Comrades and parkrun; musseling in on Umdloti; Sunday seafood extravaganza

It’s almost mid-June, the nights are starting to cool in Durban, and it’s time to fly north to France. But what a memorable last weekend!

Parkruns and Comrades

The previous Saturday, BFF Julie and I had walk/jogged the North Beach Durban parkrun*. (Click here for my October 2016 blog on the Umhlanga parkrun.)

This North Beach event is apparently the world’s biggest parkrun. (Its record is 2,526 participants [October 13, 2017], after which an additional one was established at nearby Durban Point.) Also interesting is that parkrun South Africa has by far the largest attendance at individual events, and the slowest average time: over 40 minutes.

* A parkrun is a timed 5km run that happens on Saturday mornings in different places all over the world – and it’s totally free to enter, thanks to sponsors and volunteers. According to www.elliottline.com/parkrun, there are currently 1,472 parkruns. It all started in 2004 in Bushy Park, Teddington in the UK.

This Saturday, many of the 2,273 participants were out-of-towners who’d come from all over the country – and the rest of the world – to run the next day’s Comrades ultra-marathon, a hilly 87km course between Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

The atmosphere was unbelievable. Thousands of people in addition to us parkrunners were stretching their well-trained legs while soaking up the glorious June sunshine. Among them were impis of black runners, chanting in time to a sort of martial jog down the centre of the broad promenade. (Running around them seemed sensible.)

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Legendary nine-times Comrades champion Bruce Fordyce, every runner’s hero, is the CEO of parkrun South Africa; he turned up to say a few words before flag-off.  Considering the slow start, I was more than happy with my time of 28:35.

I still like the idea of ticking off as many different parkruns* as possible.Though France has only a handful of parkruns (only eight, compared with over 600 in the UK), I see there’s one in Tournefeuille, just 12km from Toulouse – almost certainly organised by British expats.

And as Roy and I will be spending the last week of June in Toulouse’s Port Saint Sauveur, I might be able to add another notch to my parkrun belt. (I see from the website that Tournefeuille averages 16 runners a week, and and that its record turnout was 38 runners. There’ll be no hiding in that crowd.)

Musselling

Nursing slightly sore calves – courtesy of having sprinted the last 100m of the parkrun so as to see off a young woman with blue hair who was trying to sneak past me  – I set off with Jeff and Leigh from Umhlanga Rocks Lighthouse, heading north to Umdloti. It’s exactly 8km from the lighthouse to the Sandbar, where Roy would be meeting us for lunch.

Our timing was great: it was low tide, though unfortunately not spring low. At around the 3.5km mark, Jeff identified some likely mussel-beds, handed me a set of gloves and a proper mussel-collecting bag, and we set to work.

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I grew up collecting mussels, most usually at Clansthal beach, around 60km south of Durban. My family owned a piece of land down there, with a “shack” where we spent many a blissful weekend chasing fireflies and fighting off mosquitoes.

Baths were taken alfresco in a big zinc tub; the outside toilet was a “long drop”, so at night you’d have to pee in a pot.

In those days, parents thought nothing of letting a nine-year-old wander down to the beach on her own to swim in one of the sheltered gullies and potter around rock-pools.

So, mussel-picking is in my DNA. I don’t get much happier than this: walking the beach to Umdloti with a respectably weighty mussel bag gently bumping my right hip and “mussel juice*” dripping down my right leg. (* Spurts of seawater being spat out by miserable molluscs ripped untimely from their beds.)

Once ensconced at the Sandbar’s best table, where Roy had been waiting for us, nobody ordered the mussels for lunch. As for choosing a sushi platter, it had to be the salmon – definitely not the tuna.

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That was because Jeff, a notable fisherman, had recently broken a prolonged dry spell on the fishing front by catching several fine tuna, the latest of which was to be lightly seared for Sunday lunch the next day.

Sunday Seafood Extravaganza

In view of our peripatetic lifestyle, I’m often asked where “home” is. I truthfully answer “wherever I am” – meaning in Perth WA with the family, on the barge in France with Roy, or here in Durban.

The next question is: “But which is your favourite place?”  Again, I can truthfully say that I’m very happy exactly where I happen to be. But my oldest friends are here in Durban, and so is my mother, Sheila; so naturally she joined us for a final Sunday lunch at Jeff’s place. She doesn’t really do sushi, but she does love a Windhoek Light lager and pile of mussels.

Jeff had done wonderful things with the molluscs. After cleaning them – which is unavoidably a pain in the ass –  he’d cooked them marinière-style with onion, garlic, wine and cream. Big shells sometimes harbour disappointingly tiny morsels, but these beasties were beauties: some white, some red, all fat and succulent.

As we pack for our four months in France, I’m already scanning the Umhlanga/Umdloti tide tables and plotting our return to those mussel beds in October.