Runners

JULY 2018 RUNNER’S WORLD 69short grass, offering open vistas essential for spotting predators andother big animals that could come after me. Finally, Singita, a tiny, luxeproperty with a large number of highly trained personnel per guest,has the resources and knowledge to protect me, and provide a safarivehicle, guide and scout who will follow behind me and scan the horizonfor any danger.I STAY AT SINGITA for five days. Each day I wake at dawn and repeat the processof running amid the animals. But unlike most runs that I do five days in a rowin the same place, this one does not get old. At first I’m propelled forward bythe adrenaline-fuelled frisson of wondering if these animals might, just maybe,attack me. Gradually, though, I begin to realise what every safari guide alreadyknows: in the daytime, with a large vehicle a hundred yards behind me, theanimals I fear most – such as lions – aren’t likely to attack.This is confirmed oneearly morning, when I get within 50 metres of alioness, lying belly down in the grass; my guide spots her, pulls alongsideme, and commands me to jump into the Land Cruiser. The lioness looksup sleepily, more annoyed that she’s been woken up than teeming withthe desire to hunt and kill whoever did it. What I really have to fear, myguide tells me, are large herds of buffalo, or female elephants protectingtheir babies. They are unpredictable, fast, deadly; and unlike most lions,willing to come at me in broad daylight. But they’re also so big that he canspot them from a kilometre away.Soon, that inner feeling of a familiar ritual makes a seemingly unknowableplace start to feel more my own. I’m greeted by the same swallows onthe second day, and I start to imagine them as a kind of starter’s whistlefor my 12- to 16-K jogs across this land. I see and run through the sameroaming herds again and again. It feels as if they’re now letting me getcloser to them before they hurtle away into the distance. On my fourthday, there’s a herd of wilde beest ahead, hundreds and hundreds, fearsome-looking bearded creatures who move en masse as soon as I approach.When the last of the wildebeest cross my vision, another dimensionof animals is revealed in the distance behindthem. Two small Cape foxes move gingerly tothe left, and jackals run off the other way. Ibisect them on the dirt trail, picking up speed asI see a familiar herd of zebras ahead.Reuniting each day with these beasts, theirspeed and power push me to a pace that is fasterthan I’ve run in a good long time. The most gracefulof these animals, the tiny Thomson’s gazelles,spring so high from the ground that they look likethey’re leaping with every step forward. Modelling them, Ifeel my own feet spring up and out, too. These animals neverseem to tire or get winded, no matter how fast they go or howhigh they leap. Alongside them, as I push my pace faster andfaster, it’s tempting to imagine myself as one with them, justanother runner in a savannah land filled with all differentkinds of runners.But as I slow down for the day, I realise that nothing isthat simple, as tempting as it is to believe in the serotonin-fuelled high of a safari run. Game reserves and safari landslike this aren’t really pure, unadulterated nature, any morethan I am an exact replica of prehistoric man runningacross this savannah. This land is modern man’s attemptto recreate how we imagine things once were. These parkshave been repopulated by animals because of us. And theanimals have been protected and preserved, allowed togrow into herds of tens of thousands of mammals. Left tothe vagaries of nature, without human intervention, theycertainly wouldn’t exist as they do now. They might notexist at all. So as much as I start to feel a part of the flow, apiece of a natural world, an animal among animals, I realisethat such idealistic running essentialism is also a fiction.On the last day of my trip, I think about my final run. Iwrestle with the meaning of these daily communings withthe wild animals all around me. It occurs to me that I don’tcare if this run isn’t a return to the way prehistoric man oncestampeded through this land. I don’t need to feel the bloodof my hunter ancestors coursing through my veins. Instead,what I need – and what makes running here so intense,alluring, and rewarding – is the feeling that I’m getting aspecial, up-close and personal view of this world. I’m at theanimals’ level right now, running through this grasslandalongside the kinds of creatures that I never imaginedwitnessing outside the confines of a zoo or a safari vehicle.Before this trip, running made me feel at home, andthat’s been true of almost anywhere I’ve run in the world.But here, I finally begin to realise, as much as I run the sametrail, see the same animals, and grow as familiar with theirgaits and gallops as I do with the footfalls of my runningbuddies back home, I don’t ever feel completely at home, atease, relaxed. Rather than being alienating, though, that’ssupremely invigorating. The reason I first loved to travel- and to explore places through running – wasn’t becauseeverywhere felt familiar and comfortable. It was becauseplaces felt perplexingly foreign, impossible to understand- and that made them truly exciting. It’s hard to relive thatkind of high, especially now, as places everywhere becomemore and more the same, and I know the world much betterthan I did back then. The world around me here, however, which I’ve beenprivileged to witness for a few days, is a place I can’t learn, acode I can’t completely crack. On my final kay back to camp,racing through a huge, mixed herd of antelope, I start to feelthe final exhilaration that comes from this exoticism, thisunknowing, a feeling that I haven’t experienced for a long,long time. While running almost anywhere else was always a way outto a new world, here it pushes me inward, into a meditativeplace. I’m leaping forward, just as fast as I can, the same asthe creatures around me, and that’s all I need to focus on, allI want to think about, alone among these beasts.In their lifetime each ofthese animals will have seenabout a thousand humansdrive by, but they hardlyever see another runner likeme. This isn’t just unusualfor them. These runs arethe most extraordinary,sublime, and immersiveencounters of my life.