This Month’s Personality
Kim van Kets, no gladiator’s girlfriend
To my extreme amazement, I’m nearly 50. I have no idea how that happened. But I still feel like Iʼmonan upward trajectory. Iʼm excited about being this age because Iʼm interested in how endurance is something that just gets better and better – maybe not when Iʼm 80, but certainly for now.
I’m a lawyer, not that thatʼs of any importance at all; in fact, I think Iʼm not a very good one. Thatʼs not how I define myself. Iʼm a wordsmith, a storyteller, an adventurer. Iʼm basically just an ordinary person whoʼs had time and opportunity to do things that maybe other people havenʼt.
I’ve been running since I was 17. The only sort of ultra running was road running and I loved it. I kept trying to run further, run longer. I have two older brothers and Iʼve spent an enormous amount of my life trying to prove to them that Iʼm not a girl. Back then, there were no safety precautions or anything for the races I entered. Things were done with a cavalier
attitude. We were kind of told: ʻOkay everybody, keep the sea on your left and make your way to East London. See you at the finish… seven days later.ʼ Iʼve not run another road race since then. Trail running just felt like play. It became less about the actual running, and more about the running being a vehicle to take me to these amazing places that I wouldnʼt normally be able to access.
I’m not an amazing runner but I am a kind of tank. I donʼt break. Any normal person who had started running ultra marathons so young and had continued doing that would have probably got an injury and that would have been the end of that. I just never did. I have these German, peasant genes, I think. My ancestors must have laboured in fields for 18 hours a day. They probably werenʼt very clever, but they didnʼt break.
My husband, Peter, is also an adventurer, but when I met him, he wasn’t. Shortly before he lost his marbles, he was a teacher. So these adventures that I go on are not really crazy within the context of my family.
When I had my daughter (now 16) I imagined I would model my values to her, not just speak them. And I really sort of believed that she saw me as this powerful, capable independent athlete, this hardcore lawyer. One day when she was about four we were lying on the trampoline and I asked her: ʻHannah, what does daddy do?ʼ She said: ʻDaddyʼs an adventurer!ʼ Then I asked her: ʻWhat does mummy do?ʻ And she responded: ʻOh shame, youʼre a servant.ʼ I realised that I was telling her one thing, but demonstrating another. I had been in a support role basically since sheʼd been born, but that wasnʼt really my deal. I wanted to be Gladiator, not Gladiatorʼs girlfriend.
It may seem selfish of me to go off and do these things, but actually I was just showing my daughter that moms could be heroes, too. Setting amazing goals and going out there and achieving them is not the exclusive domain of men and fathers. My initial plan before Tri the Beloved Country was to run the whole way; then I did the maths and realised running the whole way would take too long and thatʼs where the triathlon idea came from. So many things could have gone wrong but that experience was one of the greatest of my life. To experience South Africa like that, the places, the people, it was extraordinary.
My favourite part was the Wild Coast section. I know it like the back of my hand. I have connected every dot on that coast. Iʼd been rambling on about its beauty to Lucille van der Merwe, and not long after that Wild Women was founded. Weʼre now celebrating 10 years of this empowering, fun, multi-day trail run. At the start we knew we wanted to support other women, and we wanted it to be a longterm commitment. Weʼve been raising funds – R1 million to date – for African Angels independent school and Busfare Babies birth centre, both based in the Eastern Cape. This year we hope to #Match1Million with the kind help of sponsors.