This column by Simon Gear first appeared in Runners World SA in December 2009

I had occasion, not too long ago, to journey around Limpopo on the Department of Tourism’s dollar. They had collected together a group of alleged journos and we were expected to go home and write stories about how wonderful a province Limpopo is.  And it is.  Home to mountain ranges I bet you haven’t heard of, the Grippen fighterjet and the Mapungubwe world heritage site, to name just three pretty cool features.  And it is also now home to my favourite road in South Africa.

If you look at the very top of the map of SA, there is a tiny whisker of track that extends from Musina due west to the confluence where Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa meet. That little red line is about 120km of softly undulating, tarred perfection that winds its way between red bouldered koppies and Limpopo River valley savannah. Every couple of kays or so you come across massive, 500 year old baobabs, waiting patiently on the verge, as if for a very, very late bus.  This road cries out for a marathon. It would be a real toughy.  Hot as hell, dry and dusty but African to the very core.

This got me thinking about other running spots in South Africa that have that ‘Sydney Opera House effect’. You know, that moment when you are running on it and a little voice suddenly says, “Hey! Right now, you are right here. You are a part of this landscape.” There are stretches of road that deserve a t-shirt, or at the very least a tick in the mental box of been there, run that.

Chappies is probably the obvious one, but that is rather spoiled by also being a part of Two Oceans. Anyone who has gone over Pollies or Constantia Nek or even Northcliff hill in training knows that those passes only really come alive on race day.  I’m looking for stretches of road that have the ‘here and now’ charisma necessary to make it onto a cheesy boys’ magazine’s TOP 10 RUNS YOU MUST DO BEFORE YOU DIE!!!  The sort of places that you can tick off on your list when you are away on business. Places where you can run to in that weird, silent hotel room period between your last meeting and the earliest reasonable time that you can show up at the hotel bar.

Jo’burg is short on these iconic runs although Vilikazi Street in Soweto and the M1 flyover on the one day a year that they close it for the 94.7 Cycle Race would be worthy collectors’ pieces.  I once ran through the very centre of town at about 5am on a Saturday morning and the cachet of owning the middle lane of Eloff remains a cherished memory.  Any run in Pretoria needs to take in the Union Buildings and a loop through Hatfield to visit all the consulates but beyond that, our nation’s capital is a little shy of desert island moments.

The Durban beachfront comes to mind.  Apart from being the easiest, flattest, warmest run in the country, it’s also kind of fun as being the only run in South Africa where you can pretend that you are an actor in a Californian beach movie.

On the other side of the country is the section of Beach Rd, from the Moulle Point lighthouse along the Seapoint walkway.  This is the Durban beachfront’s capricious, evil step sister. Also flat, also painless, but also the first port of call for every rain squall to come howling in off the Atlantic.  The Moulle Point carpark is the closest you could come in South Africa to dying of exposure within sight of a Macdonalds.  That’s got to be worth a tick.  While you’re in Cape Town, you may as well run on the mountain, with the bit to the block house above Rhodes memorial being the out-of-towner’s favourite.

PE has an interesting equivalent.  If you clamber over the boulders at the end of Kings Beach you can get up onto the harbour breakwater and then run for about a mile with water on both sides.  It’s like running out to sea.  Whenever I run there I can never shake those National Geographic images of the killer whales that can swim up onto rocks to catch seals.  Or that time when Free Willy jumps over the little kid to his freedom.  I fantasise about some enormous, sharp-toothed thing launching itself out of the harbour water, collecting a sinewy, Nike-clad morsel in mid-flight before crashing into the open ocean to the awed applause of onlookers.  That would be worth a t-shirt.