Kate Cook Interviews Phil Hewitt

Kate Cook, ordinary citizen of Chichester, interviews Phil Hewitt, Arts Editor for The Chichester Observer and sister papers across the South about his near-death experience and how he forged the long road back to health through running …

A glorious, happy day watching England lose at Cape Town’s spectacular Newland’s Cricket Ground turned into a fight for his life after author and journalist Phil Hewitt decided to amble back on foot to his Cape Town hotel room.

Ending up notorious District 6, a township whose inhabitants were forcibly removed in the 1970s by the apartheid regime and laid much of it to rubble and waste, Hewitt was brutally mugged, stabbed and left for dead; however, miraculously rescued by a man in a pizza-delivery van, he lived to tell the tale.

Physical wounds take time to heal, but mental scars are ghosts that haunt the quiet recesses of the mind like dark spectres, a branded imprint of trauma. A couple of weeks after the attack, still nursing broken ribs and deep stab wounds to the thighs, Hewitt found himself back in his running gear and training shoes.  Step by agonising step, Hewitt journeyed back to himself through his passion for running, finding inspiration, hope and redemption, through breath and choice but, above all, determination.

Borne out of his ordeal, Hewitt’s inspirational book Outrunning The Demons: Lives Transformed Through Running retells the stories of people of all abilities who use running to move through trauma – and find hope.

In this extraordinary interview, Hewitt retells his harrowing experience, ultimately moving us all to marvel at the resilience, strength and indomitableness of the human spirit.

Outrunning The Demons, Phil Hewitt, Bloomsbury, 2019

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