Kirsten Kluyts’ savage murder has dealt a hammer blow to this city, this country and to the fitness community. This much-loved woman was murdered while doing something she enjoyed, something good for her health, something everyone should do, something she was entitled to do.
How, with any inkling of situational awareness, can we advocate for outdoor exercise when the charlatans who run this country spend more time competing for attention and dodging corruption allegations than keeping us safe, than keeping women in this country safe?
Of course, the terror of gratuitous violence is a suffocating net closing in on everyone, especially women, made so sickeningly apparent when Sinoxolo Myalo was stabbed in broad daylight by her spouse. It happens at the hands of people we know and people we don’t know.
But what about exercising outdoors? Warren van der Vyver was a man in his 40s, enjoying a holiday jog in Kenton-On-Sea when his life was savagely taken at the end of 2020. A Google search reveals many more victims. Some survived, surely all are traumatised.
There are walkers and runners in almost every suburb, every day. You often see women and men running and cycling alone at dawn or dusk. In one of their recent stories on the Kluyts tragedy, News24 ran this quote from Nicky Glickman of women’s running group Catch Me If You Can: “We keep safe by running different routes daily and meeting at various locations. We steer clear of parks with dense foliage and stick to busy areas. We carry pepper spray, and many of us bring our dogs with us.
“We make ourselves known to locals and keep our eyes peeled for suspicious people or vehicles... Having [security] watching and monitoring has made all the difference. Please don’t run alone. There is safety in numbers.”
The group uses eblockwatch Fidelity ADT Cyber Chaperone, which the article says “uses WhatsApp to connect runners and cyclists with the Fidelity ADT control room, which will monitor their route”.
What they are doing is right. It is good. But how tragic? I’ve encountered cyclists and runners who never go outdoors unarmed. Read that again — this is the state of our nature.
Cognitive function
I am not saying don’t exercise outdoors. I admire Glickman and the good people at many security companies who are fighting for the right of citizens to be outdoors. I also exercise outdoors, often, but I do so with a degree of situational awareness that’s unnatural to people from countries in Europe or Australia and New Zealand.
Why do we bother? A study called “Exercising is good for the brain but exercising outside is potentially better” was published in the open-source journal Scientific Reports in January in 2023. The authors write: “In conclusion, we demonstrate that a brief walk outside results in a greater increase in cognitive function than a short walk inside. Given the continued growth in urbanisation and a move to an indoor lifestyle, our results highlight the importance of spending time in nature, especially when exercising.”
A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health around the same time analysed dozens of studies seeking to draw links between outdoor exercise and its effect on psychological and physical health.
The authors write: “It is noteworthy that all findings of statistically significant differences between outdoor and indoor settings favoured outdoor exercise. Further evidence is required to clarify whether these results accurately represent treatment effects, or result from bias arising within ... (for example, unblinded outcome assessment, selective reporting, multiple testing) and/or across studies (for example, publication bias).” They concluded that more robust studies are required to draw any conclusive link between outdoor exercise and better outcomes.
I don’t think we need science. There’s just something about nature, isn’t there? Something about (relatively) fresh air and space and the solitude of our breath and thoughts and birds. It is wonderful to exercise outdoors, but please be aware of where you are and always follow good advice. It feels unfair because it is unfair, but it is what it is.
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