Comrades #1 - Uprun 2024

Dare I write my name on that page?
Dare I write my name in that history?
Yes, I dare.

If you know, you know, If not, stick around here for a full explanation on the above. As I’ve said before, my early years had 31st May as a red letter day. I suppose with the sporting boycott in full swing, this was our own Olympic final. Currie Cup final and B&H night cricket was the only thing that came close. Take the freestate bits out and this story might have well been mine.
So while I’m slightly surprised it has taken me this long to actually run Comrades, only once there did I realise how many firsts I would tick off. I had heard, watched and thought about the VIBE on the startline. It is 5am and the Comrades start is the centre of the universe. Chariots of Fire and shosholoza will never ever be the same again.

Even the expo was thrilling, driving the route and putting all these placenames into a visual reference was overwhelming. Seeing the endless stream of spectators firsthand from the field trumps anything I’ve experienced in my 26 Argus cycle tours. I’ve watched a lot of people finish this race over the years, now I did it and got the tiniest but most memorable medal in my collection. The final cut-off was something I wouldn’t have missed for the world – the most basic of human emotions are stripped away and infront of all, a mixture of massive disappointment and pain. It makes me cry just thinking of it. Tell you what they don’t show on TV – the traffic getting out of PMB!

I entered this race on the day it opened in October 2023, joined a running club in January and got training in earnest. About 6 weeks to raceday my wife Victoria confirmed her massive desire to join me for the trip and that is the junction that changed how it would unfold. I could have done it all alone, but the experience would have been totally different. I’m the first person in my family to do the Comrades, but let’s compare that score to the one I married into. Between her mom, grandfather, two aunts, three uncles, four cousins, and some respective spouses the count of Comrades medals is north of 50.

That’s a tough act to follow, but I got treated like the international sponsored athlete that I am most definitely not. Driving the course with a 24 time finisher, sleep over and an early lift to the start from a multiple Bill Rowan – you can’t buy that experience. It was such an occasion that Victoria is now planning to be the second Burnett to do this damn thing next year.

The start is just incredible, you have to see it to believe it. Go find a race stream on youtube and watch it from 8 minutes before the gun. No one does it like this, and I suppose it is even more of a national coming together directly after our most fractious democratic election. The posters were still up and there were murmurs of violence in KZN, but we were all united with a common goal - a coalition to the finish line at Scottsville race course.

Somehow in the chaos I looked around and found Craig about 10 meters behind me. We had both coincidentally chosen to do our first race Comrades this year, and had navigated the novice journey together mainly on whatsapp. I had run the first half of my qualifying Weskus marathon with him, but our race strategies were different for Comrades. We would either meet at the finish, or along the way if my faster start backfired. We had a lovely chat, wished each other good luck, heard the gun go and then got shuffling forward after 5 minutes when we could finally move.

It's not easy to tell the difference between a 2000 and 20000 crowd at 6am if you’re in it and don’t have a bird’s eye view. After a few km, the route rounds onto the highway with a slight rise and straightens to show half a kilometer of four lanes packed with bobbing heads. It’s a sight to take your breath away. So many people who have done a marathon, paid their entry fee, got themselves there and put their feet on the line to go all the way to PMB – took my breath away.

It had been drilled into me to take it easy in the first half, Bruce famously says “start like a coward, finish like a hero”. While 2:20 is maybe the slowest half marathon I’ve ever done, it did have 350m of climbing and the first of the big five, Cowies Hill. My legs were already feeling that it was going to be a long day at the office.

Driving the route on the Friday was incredible knowledge to gain, but also just a blur compared to actually doing it on foot. I had a two stop strategy with seeing Victoria, once at Gillett’s crossing (29.3km) and second time at Inchanga (48.5km). It was a nerve wracking day for her, she had two packets of extra gels/carb drink, spare shoes and socks, even my sunglasses. She had a rental car with ropey navigation phone interface, KZN drivers, roadworks, N3 traffic, parking chaos often miles from the route and a weight of expectation that she had to be there to see me. Most people don’t have a private second, it’s a real luxury but also a way to share the race and entire experience together. She learnt a helluva lot on the day, and it was a real relief to see her at Spot A. It would have been manageable taking in the race refreshment stops (lots of bananas and salted oranges) but I had been worried that she would freak out that she hadn’t been able to see me, I had no way to get her a message that she shouldn’t worry. Also, that fancy ass and expensive Maurten nutrition did not want to fly back to Cape Town either.

I had tried to have a pacing strategy for the day. There are as many theories as experts out there on what to do. I done about 80% of the sub10hr training plan requirements, and hadn’t actually done the sub4hr marathon that is the yardstick (time x2.5) for your Comrades finish. I had now caught up to a 10hr bus and chose to run with it up Fields hill, the 2nd of the big five. A pacing bus is a uniquely South African thing. An experienced runner gets assigned a time to run and it’s their loose responsibility to drag whoever follows them to the line in just under the target time. They’re identified by a big flag, will be crowded by followers and often come with chants, singing and in this case, a tambourine. Sometimes they take up the entire road and can become a bit of a hazard for slower/faster runners and even spectators!

There was a second 10hr bus further up the hill, and I had now got between these two. My plans were constantly changing! In any running race, people will talk about a “split”. This is your time at the halfway point. Normally you tire and your second half is slower than the first, this is a “positive split”. Keeping gas in the tank after a conservative start is a ‘negative split”. This is the suggested option by many, as the second half is considerably easier and you want to be able to take advantage of the flatter roads to record fast pacing. This was going to be my longest run past 56km, so any sort of plan was always an experiment. Mainly due to simplicity I bargained on maintaining 7min/km average for the first half and taking it from there.

