to still be someone worth waiting twelve hours for
Sixty Meters
Sixty meters, and I had to walk again.
I tried once more. Nothing. Just this burning low on my right side, the kind of pain that makes you stop believing your own plans. "I should continue," I told them. "Let's give it a bit of time — my energy will come back."
Dirk didn't argue. He just said no.
It was a cold Saturday morning, July 2024, 200 of us lined up for a 30km run, and I'd checked my vitals before we left, the way I always do. Body battery: 88 out of 100. Resting heart rate: 46. Everything green. I felt ready.
The first kilometre was fine. The second, I could feel something draining out of me that wasn't supposed to drain. We turned onto a hill I'd climbed a hundred times before, and this time the tiredness didn't lift. Then the burning. Then the nausea.
Marco ran ahead for water. Dirk stayed with me. I don't know what I looked like in that moment, but whatever it was, it ended the conversation. They walked me home — 6.5km covered instead of 30 — and I don't remember much after that except a bath I could barely climb out of, and two days of sleep so total that Sunday passed without me really being in it.
A doctor found nothing conclusive. A bit of flu, maybe. Possibly dehydration. Nobody could say for certain, and that uncertainty was almost worse than the collapse itself — no name to put on it, nothing to point to and say there, that's what beat me.
I didn't leave it there. Further tests turned up something more specific: my lung capacity needed rebuilding, close to from scratch. So that's what the rest of that year became — slow runs, deliberately low heart rate, months with nothing worth bragging about. Less about getting faster, more about learning to breathe properly again.
Father, you know everything, I wrote that week. Lead me and guide me.
I ran the pace math the way I run everything — obsessively, on paper, before the road ever tests it. 8.2km/h out, 7km/h home, that kind of arithmetic. Somewhere in all that calculating, I forgot the numbers don't get a vote.
"Alone in 2025"
A few days before that first Comrades (2025) on my own, I had breakfast with my brother and spent a golden afternoon with my son and grandson, building a block ship that was never meant to touch water. My grandson made me promise to tell him more stories in the morning, and he kept his half of the bargain — up before dawn, into my bed, demanding the next instalment before he'd even had breakfast.
Then the race, alone this time, and it did not go the way the spreadsheet said it would. I finished forty-five minutes past the medal cut off. No medal. I was offered the medical tent and turned it down. Instead I walked to the train — a walk of almost 2km that took thirty minutes and felt, somehow, like it took the rest of the evening. Strangers kept asking if I was alright.
"Yes," I told them. "I do not have too far to go."
I didn't get a medal. But I finished the race, and I was happy about that — happy in a quieter register than I expected, the kind that doesn't need an audience.
A different Injury!
By the end of that year, a new injury had crept in — hamstring and glutes, bad enough that running went off the table entirely for a while. I cycled instead, whatever I could manage, and by the time I got back to running I'd lost close to three weeks of training. That was the hole I was climbing out of in January.
On a Wednesday in January 2026, I ran thirteen kilometres at an average of 6:38 per kilometre and felt something close to disbelief.
A few days earlier I'd been struggling to hold a run for more than three minutes at a stretch. Now I was managing six minutes running to one walking, and the ache that had been living in my glute for months had shrunk down to something more like an irritation than an injury. I was wobbly getting home. I didn't care.
The arithmetic isn't really the point anymore, and I think I've finally started to understand that. The point is what happens between the numbers — the six minutes I could hold this time that I couldn't hold a week before. The body keeps teaching the same lesson, over and over, in a language made of kilometres and heart rates and small, hard-won minutes. And somehow, this far into the conversation with it, I am still showing up for class.
to still be someone worth waiting twelve hours for.
Then came June 2026 — another Comrades, alone again, and a harder one. A hamstring and glute injury caught me at the second kilometre and never fully let go. I made it to 78km with 6.9 left — close enough to finish, but it would have cost me another hour, but there was only five minutes left on the clock. So I was stopped by the race marshals at that point, the last cut-off prior to the finish..
My son drove us the 670km home that night, my five-year-old grandson asleep in the back after a very long day of his own, and we pulled in just before 3am, past more trucks than I've ever seen on a highway at that hour. I sat in the passenger seat, too tired to be much use as backup, thinking less about the race I hadn't finished than about the boy who'd waited twelve hours for his grandfather to come back down that road.
I didn't get to 78km by accident — four years of work got me that far before the clock did what it did. Somewhere in the last four years, the goal quietly changed — not to finish faster, but to still be someone worth waiting twelve hours for.
That, for now, is the whole of the lesson, and I am grateful for it
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