RUN For the Love of Life

Author: Erica Terblance
Publisher: Quickfox
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
I am both incredulous, and exhausted. I have just finished reading Erica Terblanches’s book RUN: For The Love of Life – and have been transported into another world, worlds actually.  Other planes and places – way out of my comfort zone, deep in fact, into discomfort zones. Imagine, just imagine if you can, running 56kms across the salt flats of the Atacama Desert in Chile on Day four of six. Or 

127kms along the Lycian Way in Turkey – Day one of six. Or 41 kms through the Kalahari, along what she calls Death Valley – Day two of seven. I could go on, but you get the picture. More astonishing still is that these cross-desert runs took place in 2009, 2015 and 2019 respectively, with many, plenty of others equally challenging, in between. Erica’s levels of endurance seem to know no bounds – her descriptions of tent-sharing sleeping, eating and competing in these events are breathtaking. They are also written with such immediacy and detail that you can all but smell the sweat and feel the grit – fresh from the pages of the journal she must surely have kept. Because Erica is also a writer. A writer who runs or a runner who writes? The question comes up in the book and certainly her style, of writing that is, is evocative, colourful and agonizing.
It’s not just the running that is agonizing, her own emotional life during these last twenty years or so (she is just 50 and only started running at 30) also suffers some extreme peaks and dips, and she very openly shares the passion and the pain that some of her partners have both given and caused her.  Adding to the texture of the copy is her liberal sprinkling of quotes and poetry: ‘Only those who risk going too far find out how far they can go.’ TS Eliot; ‘As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe will be simpler…what I found in simplicity was fullness’ Henry Thoreau; ‘I know you are tired but come, this is the way.’ Rumi. There are also lots illuminating, um, ‘footnotes’ on all things from nutrition and equipment to politics and philosophy for anyone who may even be contemplating following in her tracks.
You have to admire the commitment to putting across the full story of her running life, which is not just about running. Aside from her family and partners, Erica describes in detail the physical and mental approach, the strengths and weaknesses of several of her fellow athletes – some of them in their seventies (just in case you were feeling comfortable that at your advanced years you have moved beyond such madcap activity). But above all, the running journey has enabled her to look deeply into her own approach, strengths and weaknesses, and she is again, very open to sharing. ‘As I grow older’, she concludes ‘…I have found that in the moments when I shift my attention of worldly preoccupations…the greater the peace and the more my life seems to right itself.’ And as she grows older one of her other preoccupations is to encourage others to benefit from running – not hundreds of kms through unforgiving landscape – but Couch to 10kms in 10 weeks through her Thrive Run Club. You might like to check it out on facebook – or take a trot along the Sea Point promenade where you just might find her like a pied piper with a new and enthusiastic set of followers. Erica is an athlete in the extreme. ​