RUN WITH RORY
2 MINS 50 SECONDS
Rory on the Run
Rory Petzer is South Africa ’ s officialunofficial Minister of Champions .
This guy pops up everywhere – from national talk-radio to news features , social media feeds , international online news publications , on stages all over South Africa and on WhatsApp groups across the world . And now thanks to some very tricky negotiations Rory will be popping up in Modern Athlete Magazine , monthly !
I only started running when I stopped partying . I partied a lot , more than you should when you want to keep your liver to a reasonable age . It ’ s a long story which we ’ ll get to in this magazine later . In December of 2017 , I decided enough was enough and it was time to clean up my act . I stopped the party lifestyle – cold turkey .
Being a creature of habit , to stop one behaviour I needed to replace it with something else . I usually only got to bed at 04h00 so the logical option for me was to find something that would require me to wake up at 04h00 so I couldn ’ t party all night , and that is how I started running .
At first , I had no idea what I was doing . Running in whatever tekkies I had at the time , no watch , no Strava , no clue . But I ran from Sunningdale in Durban to the Point and back , pretty much daily . It was about 17km . I used Google Maps to work out the distance .
Slowly as you run , your mentality changes and I started identifying as a
38 ISSUE 176 | www . modernathlete . co . za