702 waaaaaaalk the talk

Sunday, July 27, 2014

00: 25 Alarm is set and I am about to slip into bed. Extremely early and cold morning is upon us.

Initially, my plan was to document the race as if I was tweeting. Each time we passed a milestone I was going to record a time and the milestone. At the beginning of the race, this was working for me and I was braving the cold as my poor fingers were frozen while I was trying to type. By the time we crossed over the Nelson Mandela bridge, something happened to my Ipod and that was the end of my "tweeting" idea.


What started off as a plot to get my mother active ended up in me signing us up for the 20km Walk For Democracy. Never in my head, have I imagined walking for this distance, even 5 kilometres is too much for me to walk. I am a runner and I run everything, if I had a choice I would run all day, every day. However, after today my mindset has changed, it was nice to experience something different other than the pain that I go through when I run. I do not think that there is anybody out there who runs without pain, If you are one of those people please email me and tell me what special formula you use.



Johannesburg is a beautiful city with a lot of history and landmarks. We started in Marks park and walked through Melville. The first water point was located at Wits university, anybody that has been to Wits knows that the walk from west campus to east campus is a steep uphill that will test your fitness and break your back. The highlight of this was seeing Catherine, I have not seen her since May and it was a pleasant surprise. As we left Wits we approached the Nelson Mandela bridge through Braamfontein and crossed over into Newtown. I really wanted the route to go through more streets of the Cbd, but I guess this is Runjozi's speciality. From Cbd we passed through Constitutional hill, I thought we were going to go through Hilbrow but again I was wrong, we were approaching the Johannesburg zoo. As we passed through Zoo Lake there were about 6 kilometres left and my hips were on fire. I was really hungry when I started this walk and the only thing that was keeping me going was the coca cola that was served, for some reason it kept me full.


Anybody that knows anything about Nike Free's knows that they promise to deliver a barefoot experience and yes they are true to their promise. I could feel the street with every step that I took at times I wished I had taken a change of shoes. I hope that my legs are strengthened now and I can run longer without feeling pain in my legs.



This was actually a wonderful experience, well organised and the people on the route were just amazing. I love it when people go out of their comfort zones to push themselves to improve their fitnedd. Yet again there seemed to be more old people than the youth, quite a lot of work needs to be done to make events like these appealing to them as oppose to "turning up".

Well done to the race organisers, I will definately do it next year and every other year after that.






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