I can’t remember who it was, but around five years ago a person told me that I should try the Drakensberg Grande Traverse. I looked at them and – to be honest – thought they were completely crazy. Attempting to trail-run an unmarked route of approximately 220km through one of South Africa’s harshest and most rugged mountain ranges seemed at best foolish, and at worst, utterly dangerous and unachievable. But formidable as the traverse stood, there lay a challenge within the madness of those mountains to test myself physically and mentally and see what I could achieve.

At the very outset, the Drakensberg Traverse never appealed to me. I always saw those mountains as quite foreign, because they’re in northern South Africa and I’m from Cape Town. I’d never spent any time up in the range and from far off, it seemed intimidating and very wild. But as my trail-running career progressed I started chatting with Ryno Griesel about the infamous route through the mountains, and the seeds of a plan began to grow. The legends of the Drakensberg Traverse were born nearly twenty years ago. The Raubenheimer Brothers were the first to ‘officially’ do hike it, over 105 hours, or four and half days. Then, what began with a traditional hiking mindset soon progressed, with guys attempting to speed trek the traverse, followed later by a few adventure races. Ryno and I kept talking and we developed plans for our own attempt at the route. We looked at the Drak differently – from a purely running point of view – to see just how light, how fast and how far we could actually go.

The hardest part of the preparation for the run was the results from the initial reconnaissance. The Drak is something you have to do completely self-supported. There are no paths, nor trails. The rules are that you have to start at the Sentinel Car Park and finish at Bushman’s Nek, the border post. There are six significant peaks that you have to reach along the way without any aid or food-caches. These peaks are all over 3200m, all steep and all high; the tallest one being over 3,400m. There was no way I could attempt a route like this on my own – it was just too wild out there. From very early on, it became clear that Ryno and I would both have to work together if we were to stand a chance of pacing through the entire distance without serious incident.

Even then, from the moment we set foot in the Drakensberg she went out of her way to show us her fangs. We got caught out in a bad storm on the very first recce. Normally in October the weather is supposed to be calm and quite pleasant – so we were taken by complete surprise when a calamitous front ploughed straight into us. I hadn’t expected to be in the middle of a snowstorm and then, a few hours later, in stinging hail and thunder. The brutality of the storm made me think a lot about the feasibility of a full attempt. I came out of that first foray pretty scared, having realised how far removed we would be from rescue – completely at the mercy of the elements. In the Drakensberg all four seasons sometimes arrive in one day. But we would have little gear, no sleeping bags, no tents – just enough to survive what she could throw at us, if we ran fast enough.