Comrades 2019 - The Up Run #11 (better late than never)

Despite good intentions, I was unable to finish my 2019 Comrades Marathon race report. Life got in the way. Anyhow, I managed to lump together some pictures and notes. There may be some titbits in here for people interested in such things. Hope it floats your boat. 

~RobbyRicc (March 2021) 

Oceans Eleven

I took it as a positive that the 9th June was my birthday and the running of my 11th Comrades. Also it was my first Comrades in green (#47714) and Alby's 16th. So the planets aligned nicely for the 88k's that lay ahead.

 

Leave no stone unturned

With just over 21,000 runners on the day, and food and drink already catered, I had a good feeling about the run. The beginning of the year had a few glitches with a twisted ankle and a sore knee, that thwarted my volume goal of 1,400k's, but those troublesome weaknesses in the body eased in the days leading to race week. I managed 1,030 k's from January. Alby was close to 1,300. 

 

Before the race, I asked Alby what pace we should adopt. 

 

"We'll see," he said. 

 

This in Alby-speak means "I'm not feeling well. There's a good chance we won't make Inchanga."

 

Or it could mean "The gods have predestined us for greatness. Glory and untold fortunes await us at Pietermaritzburg if we head out at Silver 5-minutes per k pace. Death before dishonour."

The Running Year So Far



I mentioned to Manchild, Jake (13), that he runs like Eric Liddell. Eric was the winner of the 400 metres in the 1924 Olympic Games held in Paris after refusing to run the 100 metres due it being held on a Sunday. He was a missionary and running on Sunday was against his religious beliefs. The movie Chariots of Fire was about the 1924 games, and its musical score by Vangelis is played minutes before the start of the Comrades. 

 

Ever since I told Jake that he runs like Liddell he throws his neck up and looks at the sky every time he runs by me.

Man-cub, Ben (10), has started picking up on his cross country running. "It's quite easy for me because I am skinny," he says. He decided he wants to break the world kilometre record. "That'll be easy because it's shorter than cross country." 

Umhlanga Park Run, the day before Comrades.  Good to be surrounded by my friends. The Cows, one and all, most in Apocalypse Cow outfits who are in their 10th year. 
Bainbridge junior is the runner to keep an eye on. Hailey-Jade will be ripping up the world of running in the near future.
   

I turned 47 on race day.
Luis Massyn ran his 47th Comrades. 

Marco De Stefano in the black Tshirt ran 1,700k's between January to race day.
He PB'd by almost an hour with 9.37.
 

Hanging out with the Cow Girls

Jackie Mekler (87) told me it took him 45 years to write this book.
It was well worth the wait. A keeper for the library.

Jackie ran way over 100 miles per week, sometimes closer to 150.
And he never ran in socks for the first few years!





THE RUN

Alby and I started off in batch C with the sub 3.40 and charity runners. Batch C was the third biggest batch with 3,384 runners. Batch F has 3,551 runners. Batch D is the largest (and most snug batch) with 4,502 runners.

So here's the run in numbers: 

• Fastest K Splits: 5m08s at KM17; 5m13s at KM42; 5m19s at KM84
• Slowest K Splits: 10m10s at KM77; 9m56s at KM81
• Average Pace: 6m44s 
• Finish time: 9h55m
• HR average of 135 (mostly zone 1 & 2)
• Calories expended: 5,054 calories or 9 Big Macs

We ran, we survived. Life is good.

Born to run,

Jake in full flight

~RobbyRicc


The Green Jacket brigade

Suffering is one of the options

There are a number of race pictures which lurk in the recess of my computer files. Just sitting there. Alone. Brooding. Narcissistic. With no-one to look at them, to ponder, "I wonder what he was thinking when they took that picture?"

Most of the race photos are my Facebook-happy-pictures which reflect some sort of emotion which can be slotted into a holding pen along the spectrum of my contentment. The pre-race excitement shared with friends; crossing the finish line in a state of euphoric delirium; the smile elicited from a kneeling photographer; or simply a photo reflecting the state of graceful racing. These are the sort of pictures I'd share with my Facebook friends or (both) my Twitter followers, so they could see that life was good for me, for a moment, and that it might transfer some of that happiness into their world. Endorphins trickling down through the cyber network of our social cosmos.

