Kim’s toughest race yet: Slowly getting back on her destroyed feet

Sunrise-on-Sea endurance runner Kim van Kets, middle, with fellow entrants Misty Weyer, left, and Laura Bannatyne. Picture: SUPPLIED
Sunrise-on-Sea endurance runner Kim van Kets, middle, with fellow entrants Misty Weyer, left, and Laura Bannatyne. Picture: SUPPLIED
Endurance athlete Kim van Kets has spent the past few days nursing her swollen feet, which are studded with blisters and abscesses after her most gruelling trail race yet.

Entrants were expected to run the equivalent of a Comrades Marathon every day for five days.

Van Kets once spent five months running, biking and kayaking her way around a 6772km periphery of South Africa, and has taken part in many extreme running events, including the 72-hour Beats of Ballyhoura race in Ireland.

But the inaugural Munga Trail got the better of her.

Just nine of 26 national and international runners finished the brutal race, which started in the highveld town of Belfast on April 19 and ended near the Blyde River Canyon on Monday at noon.

Van Kets was not one of the finishers, despite pushing through the unforgiving Mpumalanga terrain with mangled feet, taking very little time to sleep and staggering through a debilitating dose of “the runs”.

She missed the cut off by a few hours with 30km to go.

“When we got a message from the organisers on Monday at sunset that they were cutting off all support, we could not carry on running with no access to water or food, so we found the nearest road and hitched a lift to the finish,” she said.

“I have not experienced such highs and lows or such sustained physical and mental agony in any race ever before. It was off the charts.”

Van Kets was gingerly mobile again yesterday after spending a couple of days with her swollen legs in an elevated position after running 376km in 125 hours.

“I am obviously very disappointed about not having achieved my goal, but to see this as an unqualified failure would be very one-dimensional.”

True to form, the Sunrise-on-Sea lawyer, whose epic adventure was sponsored by Fusion Office Automation, managed to find hilarity in hellish circumstances.

“Instead of taking four hours to rest, me slept for 90 minutes on each of the first two days. The race has villages and water points 40km apart and on the third day we got food poisoning from a boerewors roll we got at one of the villages.

“We were very grateful for it, but 8km later we were all running off the path in different directions with the runs. It took us more than double the time to do that stretch, but it was absolutely hilarious despite the horror of it all.”

Because they were literally unable to stay on track, Van Kets and her running mates ran out of water and had to drink water from a stagnant pond to fend off dehydration.

By day four, her feet were “destroyed”. “I am very pedantic about my feet, but my running shoes were stolen three days before the race and I had to run in new ones.

“My feet became more and more swollen and I could barely fit them into my shoes. My body felt fine, but my feet were trashed,” she said.

Battered feet aside, Van Kets said the race’s biggest challenge was the lack of route description and clear pathways especially when GPS signals died and she had to climb wet, slippery gorges in misty conditions at night. “It was hectic and we got utterly lost. The Munga is nothing at all like running five Comrades in a row. You don’t run Comrades on your own with 7kg on your back, with no idea what direction to go in if GPS fails, in the dark and mist and on a single track with aid stations between six and 12 hours apart,” laughed Van Kets, who said it was “too early to say” if she would put her feet through the rigours of the Munga again next year. — barbarah@dispatch.co.za

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