5 minute read
Why we run: Frith van der Merwe
Heather Dugmore tracks down the personalities behind Wits’ distinguished legacy of distance running as the Varsity Kudus Running Club turns 45 this year.
"I am definitely addicted to running; if I don’t run, I feel terrible,” says Frith van der Merwe (BA 1986), who won the Comrades in 1988, 1989 and 1992 and Two Oceans in 1989. Her 1989 Comrades down run record of 5hr 54min 43sec stood for 34 years and was only broken last year by Gerda Steyn.
“I run every day of my life. I am paying for the sins of the past and I limp a bit, but running clears my mind and puts me in a positive framework,” Van der Merwe adds. “I feel good once I’ve run and so many problems are solved along the way. It puts things in context as I tend to overthink things. I turned 60 this year and these days I run 5km Monday to Friday and 8km over the weekend.
“I went into a complete trance while running the other day and thinking about my time at Wits. I loved Wits, the lectures, the running and the social side; it was such a happy time in my life,” she says.
A 2010 article about Van der Merwe in Modern Athlete, by Michelle Pieters, reads as follows:
Wearing a red ribbon in her hair, a slender Benoni school teacher astounded the running world when she broke the tape at the 1989 Comrades Marathon in a phenomenal time of 5:54. She not only won the women’s race, she finished 15th overall. Even more remarkable is that this was achieved only a couple of weeks after she set another course record that is also still standing at the Two Oceans Ultra. Frith is the Queen of Comrades and undoubtedly the best female ultra-athlete South Africa has ever produced.
Today, Van der Merwe is still a teacher of English to grades 10, 11 and 12 at St Francis College in Benoni. She started running when she joined the Wits cross country and marathon team in 1982 and initially got full blue for the 21km half marathon and cross country.
“I had the most fun with running as a member of the Wits marathon team. I saw myself as a social runner and enjoyed the parties afterwards more than the running, but our running coach Tony Frost made me realise I can do this running thing properly. Mark Plaatjes (BSc PT 1987) was also part of the team and it was so inspiring to be in the same team and to get running tips from him.”
A world class distance runner, Plaatjes won more than 20 marathons, including the 1993 IAAF World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany – one of his first races representing the United States, where he moved in 1988. He lives in Boulder, Colorado and in 2018 he opened In Motion Running, a business that sells running shoes and kit and offers physical therapy, training and support. He continues to run although no longer competitively. Van der Merwe says their running team struggled to raise sponsorships to get to inter - varsity in other parts of the country because of Wits’ anti-apartheid protests “but we man - aged to get there and we had such fun”.
Academically, she says, Wits opened her eyes. “We had fantastic history lecturers like professors Tom Lodge, Phil Bonner and Charles van Onselen (BA Hons 1971), and we learnt history from a different perspective. Until I got to Wits I also didn’t realise how bad education was for black people. It was such an important stage of my life, and I began to question everything.”
Running-wise she says: “I ran Comrades for the first time in 1987 and came sixth. At the end of the race Bruce Fordyce came up to me and told me I have the potential to win Comrades; that I have two major advantages going for me – that I have the perfect build for distance running and that I’m a Witsie!
Recalling her 1989 Comrades super-victory in Pieters’ article, Van der Merwe said: “The night before Comrades 1989 I did everything nutritionists will tell you not to do! I had four glasses of wine and two toasted cheese and tomato sandwiches. I slept like a log!”
The next morning she grabbed three chocolate bars and chugged down a cup of coffee before making her way to the start. She knew she had a good chance of winning, but little did she know that she would be making history. “As I finished they played Chariots of Fire. I felt tearful, ecstatic and emotional. My mom was waiting at the finish line. It was for sure the best moment of my life – a day that I will never ever forget. Something like that hap - pens only once in a lifetime.” After South African athletes were able to compete again internationally from 1991, in 1993 Van der Merwe won the Tiberius Marathon in Israel, came fourth in the Paris Marathon in 1993 and finished seventh in the World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany also in 1993. “Unfortunately I was not at the same level as I’d been during my peak running era and it was disappointing that we were not able to compete overseas. In 1990 I was running better times than the winner of the New York Marathon.
There were so many talented athletes in South Africa in the 1980s. Matthews Temane was one of them – he was a fantastic half-marathon runner and could have won world titles with the times he was running. But there was no point dwelling on it, and we did what we could in South Africa.”
