The Loskop 21km WILD challenge. Very wild.

The morning of The Loskop Half Marathon, I’m doing my normal… you know, freaking out.

This was my first attempt at this race, which has a serious reputation for being tough. 

Runner’s Guide gives this route a difficulty rating of 5! 

That is serious, dude! 1 is known to be an easy route, and 5 is hard; everything else in between is OK!

On top of all that, all my friends speak of this race with such fear in their voices that you can’t help but ask yourself if you’re stupid or insane for wanting to do it, too. The funny thing is that they are all doing it, not for the first time.

This speaks volumes about the race, that although challenging, it is doable and one of those races that you will cross the finish line and feel really proud of yourself.

I decided to face this so-called ‘monster of a Hill’. Yip, plus, I created the opportunity to see what the fuzz was about.

At 06:45, the starter’s gun sounded, and we were off, heading West towards the nature reserve.

Within a couple of hundred meters, the tar road became a dirt road as we approached the entrance of the nature reserve. Ever so steadily, we kept on climbing. At last, we encountered a few downhill sections.

As progress at around +- 6 kays (Rhino Hill) was becoming rather ‘hard work’, I discovered that this was not yet the ‘much talked about Hill’. After Buffalo Plateau, one is confronted by a Hill which reminds one of ‘Rustenburg Berg’. It snakes upwards past Thaba Diafela and reaches further towards the sky, approaching Giraffe Neck.

If one runs Giraffe Neck, one can earn a special T-shirt. Suffice to say that no one was aspiring for a ‘T-Shirt’ in our vicinity. Not when one experiences a shuffle decelerating down to a stroll and then to an effort of placing one foot in front of the other. Occasionally, someone would stop dead in their tracks and take a breather before continuing up this relentless incline.

At one stage on Giraffe Neck, my thoughts were: “Someone shoot me, please. No, really, I will pay you. I have money. (Not a lot, but some.) If you go ahead and shoot me, I’ll give it to you. All of it.”

The last climb is within 500 meters of the finishing line (Forever Hill) as one ascends towards the entrance gates (opposite approach to that of the ultra-runners). One turns towards the right and descends in an adjacent lane to those of the ultra-finishers (amongst the throng of people on the sides) to complete another ‘hard day in Africa’.

A medal, ‘goodie-bag’ and a ‘bag of oranges’ further weigh down an exhausted body.

The Loskop Half Marathon tested my mind to the limits!