But then there are the real life pictures.

A bit like the reality war photographs from Life Magazine or the leech-infested swamp photographs out of National Geographic. They reveal something deeper. Because I am the person in these pictures, they trigger an emotional response within me which differ greatly to what would be seen through the goggles of an impartial bystander. These are my photographs of quiet and silent suffering. My monk-covered-in-flames moment. Not as dramatic or fiery, but at the moment when each of those were taken I was at my limit. Right on the edge. Nudging at the sinewy fabric of possibility and teetering on the brink of my own destruction.

They are not necessarily my best moment ever pictures. But because of that they are interesting. They reveal more about the moment and the athlete within them, than all the other happy snaps combined.

The picture above was taken at about the 13k mark of the Ironman South Africa Run.

The wheels had come off. My heart rate monitor was showing me that I was on a road to nowhere. My lungs were still filled with lurgy-fluid preventing me from breathing easy. And in a race with the magnitude of an Ironman, you need to breathe easy. Real easy. I was not yet spluttering. That would come later. I was sucking in oxygen though. And it was not getting to my legs. I knew it was game over. However I had chosen to ignore all the obvious signals of my defeat. I was pushing way beyond what my body, and its waterlogged lungs, would permit. "The feedback from the body is white noise" I affirmed. "Bring me my sweet glory. Or my sweet death."

As it was, my bleeding gasket blew about 90 minutes after that picture. I had started thinking about my kids and their idiot dad who was hurting himself for a race. Thoughts like that slow the body right down. They remind you that you've lost this chess game. Tilt your king to its right side. Take stock. Reload the chess pieces. Get in line. Plan for another year. Try again.

A friend of mine took the set of pictures (look left) of me at the ITU World Triathlon Championships in 2012. I was on the start of my 10k run around London's Hyde Park.


I was mad.


My tri suit was too small and my quads bubbled on the bike with way too much lactic acid in the muscles, not from lack of training, but from tight untested fabric.



I had a pack of four or five athletes on my heels. They would stay with me for about 2 more minutes and then I'd find another gear.


We were going at about 3 and a half minutes per kilometre. Which was about as fast as I could go at the time.


At about this frame on the left, a shiver of a cramp burst through my quad.



You can see the grimace appear. The body is fighting back. But the mind wants none of it.



Someone whispered "It's all in the head". And I listened.


The body would come back though. It'd be 38 mins for the 10k run. Which was about as fast as I could go at the time.


These were the bad moments in an otherwise good day.

Which brings me to the Sun City Swim pictures below. The picture on the left is the first confirmed sighting of the Cow speedo in action. The one on the right is the second confirmed sighting of the Cow speedo in action, with a passenger.
 
 

In the solo shot, my shoulders were fully loaded with what can only be explained as the same burn felt by Olympic rowers. The little guy with the green cap, must have been 11, swam with me thw hole way. As much as I fought to lose him with my Popeye-the-Sailor forearm thrusts, he stayed on my hip for the swim's duration. The vision was blurry and I could barely stand up as I exited. I was 5th old guy in that race.














And later on the same day, Emi and I swam the family race. Jake headed out ahead of the family, with Natalie and the flippered-Ben following on their noodles. Emi was rather mad and teary because the race was too far, and we had been abandoned by her siblings and precious mother. 600m's -it turns out - is really far for kids. And for dad's carrying their kids.

I propped the floating buoys under each arm and kicked for all I was worth. The further we swam the higher Emi perched herself on my neck causing me to arch my back and tilt my hips in order to kick. It must have taken us an hour to finish the swim. As hard as it was (and I would not recommend it for novice families) I couldn't help laughing. I motivated Emi from the word go, using every trick and ploy in my arsenal. I was the Tony Robbins of swimming.

But she wanted none of it. She kept calling out to the lifeguards to help her find her mommy. As though I was a pile of floating reeds onto which she had been jetissoned from a passing ship. At one stage she bawled and raged and grabbed my goggles forcing us to zig-zagged blind for a while.

