SAYAS BLOG

Elizabeth Carr

Every Saturday morning across South Africa, thousands of people voluntarily wake up early to put on shoes that they have overpaid for and jog through public parks and green spaces, pretending it’s fun. I should know, I’m one of them. I am also a parkrun volunteer (read: unpaid local hero), which means I’ve scanned thousands of finishing tokens and have often been sprayed with a light mist of someone’s sweat as they huff up to me and hand over their sweaty, crumpled runner ID which I then have to delicately unfold and scan.

But recently, for me at least, there’s something about running in a South African summer that feels different lately. Not emotionally but rather physically, specifically, hot. Like, why-is-my-sweat-sweating? hot. Like, why-are-my-shoes-melting-to-the-payment? hot. Breathing feels less like drawing in fresh morning air and more like sipping liquid lava through your nostrils.

It’s not just me. I’m currently pursuing a postgraduate degree (MSc) where I am researching the risk of heat stress in parkrun, I’m also an avid parkrun runner and long-time volunteer. Tragically, during one of the events I was volunteering at last year, an elderly gentleman passed away. He was a regular who had completed over 250 parkruns and I saw him and his wife every Saturday morning at the parkrun. His passing deeply affected me, not only because it was such a shock, but because it left me with unanswered questions: why then and why there? I later realised that heat stress may have potentially played a role in what had happened. That moment sparked my obsession with understanding how rising temperatures affects casual exercisers, people who show up to move, not compete.

My research led me to the literature, where what I found made me sweat even more. Studies show that South Africa is warming at twice the global average, with more frequent and intense heatwaves recorded across the country. It’s not just a summer problem anymore, it’s become an all-year-round reality. These events fall into what scientists call extreme temperature events, things like heatwaves and warm spells. Extreme temperature events are one of the clearest signals that climate change is showing up on our doorstep. These hot spells don’t just make us sweaty and grumpy, they are known to affect everything including human health and productivity. So what’s the problem with a little heat while exercising? Well, quite a bit, actually. While there’s already research on the risks and effects of heat stress in professional sports and endurance events, far less is known about how heat affects casual exercisers, the kind of people who show up at parkrun with good intentions, sunscreen and maybe a slight hangover. Parkrun is unique: it’s free, inclusive, non-competitive, and attracts a wide range of people, many of whom aren’t trained athletes. That’s exactly why I chose to focus my research here. I’m still early in the process, but I’m hoping my work will help fill this gap in the literature and raise awareness about the heat-related risks faced by everyday South Africans who are just trying to stay active and healthy.

When your body’s core temperature rises (like when you start jogging because you cannot let someone five age categories above you beat you), your heart has to work harder to keep you cool. Blood is rerouted to your skin to help with sweating, meaning less oxygen-rich blood reaches your muscles. That’s why hot weather runs feel harder (and more dangerous) than cool ones.

This is called heat stress, and it’s no joke, even for casual exercisers trying to avoid the label “couch potato”. While professional athletes often have trainers and professionals to help them manage it, the average parkrun runner is armed with nothing more than a cap from Mr Price Sport and half a bottle of warm water in a reused Energade bottle.

Still, we show up, why? Because parkrun is more than a Saturday 5km. It’s community. It’s routine. It’s a chance to say “Howzit!” to that one Tannie who finishes every run-in jeans. But showing up may start doing more harm than good, unless we start paying attention to what heat does to our bodies. It is time we acknowledge that heat is no longer just uncomfortable. It is a real hazard, even during recreational exercise.  

So what can we do?

As a volunteer, I’ve started noticing more runners slowing down or walking the route when it’s hot. That’s smart. The human body isn’t designed to set a PB (Personal Best) in high temperatures. Hydration, shade, looser clothing and adjusting your pace are all small but crucial steps. Maybe also encouraging parkrun SA HQ to move start times earlier in some locations, because let’s be honest, 8 a.m. in Durban in summer is less “casual morning jog” and more “voluntary, free sauna session”.

