Another weekend off, mind you I only get every second weekend off, along with my off days during the week, such is the life of a nurse. I’ve been up early since 5 am and now it’s midday. Why on earth would I want to be up at 5am on a Sunday morning of all mornings? It’s Comrades time, as in The Comrades Ultra marathon. It’s been a little “tradition” of mine for many years to get up early on my weekend off, and watch the start of the marathon. If over 15 000 runners can get up even earlier to get to the start, to run nearly 90 kilometers between Pietermaritzburg and Durban, I can make the effort to get up and watch the start of a great South African ultra-marathon. Each year the start/finish alternates between Martizburg and Durban. When we lived in the city center of Martizburg, a couple of times I walked to the start of the race, and even as a spectator, the vibe is electric, watching the start of such an iconic sporting event in this country, and this year is the 101st anniversary since the first marathon. The marathon was not held from 1941 – 1945 due to the second world war, and more recently was not held in 2020 and 2021, for reasons we know exactly why, but it was great waking up early today and watching it again after it being cancelled for the last two years. As I am watching now, the winning men (the top 10) finished well over an hour ago, and now the winning ladies are going through. Great stuff and amazing from athletes who have put in the time and extremely hard work to be able to finish in the top 10. Of course, there are many thousands of other runners behind them still going on the road, some will finish comfortably, others will struggle but still finish, and then there are those who will only just make it before the gun goes off at 5.30pm to end it. Sadly, there will also be heartache for those unable to finish, for various reasons. Kudos to every one of those runners though, who started off at 5.30 am – they put in all their effort to get to the start, all of them have my respect, whether they finished or not.
Maybe this will be the motivation for me to get back on the road again, and start running again. I was a snail of a runner for 5 years, until the 2020 lockdown in South Africa prevented us from even walking around for a couple of months. I have only myself to blame for not getting back into running. I won’t go into the specifics of why I didn’t get back into running, but if I’m really honest, I gave up too easily. I do miss running, even if I was a snail!
It’s now Tuesday morning and I didn’t quite get around to posting. I had a relaxing weekend, although these days I don’t I don’t get up as early as 5am on my weekends off, so by early Sunday afternoon I was quite tired and had a good couple of hours of an afternoon sleep.
So now it’s a new week, and another two week cycle to my next weekend off.
Rants and Raves of an old hen. 