I kept having to control my efforts as my breathing became ragged. The pull-buoys kept popping out. A flotilla of fellow families brought us into their fold and guided us around the course. It wasn't easy, in fact quite the contrary, but - and this is why I love that picture - it was certainly memorable. One of my most memorable daughter-dad moments.

So the point I guess I'm trying to make is that when you look back at the photos in your life, you might remember the Facebook good times, the Instagram'd ecstasies or the archived discomforts. However - and this is the crux of it - is it not both the good times and the times of suffering that help us get to the place on the road where we need to be?

On the road again,
~RobbyRicc

Battle of The Rabbit

When Nats and I arrived back in Johannesburg in 2008, after having been abroad in the UK for just shy of a decade, one of our key priorities was to ensure that Jake's rabbit, Nini (pictured above), would come back with us in one piece.



Nikki, my boss at the time, had bought the rabbit from a shop in Windsor as a present for Jake. We noticed that from an early age, Jake would automatically reach for the rabbit and hug him before he fell asleep. We called the rabbit "Nikki" after his acquirer which Jake, when he learnt to speak, morphed into Nini.

We went on trips with Nini all over the place and Jake and Nini were rarely separated.

Prior to returning to South Africa, we organised an around the world trip. The idea was to visit friends along the way, do Ironman Western Australia (it happened to be at just the same time we were visiting Busselton!), and ensure that the travel bug would be truly squished.

Somehow Nini made it around the world unscathed. This is quite impressive since we took about 15 flights and visited about 11 cities (excluding the places we visited on New Zealand's South Island in a campervan). At each stage Nini was in Jake's firm clutches.

Arriving back home we went to Sabie (several hours drive awayfrom our place) for a weekend away and Jake inadvertently left Nini at our B&B . Nats and Jake were in tears. I was put on the case and three days later a parcel arrived from Sabie with Nini squashed into a cardboard box. We had a dinner that night celebrating Nini's return.

And then Ben arrived. On the 15th February 2009, Jake became an older brother. And Jake slowly introduced Nini to Ben. Below is one of the first encounters.

Jake is a good brother, far more chilled than Ben, who can be highly strung at times. It's tough when your older brother can speak and get by in the world, when you can only mumble a few words and no-one ever listens to you. Ben is a man of action.

Ben became aware of Nini's presence in the family from a young age. Nini even made an appearance into the family album. More as a family member than a prop. Ben has never minded Nini's position in the home.

It's important to note that the boys get along just perfectly and look out for each other. Below is a picture of them with their flying pig. "If pigs can fly", I tell them, "anything and everything is possible". Nats says I am too competitive. Note Nini tucked safely under Jake's arm.

And then one day, a few weeks ago, after Emilia's arrival into the world (where Ben became an older brother), we saw "The Battle of The Rabbit". I was taking pictures of Emmy in the kitchen and noticed in the background that Ben was sitting on Nini. He was loving life and killing himself laughing with his latest coup. Jake saw this and lost the plot. I'll let the pictures below explain the rest....

One should not laugh at Ben's lung exercises, but Nats and I, who both know the ties that bind Nini to her master, could not stop laughing.

The story does end well thankfully. Ben who is sprouting the odd word or three, has taken a liking to his favourite TV show, Barney and friends. It was therefore with much gusto that he tore open his Christmas present to find that Barney was the newest member of the family.

Everybody needs somebody to love,

~RobbyRicc

The Ricc Boys

If you look into the eyes, you will see what I have seen........

Here's the message posted by our club president, Trevor, to our running club's email list:

The day after Valentine’s Day saw the arrival of young Ben Riccardi at the Bedford Clinic, made with love and much skill by Roberto and Natalie Riccardi. The arrival time was 6am, with the general belief that this was done deliberately to prevent Robbie doing the Pick n Pay 21 which he’d already paid 40 bucks to enter, and which was also a vital part of his Iron Man training. Elder boet Alberto is to do everything to ensure this milage is made up during this week.

3.245kg Ben and mom Natalie doing well – Dad Robbie slightly under trained but bearing up under the circumstances.

Our congratulations and very best wishes to them both from us all at the club.
T.