April’s marathon calendar filling up
AS a short and skinny teenager, Lusapho April didn’t take long to convince coach Karen Zimmerman that he would become a marathon runner.
April, third at last weekend’s New York marathon, was just 14 when he first arrived at Zimmerman’s training group in Port Elizabeth. He wasn’t the best in track and field, getting beaten by some of his peers.
“He was about 15 when I first said he was going to be my marathon runner,” recalls Zimmerman, who has coached him for 17 years.
Running was April’s first love. “We played soccer in the location,” he recalls, but then shrugs and flashes a big smile that confirms he followed the right dream.
April, whose mom died when he was seven months old, grew up with his grandparents in the Nomatam- sanqa township in Addo. It was so close to the park that if he stood on the roof of their home he could sometimes see wildlife.
He now lives in Langa, a township next to Uitenhage with his threeyear-old daughter Avuzwa and girlfriend Ziphozihle. It was while visiting a friend in Port Elizabeth that April first visited Zimmerman.
That was the start of a partnership that has withstood agents, managers and even former Athletics SA (ASA) president Leonard Chuene.
April had been called up to a training camp in Potchefstroom ahead of the 2009 world championships and, said Zimmerman, the agreement was that the runners would be allowed to stick to their individual training programmes.
“When they got there it was a different story . . . the coach there was trying to kill them,” she says.
April remembers that on the first day they did a 10km morning run and then 50 hills in the afternoon.
At the first opportunity he ducked off to Zimmerman’s training base at Hogsback, an Eastern Cape retreat at a similar altitude to Johannesburg.
Chuene phoned, telling April to return to Potchefstroom. Few people were prepared to stand up to Chuene, but April did.
“You will return,” instructed Chuene. “No, I won’t.” “You will.” “I won’t.” Chuene eventually hung up, April recalls. “I wasn’t worried. By then I knew I wasn’t going back to the training camp or to the world championships.”
Zimmerman and April, who is 1.67m tall, were back at Hogsback preparing for New York, although the skinny frame she identified as a future marathon runner was a little too small initially.
“He was weighing 47kg and I wanted him to get up to 50kg so he would have some fat for the race. I have a fancy scale that also measures body fat. At the start it wouldn’t give a reading. By the end it measured his body fat at 1%. But is that possible? The scale must be wrong.”
Third place in New York will go a long way to ensuring that April gets spots in the right races in future — Zimmerman wants tactical races rather than world record attempts aided by pacemakers.
“We have avoided managers and agents because they put you in a race where you get paid because they want their 15% cut,” says Zimmerman. “It’s a business for them.”
The day after the marathon, Zimmerman took April sightseeing around New York, including a cruise. “He kept on falling asleep.”
That sounds like a well-deserved rest for the father of one.