Mystic philosopher Robert Rorich and the pain cave

They call it “the Grail of Trail”. It’s a marathon, but the conventional wisdom is that you have to take the 42km distance and double it to get a sense of how tough the course is: rocks, sand, rivers and forests, with thousands of stairs to climb and thousands of metres to ascend. This is the terrain of the Otter African Trail Run, a gruelling sports event in an awe-inspiring location.

In less than a week gulp I will be tackling the Otter Challenge. I have a few hundred kilometres of training in my legs. I even bought one of those silly-looking hydration vests.

Thanks to Otter presenting partner EasyEquities, I now have some teammates to chivvy me along (though I can’t quite get my head around the paradox of being part of “Team Easy” for the hardest race I’ll ever run).

I have another spur to keep me going if I enter that deep, dark place athletes call “the pain cave”: I’m raising funds to help Wits University students in financial need.

Hopefully somewhere in the pain cave or, preferably, on the exalted heights of a clifftop

I’ll be able to reconcile the different parts of myself that got me into this predicament in the first place ... part university academic, part arts writer, part amateur sports enthusiast and would-be ultra trail runner.

These are not contradictory identities or states of being, however much crass stereotypes and social pressures condition us from a young age to accept the false notion that sport and art cater for different “kinds” of people, or give expression to different “sides” of human nature. Those who follow this column have seen me climb on a soapbox to hold forth on the subject before, so let me not repeat myself here.

Nevertheless, I do hope that somewhere on the Garden Route next week I’ll bump into artist, trail runner extraordinaire and mystic philosopher Robert Rorich. It won’t be along the Otter single-track; Rorich is an elite runner, and if he’s participating in 2023 he will complete the race in about half the time it takes me to stumble to the finish line. But I think I’ll catch him at the awards ceremony, where he will be handing over the miniature otter sculptures that he has created for those who have finished 10 Otter races.

These quirky statuettes have been cast from plastic that Rorich has collected while out on the trail, melted down and mixed with sand and terracotta powder (to minimise toxic emissions from the moulding process). He has previously worked with clay and bronze; his new adventure with sculpting in plastic is a deliberate ecological and aesthetic intervention.

In an age of halfhearted environmental awareness, we have all learnt to blame plastic even as we continue to depend on it. We project our human failings as producers and consumers onto an inanimate substance that we have synthesised. Rorich, having “spent so much time hating plastic and its presence on our trails and in nature”, has started to think about plastic differently. Instead, he wants to “reshape the narrative of plastic’s destiny” from one of destructive “disposability” to repurposed “cherished heirlooms”.

This is a continuation of the activism that has driven much of his artistic output. His 2022 exhibition Transcendence focused attention on the precarious position of the endangered pangolin. More generally, his work emphasises human-animal connections and the ethical obligation indeed, the existential imperative of finding ways to coexist with, rather than to dominate, nature and other species.

Little wonder, then, that Rorich’s art matches the “green principle” behind the Otter African Trail Run. Brothers John and Mark Collins, who founded the event, wanted to ensure that the near-pristine setting remains better preserved because of (and not despite) the athletes pounding their way between the Storms River Mouth and Nature’s Valley.

Sport, art and access to natural beauty: each of these, affirms Rorich, offers “access to ecstatic states of being ... energy, openness, connectedness, love, passion, conscious presence”. That is an appealing prospect even if you have to go through the pain cave to get there.