THE NO-LIMIT LOCKDOWN
From garden marathons to climbing Everest on the stairs, people all over the world are attempting fitness challenges in isolation, write Andrea Nagel and Dianne Tipping-Woods
Lee den Hond is an extreme athlete, public speaker and businesswoman. In 2013 she became the third South African woman to summit Mount Everest, and in 2015 she was awarded South African Business Woman of the Year in the entrepreneurial category. She has written a book about her experience of climbing Everest called Yes. Now, under lockdown, she is running marathons in her tiny garden.
You’ve run a marathon in your garden?
Yes, I ran a loop within the walls of my home 844 times. It was equivalent to the distance of a marathon, 42.2km.
How many marathons have you run?
I’m not sure of the exact number — more than 20.
How long did the home marathon take?
It took me 10 hours and 20 minutes. My best marathon time on the road is 3 hours 48 minutes.
What do you do to stop getting bored?
I changed the direction a number of times. I listened to music being played from the lounge but mostly I was just thinking. What's the difference between going on expeditions and being stuck in confined spaces?
Expeditions are gifts, they entail a different kind of experience in comparison to a local race. Of course, they involve travel, engagement with people from all over the world and with different cultures with various sporting backgrounds. Being able to experience different countries while achieving physical goals is a privilege.
What do you do in your “normal life”?
I run an event management company and do inspirational talks. Do you consider yourself an extreme sportsperson?
Yes, I have completed six full Ironman endurance events, summited Mount Everest and completed the Marathon des
Sables, known as the toughest foot race in the world — a distance of 251km in the Sahara desert in Morocco.
What’s been your greatest physical challenge so far?
Getting to the summit of Mount Everest. I was on the mountain for two months. It was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done.
Is there a difference between exercising to keep fit, and setting yourself a goal to overcome?
Yes. Exercising to keep fit and maintain weight involves regular short intervals of training. Training for endurance events means hours and hours of three disciplines — swimming , cycling and running.
What kind of benefits do you derive from running, walking, hiking? Meditation through movement. The physical benefits are endless, accompanied with the balance achieved mentally. Endurance sports provide the perfect combination to settle one’s head and heart in the intense world we live in.
How can you take the benefits from the outdoors and apply them to lockdown?
There’s a wonderful parallel between lockdown and an endurance event. The lockdown isn’t a one-day game or one-day event; it requires grit, patience and tenacity. The endurance event is hard and you need to dig deep but you’re always aware of one important fact: it will end!
Was there a reason you set yourself this challenge?
To show that nothing is impossible. I live my life by this motto. What other things have you been doing to keep fit and stay mentally motivated under lockdown?
I’ve run shorter distances — 5km and 7km. I listen to motivational podcasts and watch TED talks.
What travel plans have you been fantasising about?
I’ve been dreaming about heading to Nepal to run one of the highest altitude races in the world. It’s called the Everest Trail Race — 160km, which must be completed in six days.
Are extreme sports addictive?
Yes. You realise that the human mind and body are unstoppable. Realising that you can do anything you put your mind to is a gift. Essentially the entire world opens up to you. All you have to do is say yes to your next adventure, next race, next run, next walk, next experience. It’s there, waiting for you.
How to you feel when you achieve your goal?
100% fulfilment.
On April 28, Limpopo wilderness guide Bruce Lawson decided to walk 150km around a 400m track in his garden over three days, to raise money for food parcels. He hasn’t stopped walking since.
More than two weeks later, he’s nearing the 1,000km mark, with over R400,000 raised. That’s more than 30,000 meals for families in need.
“I thought, 150km to start with, but always had 1,000km in the back of my mind. I know that if you can walk 100km, you can walk 1,000km. If you can walk 1,000km why not 10,000km? That’s just the way I am,” says Lawson, 51, who’s so far lost eight toenails on the walk, and is braving tortuous ice baths to help his body go the distance.
Already a legend in the wilderness guiding community, Lawson has become a minor celebrity on the Hoedspruit Wildlife Estate where he lives, as he uses the lockdown level 4 exercise period between 6am and 9am to expand his route beyond his garden track. “The space gets very small when you’re going around in circles,” he says.
He started the first 150km with friend and fellow wilderness guide Sean Pattrick, 50, for company. Sean lives 650km away in KwaZulu-Natal. Both have spent the best part of the past 25 years leading trails in the African bush. Their plan was to raise money in support of the Hoedspruit-based Hlokomela Herb Garden food parcel initiative to get food parcels to families affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Out of this, the Tshembo Africa Foundation was born to support community conservation projects and livelihoods.
“As wilderness guides, we want the best for our environment and the people living around the areas where we work. We see community and reserves and guides as linked. We do as much as we can to strengthen those links,” says Pattrick.
Inspired by Lawson and Pattrick, more than 70 of their former guiding students from more than a dozen countries around the world are following in their footsteps. Together, they’ve covered more than 5,000km, and counting.
Wilderness guides walk for a living in Africa’s wild spaces, and Lawson has completed more than 19,000 hours of walking in his career. He’s also walked unsupported from Cape Town to Windhoek (about 1,480km) to raise money for a remedial school in White River, and, almost unimaginably, completed 12,500km, unsupported, on foot from Cape to Cairo.
An accident as a child left Lawson unable to walk for four years between the age of four and eight — he spent two years in a plaster cast and one year in a wheelchair. He was told that he had a less than 10% chance of walking unassisted. “Perhaps I’m trying to make up for that,” he says.
“I’ve definitely grown mentally stronger over the years — or just more mental — but my mind can keep going when my body wants to quit,” says Lawson, who starts each day at 3am, and tries to finish the 50km daily target by 7pm, with a few breaks in between.
He carries an 18kg pack on his back, saying “the more you suffer, the more interest people take in what you’re doing.”
And he is suffering: 50km a day for more than 14 consecutive days is hard on the body.
Lawson isn’t sure when people will be able to travel again. “I may not have an income right now and possibly for the rest of the year, but I have a roof over my head and food on my table. Some people don’t have that. If my stroll around the garden can do that, and give people hope, then I don’t see any reason to stop.”
Visit Tshembo.africa@gmail.com. Follow on Instagram on @bruce.e.lawson, Pattrick on @naturalexposuresafaris and the Walk for Hope story on @Tshembo_Africa.