How I Got The Name

From where the name originates

On a cold Winter's morning back in 1992, my good mate, Marcel, and I decided to go "jog" a 21km in the valley of Verwoerdburg (now Centurion). Things happened that day; strange things.

This is where the legend of "Famous Shamus" began.

Notice the colour difference between our undershirts?
That is rather fresh cow dung from the Irene dairy...... I shit you not.

Being the 1st of May, it was pretty nippy so we dressed appropriately; club vests with race were worn over tights and long tops.

It all started casually because it is a very popular race. There were thousands of runners on the road because this is the last Comrades qualifying race. I decided around 2kms into the run that I needed to "water the plants" but couldn't find a suitable spot. Eventually around 6kms I stopped under the trees just before the little river that runs through Verwoerdburg. Other runners, I knew, would "chirp" me, so I decided to jump over the embankment and go behind the tree (there were no fences back in those days).

Stepping onto the embankment, I quickly surveyed the area directly below me ........it looked like soft grass, so I jumped down.
It was not grass, it was a layer of Weeping Willow leaves floating on the surface of a "run off" dam that drained from the dairy 100 meters away.
I sank shoulder depth into a freezing mixture of cow dung, water and who knows what else that gets washed out of the enclosures and barns daily.

Naturally, I panicked when my feet broke the surface of the dam. The next 5 seconds seemed to happen in slow motion; by the time my knees became submerged, I was already turning to face where I came from, by the time my hips touched the water I had spotted a branch I was determined to grab, by the time my chest became submerged I was already trying to pull myself out.
Thankfully my good mate Marcel Smulders had followed me and helped drag me out of a most precarious of positions. Suffice to say, I didn't need to go wee-wee any longer.

We continued to jog on, fueled by adrenaline and some laughter. We ran the second 10km in about 40 minutes. The picture is of us sprinting for the line. (Sort of).

My coach at the time, Henning van Aswegen, was writing stories for the only multisport magazine around: TriCycling. 1992 was the very end of the Apartheid era so we international publications were few and far between.
The magazine was an A3 sized monthly, with a glossy cover and a very low budget newspaper like feel to its pages. Everyone loved it and read it voraciously from cover to cover.
Henning was a bit of a legend himself as he had completed a few Hawaii Ironmans back when when tube socks were still the fashion.
In one of his stories, he wrote about Dr Robbie Nel who did his open water swims in a crocodile infested dam with his shotgun-toting assistant rowing in a boat beside to him.
These were real men. Real tough men. Iron Men.

On the Monday after the race, at the notorious PETC track session, the weekend's shenanigans was mentioned while we swapped our training war stories. Some chuckling ensued and then we got on with another brutal session.
"Everyone has war stories", I thought, "It's all part of the fun."

Armed with most of "the facts" and a little poetic license, Henning penned a story that appeared in the TriCycling about 2 months later. This was story that spawned the moniker "Famous-Shamus"

It appears everyone who did Triathlon or Duathlon back then (in the days before Google), read the story, and thanks to the legends that are Paul Kaye, Paul Ingpen and Paul Valstar, it haunts me to this day.