Comrades Marathon
Illustration by Daniel Yagman
“The reason you beat me in the ‘Comrades Marathon’, Bruce”, Hoseah Tjale once remarked, “Is that I start cramping with 10 kilometres to go in the race and you start cramping with 5 kilometres to go. While I’m fighting cramps in those critical few kilometres, you run away from me.”
Alan Robb
Glued into one of my old scrapbooks are some faded dog-eared newspaper articles of the 1978 Comrades marathon. That year I ran my second Comrades Marathon and my first down run. To be honest I kept these articles because my 14th place finish meant my name appeared in those newspapers that published the first 20 finishers. Fame at last! One photograph in that scrapbook, however, always catches my eye. It’s a faded black and white photo of Alan Robb’s head poking out from above a shower door. Clearly, he is enjoying a shower in Durban’s famous Kingsmead stadium. Alan’s running vest is also captured in the photo. It dangles from a towel rack with Alan’s Comrades number, 1704 still pinned to it.
Bruce Fordyce Comrades After Party
Last Sunday’s epic 42nd running of the London Marathon reminded me that I once ran the London Marathon with Gordon Ramsay. Yes “Hell’s kitchens/Kitchen Nightmares/The F word” Gordon Ramsay.
For any astonished non-believing sceptics reading this article who doubt Ramsay’s ability to run a marathon, allow me to startle you further. Gordon Ramsay has completed 3 Comrades marathons between the years 2000 and 2004. His best time is 10:31 (up). For good measure he is also an Iron Man medallist. In language spiced with profanities he rated the Comrades as the toughest @#$& race he has ever run.
Bruce Fordyce Comrades After Party
In 1972 a team of English runners from the famous athletics club, Tipton Harriers, in Staffordshire, arrived in Durban intent on sweeping all before them in that year’s Comrades marathon. They immediately caused a sensation when it was learnt that they were relying on a new revolutionary new carbohydrate loading regime called the Saltin diet to boost their chances, and that they had held striptease shows back at home to help raise funds for their trip. Back then in conservative “verkramp” South Africa this was scandalous behaviour.
Comrades Marathon
It’s such a pity that South Africa’s two premier ultramarathons are run just a few weeks apart. It’s like those poor people whose birthdays fall on Christmas day or New Year. It’s simply too much excitement in too short a time. Comrades Marathon runners are compelled to choose. One of the events must take precedence. If their goal is to run a successful Comrades they must make Two Oceans the supporting act for Comrades. Two Oceans ambitions must be cast aside, and the focus must be the Comrades marathon. For Two Oceans fans it means discarding the Comrades. It’s a little like choosing the Rolling Stones as the supporting act for The Beatles. Neither should be the supporting act for the other, It’s Interesting that many Cape based runners call closed season after they’ve earned their Two Oceans medals. For many of them the Comrades is a bridge too far.
Comrades Marathon 2023
Casting my mind back over nearly half a century of running I realise that I have very few regrets, very few moments where I think “if only”
Yes “if only I had run a little faster and been a little bolder in the 1980 Comrades marathon, I might have won the race”
But Alan Robb deserved to win that year, and I was a very young runner, and was delighted with my second-place finish that morning. And, besides, a year later I won.
Comrades Marathon
There are few moments in one’s life, where a day or experience will stay with you forever. You could count them on two hands, and this was one of those times.
Everyone is familiar with the famous Aesop’s tale of the tortoise and the hare, and how the two animals raced each other one day, and despite all the odds stacked against him, the tortoise plodded his way to victory.
Comrades Marathon
How to tackle the down Comrades marathon, particularly for novices.
No one sleeps well the night before the Comrades marathon. And tonight, Saturday night the 27th August will be no exception, as thousands of Comrades runners try counting sheep while their nerves are jangling, and the butterflies in their stomach are more like angry swarms of bees. It won’t help that they will be sleeping in strange beds, with different pillows, while being continually disturbed by runners in the neighbouring rooms who keep flushing the loo and switching their lights on and off as they prepare their running gear for race morning.
Comrades Marathon
Through the bedlam and chaos, the screaming spectators, the over- enthusiastic pats on the back and the thick acrid braai smoke I could see the Caltex garage to my left, and ahead, not too far away, the summit of 45th Cutting.
My legs were heavy wooden planks and it seemed sharp knives were stabbing at my quadriceps muscles, but I was running strongly and purposefully and nothing was going to force me stop.
Comrades 2022 training
It was the morning before the Comrades marathon in 2019 and I was gazing out of the 15th floor window of my room in a Durban beach front hotel when I witnessed an astonishing sight.
No, it wasn’t the brightly billowing spinnakers of 100 international racing yachts nor was it the conning tower of a nuclear submarine surfacing off the bluff.