Rusty Berther - Scared Weird Frozen Guy: One Mans Mid-life Mission Musical Comedian to Antarctic Marathon Man

Scared Weird Frozen Guy

One Mans Midlife Mission from Musical Comedian to Antarctic Marathon Man

Rusty Berther

For Denise, Hank and Mary-Lou

Contents

When people hear that I love running they often ask:
What are you running from?
I dont think I am running from anything.
Maybe I am running to something.
Maybe I am just running.

28 November 2011

The plane to Antarctica was leaving at 7 am. The documentary maker, Bradley, and I went back to the hotel after dinner and did some final night before the big event interviews and got to bed around 11 pm. After all the planning and dreaming there was only one more sleep until my big running adventure finally began. This was getting very exciting. I felt calm and confident and ready to take on the world.

I had completed all of my training for the marathon despite the setback with my foot and I was currently fitter than I had ever been in my life. I had raised the funds for this expedition by myself and I had gathered an incredibly expensive collection of specialist clothing and gear that I would likely never use again. I had made it through hours and hours of painful gym sessions and grinding runs up mountains, along beaches, down bush tracks and through city parks and I was now ready to achieve this once-in-a-lifetime dream. I couldnt believe it was all about to finally happen.

An hour later I was lying on the bathroom floor, hallucinating and throwing my guts up with the worst bout of gastro I had ever experienced and my Antarctic dream was over.

To explain how I got to this point in my life we need to go back. Way back. I need to tell you some of the stories of my life that led me to the conclusion that running a marathon in Antarctica was some kind of good idea.

I know what youre probably thinking. A marathon? In Antarctica? Sounds like a piece of cake for such an accomplished, experienced sportsperson as Rusty from the Scared Weird Little Guys. Well, guess what my friends: the truth is I am actually not the finely honed specimen of steely-muscled man-cake that my publicist would have you believe. Nor am I a lean, sinewy runner with the physique and poise of a Kenyan Olympian.

I am actually just like you; that is if you are a 42-year-old stocky white bloke with sideburns and a slight limp. Otherwise, I am nothing like you.

But, as all runners know, you have to start your running career sometime, and its never too late.

Have I been a runner all my life? No, I have not. Did taking up running come easily to me? No, it did not.

Will I ask myself questions and then answer them to launch into a chapter about how running has featured throughout my life? Yes, yes I will.

What Are You Running From?

I ran as a child. A little bit, anyway. I was active and played plenty of sport growing up on Bribie Island. Bribie Island, or as we locals affectionately call it, Bribie, is a small island off the coast of Queensland, just north of Brisbane. I played Rugby League until Under-16s when the opposition players started turning up with beards and legs like tree trunks it was time for me to stop. I played junior cricket, golf and did the general running around and exploring that was the standard thing for kids to do while growing up on an island filled with bush tracks and beaches.

My favourite sport as a teenager was squash. What the hell ever happened to squash? Squash fever gripped the world of social sport in the 1970s. It seemed that everyone was playing it. They all turned up on weeknights to puff and pant, damaging their knees by pounding on wooden floors while wearing Dunlop Volleys. We lived down the road from the Bribie squash courts and I was pretty good at squash. For a few years I even played comp squash, which is short for competition squash.

There were four people in a team and we were a very mismatched lot. There was a bricklayer, a teacher, the bloke who ran the bike shop and me. Each Tuesday night I would be picked up by one of them I was about fourteen at the time and the four of us would make the hour-long drive into the northern Brisbane suburbs to play in some social squash competition. There were many leagues around such as the SSL (Suburban Squash League) and the BSA (Brisbane Squash Association). I think our comp was called the NBASLMGBNBTDOTN the North Brisbane Amateur Squash League for Mismatched Groups of Blokes with Nothing Better To Do On a Tuesday Night, or something like that.

It was great for fitness and it satisfied my keen competitive nature. One of the memories I retain from that time is the night I played against a fellow named Quentin Dempster. You never forget a name like that and years later he turned up on the television as an ABC political commentator. I was truly chuffed and he remains the first famous person I have ever met.

One of the few trophies I ever received in my youth was actually for running. The trophy is inscribed with the following words:

1979 Bribie Fun Run Russell Berther First .

Thats what it says. I didnt really come first. Well, I sort of came first. The run was a relay event with teams of eight people. It was part of the prestigious, inaugural Bribie Island Festival and I was part of a team from the Bribie Primary School.

The Bribie Island Festival was a big thing for us islanders and included a fete, a fun run, and a Grand Parade, which consisted of a few floats and a couple of cars containing personalities who were mostly unknown to us. I remember seeing sports commentator Billy J Smith in one car followed by a young woman waving madly from the rear window who, apparently, was Alice from The Sullivans . It didnt take much to impress us beachy yokels back then.

The fun run was a simple affair. We each had to run a leg of the race that started at the Caboolture turn-off and finished at the school on Bribie. I had to run from the Bribie Bridge to the library the highly important penultimate leg. It was a gruelling stretch of 2.14 kilometres (I just checked the distance on Google Earth). After waiting at one end of the bridge in the hot sun for a few hours, I finally noticed someone approaching across the bridge. Our team was in the lead! I was passed the baton by my panting, crimson-faced classmate, Peter Hampson, and though the other teams were closing fast (there was one other team), I managed to maintain our lead and pass the baton on to our anchor man, Peter Box, who powered away and crossed the finish line to bring us victory. Of course I didnt get to see the finish, it was too far away and I had just run over two kilometres for goodness sake. So there were no triumphant slow-motion scenes of us hugging each other and jumping around in jubilation. I probably just wandered off to the milk bar to buy an icy pole and walked home.

Even with such a successful beginning to my running career, I failed to get bitten by the running bug. I failed even to develop a slight running rash. Running and I were still a long way from getting together. How can I put it in todays language? Running and I were not even Facebook friends, let alone swapping personal information on rsvp.com. The next time I went for a run was about 16 years later. I can safely say that I didnt run during the entire decade of the 1980s.

You know how it goes: high school comes along and sport becomes less of a priority, then you get a job, and then youre forty and unfit so you start running.

Thats pretty much how it was for me anyway.

High school was the beginning of the end of sport for me. I gave up squash. (Cut to a close-up of my knees under the desk going Thank you, thank you, thank you!) I played a bit of tennis and golf and table tennis, but that was it. Running was something that the super-sporty types did or you were forced to do during PE.