The call of the trail is the path to all-round fitness
American scout, bison hunter and showman Buffalo Bill once declared: “I can never resist the call of the trail.” And neither can extreme athlete and life coach Suyen Thornhill from Johannesburg.
In 2013, she joined friends on a trail run and was instantly hooked. She describes it as “basically bundu-bashing”. It’s cross-country running, but up and down mountains, along river beds, anywhere your feet can go, she says.
SA has some of the best and oldest trail runs in the world. Not far from Johannesburg is the Magaliesberg mountain range, which is 2-billion years old. There’s also the Drakensberg, the majestic Cape mountain ranges, the Otter Trail and the Wild Coast.
Each location has its own lure, beauty and “quirks”, says Thornhill. Road running simply cannot compare.
“Tarmac is tarmac,” she says. “You may be lucky to get a view at times. Mostly, you’re running around suburbs. You don’t even get to enjoy peeking into people’s homes because they’re all behind high walls and bars.”
SA also has the best trail runners in the world, among them Ryan Sandes who won the first multistage race he entered in 2008 — the Gobi March, a six-day stage event along the border between Kazakhstan and the far northwestern desert regions of China. Athletes rightly call the race “brutal”.
A writer in The Guardian in 2014, called it a “seven-day antidote to modern life”.
Sandes is the first person to win all four races in the four Desert Series. In 2013, he became the first yet to win an ultratrail race on all seven continents. His autobiography, Trail Blazer, has a foreword by Cape Town University emeritus professor Tim Noakes.
“However much we might think we know and understand, there are some phenomena which now, and perhaps forever, we will never fully comprehend,” he writes. “We call such happenings ‘enigmas’. Or even miracles. Ryan Sandes is one such.”
Thornhill may not yet have reached Sandes’ dizzying heights. However, the athlete has the same attributes of commitment, dedication, energy and single-mindedness.
The Hong Kong-born Thornhill is also a triathlete and completed gruelling Iron Man races as if to the manner born. She also by chance fell into triathlons. Her fitness trainer and business partner at The Body and Mind Space, Warren Flood, spotted her potential and suggested she give it a try. When Thornhill found out what was involved, she laughed — hollowly.
She was horrified when she saw a photograph of herself at the finish of her first triathlon.
“I looked a sight,” she says. “I swore from then on I would always smile for the camera no matter how grim I felt.”
Thornhill takes the extraordinary demands of trail running in her stride. She runs three-day, multistaged trail races that cover distances of between 32km to 42km a day.
The longest single-day run she has done was an 87km trail in Sabie.
She marvels at what the human body can achieve.
“You can wake up stiff as a board but somehow persuade your body to move again.”
It’s running in nature that does it: “The beauty of the surroundings, the fact there are fellow sufferers all cursing blisters and knees in this thing together, you can dig deep and produce another long day’s moving,” she says.
Thornhill uses the word “moving” advisedly. Trail running can be so demanding that many runners finish by “moving one foot in front of the other”, she says.
As with all sports, trail running has in-built risks. Falling on uneven ground is one. Trail runners have also fallen off mountains – and fallen foul of the weather.
Among the benefits, trail running is a full-body experience, Thornhill says. It’s not repetitive, so it’s not as punishing on the body as is road running.
The right equipment is essential and can add up. A good pair of trail-running shoes can cost upwards of R2,000. Thornhill recommends that you always run with a “bladder”, or at the very least, a decent water-carrying belt. She also advises a space blanket, a light waterproof and windproof jacket, a charged phone, a whistle, some food and basic first-aid equipment.
These aren’t compulsory on all races. However, anything can happen and, unlike roadracing, you can’t make a quick detour to hammer on someone’s door for help.
It’s really all about common sense. Thornhill says. If you’re new to the sport, start small, with a 5km walk interspersed with running, and always build up slowly.
She is also a yoga instructor. Yoga builds the body’s “core”, which makes for better trail running, she says.
Thornhill runs regular retreats to share knowledge of how to get fit in body and mind on different life trails.
There is no “best age” to begin trail-running, she says. Thornhill has friends with very young children who trail run.
What attracts her most about the sport is running cloaked in the silence of the bush. “The field spreads out pretty quickly,” she says.
Unlike in road races, you also don’t come across people standing around, watching you, she says. Sometimes, you meet some kindly folk volunteering their time at the water tables, or you may keep up with a fellow trail-runner for a while. Mostly, though, it’s the solitude that draws her to trail running.
“There’s something extremely spiritual about it.”
And you don’t always have to “be in a race”. On the contrary, she says, there is “absolutely no shame” in walking on a trail run.
Trail running makes it perfectly okay to stop and smell the wild flowers.
There’s something clearly very Zen about it. From my vantage point, trail running is most often a journey rather than a destination.