Beyond personal strategies, this is a public health conversation. We need city planners to consider green spaces and shade infrastructure. We need schools and sports organisations to revise heat policies. We need awareness campaigns that make people take heat as seriously as they take sunscreen on Clifton beach in peak Dezemba .

We also need to start talking about heat stress in a way that people understand, because let’s be honest “heat exhaustion” doesn’t sound life-threatening. But if you say, “You could pass out mid-run and wake up with a medic feeding you ice chips while your brain feels like pizza that has been warmed up in the microwave”, that tends to get people’s attention.

So whether you’re a casual jogger, a volunteer saint or just someone who sweats from the head down whenever the summer temperatures start to approach, remember this: climate change isn’t some far-off thing happening to polar bears. It’s happening right here, on the running paths, the school fields and the pavements outside your local coffee spot.

Until someone figures out how to run a parkrun inside a Woolies freezer aisle, maybe take the hint: slow down and cool off.

Deon du Plessis

I wasn’t out to eavesdrop on a whole damn country. But somewhere along the line that’s what happened.

As a linguist I probably spend more time than most listening – really listening – to how people speak. It isn’t just about what they say, but about how they say it. It’s about how the air fills the space between their teeth and tongues.

I especially love vowels. Those sounds that fill the weight of our identity, upbringing, geography… In some of my research, they’ve been whispering stories of South Africa’s complex regional past. And its audible present.

I analysed South African English, a broad category of English that that assumes that it is spoken the same all over the country. Or worse, assumes that it’s “supposed” to sound like British English. The consensus reached by several mid-20^th century scholars, such as Anthony Traill and more extensively Len Lanham and Roger Lass, was that South African English “standardised” in the mid-20^th century and there was no more regional variation, no more dialects, especially among younger speakers.

This supposed “neutral” English, used in schools and on the news, was thought to have flattened out any trace of where people came from. (Of course, there has always been variation based on speakers’ social class, ethnicity, and that kind of thing, so please bear in mind that I am talking specifically about region and mother tongue speakers here.)

But the thinking goes that dialects would emerge again at some point in time. Language is often messier than we’d like to think.

I spoke with people from Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg and looked at the vowels in words like trap, dress, and kit. I recorded these interviews and plotted (as on a Cartesian plane) people’s vowels. I wanted to see if any of the earlier regional variation survived. Or resurfaced.

It did.

The interesting thing is that it seems in South African English, dialects are not only in the process of reemerging, but they are remarkably similar to what they were before being levelled into one, non-regional thing. This actually corresponds quite closely to what happened in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachussets, USA, where people started speaking more like those on the mainland until they didn’t.

For example, Capetonians say the “a” sound like you get in the word trap markedly “lower”. In the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)’s terms, you’d write it [æ], and you could also say it sounds more like “a” and less like “e” (you can listen to what I mean here and here, but note that the difference is exaggerated a lot). And in Durban, people said the “i” in the word “kit” in the middle of their mouths, not the front like people mostly would (listen here and here).

These differences might seem subtle, but they are not meaningless. Regional differences in South African English have not been erased – they have only learned to be more subtle.

This kind of work always brings me back to the masters who laid the foundation. One is Raj Mesthrie, one of the greatest South African linguists. (It’s also worth saying, he’s just a really nice guy.) A few years ago I had the privilege of contributing to a volume, also known as a festschrift, in honour of Raj. The chapter I wrote drew heavily from Roger Lass’s (1990) work which was from 25 years earlier. Roger was a mentor of Raj’s. It’s a rule of thumb that there are around 25 years between different generations, so it was good that we could get that one-generation-depth.

People have thought that there is no more regional variation in South Africa, that there are no more dialects, but that seems to be wrong. Something that is undeniable is that how we use language, its variation and nuances, expresses who we are. Maybe that’s the most human thing about language. It’s never really settled. It’s always in motion. Like us.