The Tour de Garage - A lockdown half marathon

In the days leading up to the start of our hard lockdown I started worrying about not being able to exercise. Then I saw a cabinet minister say complex dwellers could walk or run inside their estates. I was over the moon.

But it all fell apart in less than a week. I tentatively opened an e-mail from our homeowners association and a few seconds later my fears were confirmed. I’d been fined R1,000 for jogging in the estate.

My mind was racing. I sub vocalized a few things which I’ll leave out of this post because this is a family show. A couple of Google searches later and I’d confirmed they were right.

My heart sank. Apparently the official regulations did prohibit running in your estate and the minister had spoken too early. What was I going to do? A friend suggested skipping, but I hate skipping and didn’t have a rope.

After a day or two of wallowing I determined to see if I could run in our garage. Our garden was too small and cramped. I was pleasantly surprised that although relatively awful, it was indeed possible!

Over the last month I’ve slowly mastered the art of the garage gallop. It’s not graceful but it’s effective. Some lessons I learnt:

• Space - Park the cars in the street outside your house.
• Heart rate - Running in a garage is unavoidably slower than running outside, so run with a small weight so you still get your heart rate up. I used a 3kg weight and swapped it every minute or so.
• Balance - Switch your direction every few minutes to protect your joints and spread the load on your legs evenly. I did 5 min each way.
• Un-square - Draw four rounded corners with chalk to trick your brain to relax and treat the space as an oval/circle.

This long weekend was the culmination. I completed the 21km tour de garage - a half marathon - by running 7km on each day.