The Beauty Of Slow

To run faster, run slow. Find out how and why with coach Neville Beeton.

- Neville Beeton

“It takes all the running you can do,” wrote Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland, “to keep in the same place. If you want to go somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

Perhaps Lewis Carroll was thinking of a hamster wheel, with a hamster running furiously at ever-increasing speeds, while remaining in the same spot. Fortunately for us, Alice in Wonderland was a work of fiction, and we can get ahead in our running without having to run twice as fast all the time.

With the world speeding up, we often feel as though we are in a Fast Forward setting, and we are the hamsters trying to keep up, all the while wishing we could step off the wheel for a rest and catch our breath. Just thinking of how technology has meant lightning-fast communication and increased connectivity, makes me yearn for the simpler days of my youth.

Back in 1977 as a 15-year-old kid growing up on a farm, I was training for my first ultra-marathon, the 48km Lowveld Marathon from Barberton to Nelspruit.

I had no watch back then, and my timing system was simple. I would take a look at my mother’s alarm clock on the dressing table in her bedroom to check what the time of the day was, go for my run on the dirt tracks of the pine forests, and then check the time of day again when I returned, to work out my running time.