by representing it with a simple “•”
Further scrutiny exposed the promise , “ Exactly ( sic ) Start locations will be communicated closer to the time .” Anyone looking for proof that time is indeed relative just needs to observe Capetonians * in action ( or should that be inaction ?). Several weeks after the event and the “ Exactly Start locations ” have still not been published . As for “ Exactly ,” I am working under the assumption that this is the colloquial Cape geographic-proximity equivalent to the general South Africa term , “ just now ,” which for foreigners translates as any point in time from “ in the next couple of minutes ” to “ I ’ m sure I ’ ll get to it at some unspecified time in the future .”
Sidenote : As a Capetonian living in Joburg and married to a born and bred ‘ Vaalie ,’ I can confirm that my wife ’ s sense of urgency for on-time arrival radically exceeds mine .
Jokes aside , organising marathons is indeed a lot harder than running them , and current conditions are taking this to the next level . When I chatted to Kevin Lodge of Top Events , who has organised and promoted the race together with his business partner Andrew Bell for the last 16 years , he told me , “ This was undoubtedly the most challenging year organisationally in terms of complying with rules , regulations and requirements . There was a constant back and forth with the officials about the starting points for both races – and we even had to make several last-minute changes the week before so that the race could go ahead .”
Finding My Way
At race number collection in the Rondebosch Sportsman ’ s Warehouse the day before the race , I did manage to interrogate the volunteers on duty : Volunteer # 1 consulted Volunteer # 2 , who then consulted a WhatsApp group before phoning a friend and producing the final answer that , “ It ’ s definitely somewhere near Green Point Stadium .”
With a 5am start ( which I make as the earliest in the Western Cape ), staying on the other side of the Peninsula at my mom ’ s retirement village in Noordhoek , and the
Images : Martin Mulder & Courtesy Stuart Mann
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