In January 2015, Daniel de Wet fell onto a metal lever in a gold mine in Carletonville, near Johannesburg. The 1.80-meter-long rod entered between his legs and came out through his back, just below his left shoulder blade. De Wet, then 34, remained conscious while rescuers immobilized him on a stretcher with the metal still lodged in his body and airlifted him to a hospital. Surgeons removed the lever in the operating room. Nineteen days later, he walked out on his own.
The accident cost him a kidney and left internal damage that took years to heal. But what stands out most is not only that he survived, but what he decided to do with that survival. De Wet, an engineering supervisor at the mining company Sibanye-Stillwater, resumed training and completed a marathon in 4 hours and 50 minutes, just under the qualifying time for the Comrades, South Africa’s most famous ultramarathon: 89 kilometers between Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
De Wet will run that distance with only one functioning kidney. He has precise instructions to hydrate carefully so as not to overburden it. His goal is to finish in 10 hours and 54 minutes, the same time he posted when he ran it for the first time, before the accident. “We take life for granted”, he said. “You realize that being healthy is something very, very important.”
