the poetic epic about a juggling marathon runner

PPutting one foot in front of the other isn’t the only way to run a marathon. Nothing forbids doing it jumping or backwards, even less with a bottle of milk on your head or ski boots on your feet, which you sometimes see here and there. Signed up for the Loire Marathon, which takes place in Saumur (Maine-et-Loire) on Sunday 5 May, Johan Swartvagher has been training, for the last eight months, to run while juggling. Equipped with three clubs 52 centimeters long, he chained together simultaneously, and endlessly, these two movements that seem to oppose each other in terms of coordination: “throw-catch-re-throw” specific to juggling and repetition of steps on the asphalt. What purpose? “Offers a bit of poetry and the absurd”as he explains in the podcast “Ending It”, where he talks about his epic journey.

Juggling is Johan Swartvagher’s raison d’être, his profession as well. The child was 8 years old when, fascinated by the gyroscopic flights of a juggler’s diabolo during a holiday in La Baule (Loire-Atlantique), he got one for his birthday. This will be followed by the acquisition of balls, clubs, devil’s sticks, flaming torches… At the college, in La Châtre (Indre), the teenager will propose to create a juggling section under the auspices of the National School Sports Union (UNSS), but the management will deny. In any case, the club will ultimately host the city’s youth and cultural centre. A year before matriculation, he left high school to join the ranks of a contemporary circus. Nothing could therefore distract him from his passion: making objects dance before him.

Nothing but running, which he also trains, at the same time, in an athletics club. It will take time before he has the idea of ​​combining the two disciplines. In North America, where this hybrid sport has its fans, they are talking about “jogging”. One of them, the Canadian Michal Kapral, world record holder for the marathon while juggling (2 hours 30 minutes 40 seconds), but also for the marathon while pushing a pram with a baby on board (2 hours 49 minutes 43 seconds), became his external coach, one “virtual friend” whom he has never met.

A sharp drop every 10 kilometers

The desire to participate in an official marathon came to him three years ago, on the occasion of his first athletic-artistic performance consisting of rallying Caen to Rouen (127 kilometers) with hamstring strength, with three clubs in his arms. Two days before the finish, the acrobat had to interrupt the race to go to the bedside of his dying mother, who was suffering from devastating cancer. He then had 42 kilometers to go. Equivalent to a marathon (42,195 kilometres). “There was something unfinished in this project, like a story to be completed”, he confides, in his house in Angers. Go for the nearest marathon, in Saumur, whose route borders the Loire. Also goes, for clubs, judged more “faithful” just bullets: “When they fall, the clubs stay at your feet, you don’t have to run to pick them up. »

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