You can tell way more about people from what they do, than what they say. And what they’re doing at the moment is running.
I don’t mean away. Or emotionally. I mean getting-up-at-5am-and-pulling-on-a-pair-of-Brookes-ordered-last-week-off-Takealot-opening-the-front-door and … running.
In fact, so many people are doing it that driving to work in the early morning can sometimes feel like being in the midst of a massive event that everyone else on the planet forgot to tell you about. A friend recently remarked that being on the streets before 6am these days makes her feel like “Simba stuck in that gorge in the Lion King”.
It’s suddenly commonplace to see endless knots of people staggering their way through the early-morning city in a mix of over-designed athleisure gear and whatever T-shirts feel the least puked-on by an infant.
It feels like there’s a Movement happening. People are enthused. Which is unnerving. I’m not used to this kind of unseemly excitement for the exercise equivalent of eating cauliflower.
A recent garden-variety weekday Nike Run Jozi event stopped traffic at a major intersection because that many people had chosen to run in its streets rather than sit in them in their Prados, waiting endlessly to inch forward 10m towards a traffic light that doesn’t work.
Sure, everyone in Cape Town is always trail-running and hiking and surfing and walking the dog and whatever. And in Durban, being asked to remove your flip-flops is a crime punishable by death (which gives them a veneer of Being Active).
And yes, I know cycling has always been a thing and the recent padel explosion has usefully identified the enormous segment of the population that we can happily set adrift in the Pacific on a pontoon made from Spar trolleys.
But this running thing feels uncomfortably new. Well, certainly in the slick, social media-ready format that it’s taken on right now.
Back in the 1980s, the smallish town in which I lived had two running clubs – the Albany Runners and the Drostdy Harriers.
The Albany Runners, despite having a name about as imaginative as a Midrand driveway, were the real deal. They trained, won races, and had a flashy black-and-red sponsored kit. The Drostdy Harriers, however were shit: some members had a T-shirt with Drostdy Harriers written on it in koki, and their post-run braais generally lasted way longer than the runs themselves.
My dad, of course, belonged to the Harriers. For a couple of months a year my mother and I were the club’s “support crew”, which involved driving behind them in our creaky VW Kombi (an “old-man’s underpants” yellow), occasionally lobbing Liqui Fruit boxes at the stragglers. That is the kind of running I grew up with; there was no Strava, no kudos, no Garmin fitness watches. There were no early-morning suburban coffee shops heaving with smug, endorphin-pumped, pre-work road-warriors. No-one took selfie videos of themselves hitting the 5km mark. There were no ParkRuns or average speeds posted on Instagram. In short, there wasn’t the recent Cambrian explosion of running that feels like it’s happening right now with the South African middle-class.
Turning a corner
I have a thought as to what’s behind this; I see it as probably the most important piece of data available with regard to Where We Are As A Country.
You see, people don’t generally take care of themselves while participating in a lost cause. Instead, they pound a screw-top bottle of wooded chardonnay just to make it through bathtime. Or they sit in bars, and moan about football teams, corruption and why Steers burgers are shit now.
They certainly don’t run. Or cycle. Or use padel as a thinly disguised way to have affairs. It feels to me like all this exercise is a metric that shows South Africa has maybe turned some kind of imagined corner.
Maybe it’s that by comparison to the rest of the world, things here feel marginally less on fire than Other Places. Maybe it’s the government of national unity doing national unity things? Maybe it’s just a sudden mass esprit de corps.
And so, we are running, revelling in the physical sensation of being alive and, dare I whisper it, optimistic?
Then again, maybe it’s just that it’s summer and running is the cheapest exercise in a global cost-of-living crisis.
But what do I know about the joy of running anyway; I play tennis.
Also: in case my Dad reads this (he won’t) I have to set down for the record that the guy ran countless Comrades and Two Oceans marathons and now regularly clocks up about 150km a day on his bike. Drostdy Harriers for life.