School’s ‘worst athlete’ turns cross-country champion

Sixty-four-year-old Caron Meyerowitz was told she would never be able run due to a health condition when she was only 17, but this month alone, she won two races.

Having started running only six years ago, she won the 10km Jeppe Race for the 60-and-over age category, and won gold with her team at the South African Cross-Country Championships.

Meyerowitz, who turned 64 this week and lives in Edenvale, was part of a team of four selected by Central Gauteng Athletics to do the cross-country through Rand Road Warriors, the running club she joined last year.

Meyerowitz had never run in her life, excluding what she calls her days as “the worst” athlete at school, until she was introduced to parkrun, a community event where you can walk, jog, run, volunteer or spectate, at the age of 58.

“Because I have a condition called Gaucher’s Disease, they told my mother I would die by the time I was 19,” she says. “Then they said I would only be able to walk and swim, not run.”

Her son, Neil, who ran the parkrun religiously every week, first convinced her to join him at a New Year’s Day parkrun. She wasn’t particularly excited about it, but in 2018, he convinced her to start the Bezuidenhout (Bez) parkrun in Observatory in Johannesburg. She began doing it by walking before trying a bit of jogging in 2019.

Two weeks ago, she completed her 200th parkrun and 100th session of volunteering at parkrun. The Bezuidenhout parkrun Facebook page dubbed her a “living legend”. Her family were there to support her at her 50th and 100th parkruns.

Her personal best is 27:43 at Bez parkrun, and she once came ninth overall.

Meyerowitz is now a pacer at Bez parkrun, and takes pride in having led runners to the finish within 30 minutes. Her husband, Colin, meanwhile, volunteers as a marshal and photographer at the parkuns.

She does most of her parkruns at Bezuidenhout Park, Observatory. “I like Bez. There’s a nice spirit. I always tell everybody there, ‘What goes down has to come up. When you go down, just remember you’re going to find horrible hills on your way back up.’ There’s such a vibe. Everybody now knows who I am.

“Sometimes I find somebody running slightly behind me and they’re not coming past. I turn around and say, ‘Are you following me? What time do you want?’ If they say 30 minutes, I respond, ‘Okay, let’s get you to the finish in 30 minutes.’ I’ve got a whole bunch of people to their personal bests by following me. That, to me, is unbelievable. I love it.”

Meyerowitz runs because, she says, “I feel fantastic afterwards. I don’t think I’ll ever need an anti-depressant.”

She also feels great while running. “I don’t want to run with music in my ears. It’s just me running,” she says.

On a few occasions when Meyerowitz finished in the top three at competitive races, she didn’t know about her achievement until she got home. “The first time I came first was in the Gerald Fox race at the zoo one year. My son, who lives in Israel, registered me to run it. I didn’t know you had to wear an age badge, so I ran and I went home. He said, ‘Do you know that you would have been first if you stayed after the race?’”

When she ran the Jeppe race for Rand Road Warriors last year, “I ran, went home, and my son said, ‘Go back, you came first.’” The same thing happened at a Pirates race, she came third but missed out on being on the podium.

Last weekend, Meyerowitz ran the Bez parkrun in orange in honour of the Bibas family. For photos, she put her hands up with two of her fingers down in tribute to recently-freed hostage Emily Damari, whose fingers were shot off.

Before that, Meyerowitz ran with a yellow ribbon as a reminder of the hostages. She was wearing  a yellow ribbon when she won gold in the Cross-Country Championships.

Meyerowitz encouraged her husband to be a volunteer at parkrun. “He had a hip replacement a year and a half ago,” she says, “but we do walk together.” He also wore orange this week in honour of the Bibas boys.

“At school, I was the worst athlete. I always came last in the 100m. I’ve always walked because the doctors said I could. We’ve got dogs, so we walk all the time. But then I started doing parkrun and getting personal bests almost every week just before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Consequently, I’ve done about 70 [not] parkruns – the self-recorded 5km races when parkruns weren’t possible during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

She runs on her own in Edenvale, and then meets up with the Rand Road Warriors on various mornings during the week to run about 10km.

She ran the Jerusalem Marathon in 2022 with her son and came second in her age group for the 10km race. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an official result as she didn’t register for the race correctly.

Meyerowitz participated in the race as she happened to be in Israel to help care for her son’s second son, who was a year old and had a fractured femur following a fall.

Meyerowitz and her husband ran a pharmacy in Rosettenville for 32 years.

She still can’t believe her running feats, not only because she basically never ran before, but also in comparison to others with Gaucher’s disease. “I must just be lucky. Gaucher’s disease is an inherited Ashkenazi condition and it’s more prevalent than Tay-Sachs. So, basically, I shouldn’t be able to run. Every time I run, I feel like I’ve achieved something.”