“YOU WIN A FEW, YOU LOSE A FEW. SOME GET RAINED OUT. BUT YOU GOT TO DRESS FOR ALL OF THEM.”
SATCHEL PAIGE
HIKING: A SPECIAL AND ANCIENT SPORT
Naturally we can add various reasons for hiking being a wonderful kind of recreation. It emerges, however, that it is a sport. “Sport” comes from the Latin word which literally means to be in a harbor or a port and thus to leave behind the everyday work, to relax, to come to terms with yourself, to play, enjoy, indulge in pleasure.
We tend nowadays to forget that sport is largely play. For some it has become a matter of deadly earnest, and this does not only apply to the paid professional sportsmen and women, but also to the spectators.
Sport is not simple ordinary play, however. It is also struggle, conflict. However paradoxical this might sound, sport means to be involved in playful conflict or struggle.
Playful conflict means that sport which is reduced to hard work – and often war nowadays! – is not sport any longer.
But it is also a matter of playful conflict. Any sport involves one in a conflictual relationship with a chosen resistance with the purpose of extracting pleasure from the exercise. The type of resistance will depend on the type of sport – it can be your opponent on the tennis court, or on the rugby field, or height, distance or time in athletics.
Although hiking has many similarities with ordinary kind of sport, there are at least two important differences.
In many of the mentioned sports you mostly oppose another human being. In the case of hiking there are also others with you, but in the very first place you are competing with yourself. It is your own back which has to support the backpack for one kilometre after the other. It’s your own feet which should be able to withstand blistering. It is your own legs which have to withstand buckling on the steep ascents and descents. This involves one of the great advantages of hiking: you get to know your own strength and weaknesses very well.
In the second place, artificial obstacles are only encountered in ordinary sport, while in the case of hiking these are natural hindrances. For rugby you need a playing field, and for tennis a tennis court, while for hiking you need very little – you accept the ups and downs of the trail as supplied by Mother Nature’s hand. One need not buy or erect sporting facilities at great cost. The joys to be derived from struggling with these “natural opponents” are also not artificial, but almost primitive joy of simply being part of nature again.
Hiking is a sport – and then a very special kind of sport. When we come to what it means for the individual, we will see that it is really more than an ordinary sport. Hiking is beneficial to you in a way that other sports are not, because it is, in reality, a complete vacation apart from being a sport to participate in.
Hiking is also the very oldest of all sports. By this it does not mean that people from the olden days consciously practiced it as a sport. Our ancestors, who did not have to sit out their lives behind desks, probably did not realized what a privilege it was to be able to move around on foot. In fact, walking was the very earliest and most primitive form of sport.
We as hikers, explorers, and
adventurers have the absolute duty to respect and protect our Wildernesses.
Nobody else will do it for us. Take ownership!
The End.
Safe Hiking.
References and Acknowledgements
From the book – Drakensberg Mountains – the enchanting world of – B vd Walt
Photos – Willem Pelser
Compiled by Willem Pelser
