Altitude Training Options: South Africa and Lesotho

South Africa’s diverse natural beauty and pleasant climate (most of the year) make it a popular tourist destination.  It’s colourful political past also make it an interesting place to visit, and once you’ve saved for the airfare, travel is relatively cheap.  Security and personal safety are, however, always a concern, and visitors should take reasonable precautions against crime, particularly in the large cities.  Trips can be very rewarding, and facilities are generally better than elsewhere in Africa.  Best of all, South Africa provides a great opportunity to train in a warm, pleasant climate during the northern hemisphere winter.

Potchefstroom
Potchefstroom is possibly the best known of the altitude training destinations in South Africa, but, while the facilities there are excellent, at 1,350m above sea level it is hardly high enough to initiate an altitude training response.

Dullstroom

The small tourist town of Dullstroom (2,080m), located east of Johannesburg, is a much less well known training spot, but has a greater variety of trails, is safer, has an excellent choice of holiday accommodation, and is considerably higher.  The area is particularly beautiful, but lacks a track and other training facilities.

Photos from my trips to Potchefstroom and Dullstroom can be viewed here. There are blogs from South Africa  here, here, here and here.

Pretoria
Somewhere that has excellent facilities for many sports is the High Performance Centre (www.hpc.co.za) at the University of Pretoria, where there is more than 70 hectares of land dedicated to sports facilities.  The centre’s altitude is approximately 1,350m, with areas up to 1,500m within the city.

Johannesburg
Johannesburg also has some altitude training possibilities, though the city’s reputation for crime is a major turn-off for foreign visitors.

Lesotho
The entire area of Lesotho, a small country which is completely surrounded by South Africa, sits above 1,400 m of altitude.  Covered with rugged mountains and spectacular scenery, Lesotho has a massive tourism potential, and authorities there are beginning to develop altitude training opportunities.  AfriSki resort (3,030m) and Mohale Village (2,200m) are among the currently available options.

Adriaan Geldenhuys wrote a guest blog on altitude training in Lesotho for us in 2013.

Potchefstroom and Dullstroom are detailed in Notes from Higher Grounds: An Altitude Training Guide for Endurance Athletes.  The book also contains further information on training options in Pretoria and Lesotho.

Christmas in Potchefstroom

And so I’ve spent my third Christmas in five years in Africa.  This has probably been the quietest yet, but no less enjoyable.  After the ice and snow of ’09 and ’10, it was nice to have a warm Christmas again.  Christmas morning I went for a run in the scorching heat around the North West University campus where there is a specially set out cross country course, a 400m grass track, and lots of well kept pitches to run on.  After an enjoyable run, I went back to ‘Cosy Cottages’, the very pleasant place at which I was staying.  After some lunch, I relaxed by the pool, took a walk around the town, did some bird watching, did another run, eat and slept.  I know it sounds a bit dull for Christmas, but for me, apart from my family not being here of course, I couldn’t think of a better way to spend it.  And if you’re getting a bit jealous of the heat and sunshine, it did absolutely bucket it down all day Tuesday. It’s not all sunshine, so to speak.

New Year’s Eve was even more low-key.  I did my long run in the morning, got a little bit dehydrated, and was pretty much whacked out for the rest of the day.  I went to bed about 10pm, and as is starting to be tradition for me, I managed to just about stay conscious until midnight, acknowledged that another year had arrived, rolled over, and slept soundly for the rest of the night.

I spoke to Dad before I left Heathrow at the beginning of this trip, and we chatted about how another year had nearly finished, and how we were going to make 2012 the year of living in the present.  The past is finished, and not worth living again, and the future is not yet ready for us, so best to live in the here-and-now.

And so, to the here and now.  I arrived in Dullstroom via Johannesburg yesterday.  Again there were thunder showers yesterday evening so I didn’t get to explore very much. I was pleasantly surprised to see how beautiful the place was when I went for a run this morning.  Dullstroom is a lot more rural than Potch, and the countryside around the small town is as beautiful as I’ve seen anywhere on my trips so far.  The town itself has an interesting selection of shops including an antique shop, no less than two chocolatiers, a clock shop which boasts the largest selection of shops in the southern hemisphere, a small brewery, a shop selling locally produced cheese, and a whiskey bar which reportedly has the second largest selection of whiskeys in the world.  Add to that a small supermarket and a few restaurants, and what more could you ask for?

Despite the modern shops and the reputation of Dullstroom for flyfishing, mountain biking and other Western pursuits, there is a small township close by, and the town feels far more like the Africa that I know and love than Potch, or even Johannesburg.

And now?  Well I guess it’s time to go and do some living in the here-and-now.  I might even go check out some of those clocks.

Have a very special 2012, and I hope that this year is the year that most of your dreams come true.  Not all of them mind, because as someone once said, ‘if today were perfect, what would be the point of tomorrow?’

It doesn't rain but it pours

In yesterday’s blog I opened by saying how distinctive Africa is, and how you are on the continent as soon as you land at the airport. Well scratch that. Flying into Johannesburg is just like flying into any other airport around the world. It doesn’t smell of Africa, it isn’t dusty, there are no crowds of people, and we didn’t even have to queue at emigration. Did I board the correct plane? Being white doesn’t make me stand out as a tourist, though I’m yet to decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. One thing that’s the same though is that nobody knows when the buses leave, or in fact any are travelling today.

It turns out that the last bus from the airport to Potchefstroom (Potch) left at 1pm, and I need to take a taxi to the main station in Johannesburg and hopefully catch a bus from there. It turns out that I get the last available seat for 3 days! I joke that it’s the luck of the Irish – something that maybe I should learn to be less reliant on.

The trip to the bus station was something of a disappointment. Again, there is nothing of the sort of chaos that I would have associated with a major African city, especially not one as notorious as this. In fact, it seems quite a safe and inviting city. But perhaps there in lies the danger.

I can’t tell you much of my trip to Potch; I slept the whole way. And I arrived in a massive thunder storm. As with the rest of Africa; when it rains here, it sure knows how to rain. Familiarity at last!