Now onto Botha’s Hill (the third of the Big five), I sidled up to a green number with the “70” patch on his shirt. It was easy to recognize this Germiston Callies athlete, instead of an actual number he just had “Alan” to confirm my suspicions. That is how I got to have a brief conversation with a three time winner and the guy who mostly pushed Bruce to his limits in the eighties. We even exchanged a few words about Vic’s uncle Tim who finished 2 places behind him in the 1980 race. He wasn’t that animated, but when you have his palmares you can act anyway you want – it was a real goosebump moment for me.

I figured it was time to show the inclines a bit more respect. I decided to walk the second 2/3 of the hill, but at a brisk pace. In adventure racing we go for days on end on our feet and I’ve done plenty of fast walking over the years now. It seemed more efficient than a slowrun/slow walk that many around me were doing and I wasn’t even losing much distance. There are quirks to Comrades that make it the unique experience it is. There’s a retaining wall here that Comrades finishers can buy a plaque to (technically that includes me too now, but I think it’s a bit presumptuous to do it with only one under the belt). It goes on forever, and each of those numbers has it’s own story(ies) to tell. Then there’s Arthurs seat, he got a lantana flower from me (google it!).

Meet-up spot B came a few kms after the halfway point, another cut-off safely navigated. In the end I sneaked in just under 5hours which gave me about 6:50min/km taking the time to cross the startline into account. This meant an “even split” to get in under 10hours. I had two main plans now cooking in my head, either keep it conservative and have a good shot at a comfortable enough 10:15-10:30 finish. Plan B was to push for the sub10 (Robert Mtshali medal), and if the wheels fall off then walk/hobble/crawl to the end no matter what the time is. I rolled the dice for the second plan, intent on keeping a consistent pace and doing the maths every few km markers to see where I was.
Meeting up with Vic at Inchanga (fourth of the big five) was wild, as the crowds here at come from far and wide and every runner now had a tough marathon in their legs. She was there with cousins, and followed me up the road for a bit as we swapped goods and stories. She said I was looking good, I replied that looks can be deceiving. The Comrades app is really effective, taking the runner’s timing points and then translating it to an expected position updated constantly on the map – spectators then get a fairly accurate 5 minute window to spot their runner coming past. There was a bonus 3rd meetup in Camperdown at about the 60km mark that was never going to happenm. In the end I ran the final 38km faster than she could get back to the car, navigate through the N3 chaos (official apologies from CMA for this), find parking and get to the racecourse. I’d say it was easier to be a runner, but the final stretch was no picnic for me, but it sure was quicker.

With about 25km to go, I was still well under the pace to make sub 10, but I knew that my legs would not have it. I abandoned that goal and shifted to just getting to the finish and anytime would do. I made the deal with myself that if I could keep going at a consistent speed on the flats and downs then I would be allowed to walk every uphill to the finish. This is how I got excited to see the bottom of Little Polly’s (not little) and Polly Shortts (final and most infamous big five – due to the location at ~80kms) itself – running down to them hurt enough already.

Our route recon ended soon after Polly’s, what was the point of driving into PMB Friday afternoon traffic? An old salt told me that the final few kms into the finish would be a gentle downhill breeze. Seeing the banner at Polly’s come past was the first time I knew I was actually going to finish this thing, and choked up a little. The rest was floating on clouds, with plenty of crowds lining the street the whole way. The kilometer markers at Comrades are descending, and it seems a little odd in Westville when it goes from 78 to 77 to go. The final few are great, especially that 1km board – I hope it ends up in someone’s man cave or pub. It felt a brisk run to the end (a 31minute parkrun never felt so fast), and all of a sudden the finish line was there. No twist in a stadium here, just enter the racecourse and the finish is in front of you. Final time was 10:07 something, which means a bronze medal - 7 minutes is a very long time so I'll take it.

I do feel a little silly trumpeting myself finishing this race. There were twenty thousand other people there, and over 300 000 have finished it over the years, it’s a big church! This is a huge contrast to the 900km adventure race I did last year that hardly anyone had ever heard of, but I’m happy that I’ve done both for their own reasons. Firstly I need to apologise for any comments made to people struggling on national TV to finish this event, everyone who takes this on and gets to the end is an absolute hero in my mind. Secondly (and this will be obvious to the natal crowd who have the event baked into their folklore) I really think anyone who considers themselves an athlete should put this one in the cross-hairs and take a shot at it. It’s just an experience in itself, there is nothing in the world that comes close to this – and it’s in our backyard. Now my name is just one more in that book.

squeak some tekkie

Q:What's someone who posts videos about running on the internet called?
A:A shoetuber

So I've gone down the rabbithole of looking at people talk about running. Well now here's my time to join them! I forgot to say, if you really want some good advice on shoes. Go to a specialist running store that has staff who know what they're doing. The guys at Mr Price are mostly only capable of running a bath. Beyond that, there are real specialists (eg. biokineticists) that could save you a lot of money int he long run.

Hard to PORT

Check this. Get up in the dark. Kick the kids out of bed, put them on a bike with flashy front and backs. Go for a run with your phone in hand.

In the club

What is this running club scene anyway?
South African road running is a massive thing, it’s a whole subculture most people are either blissfully unaware or incredibly suspicious of. One condition of doing road running races beyind a half marathon is that you have to join a club, and run in the official club kit – with any variations being a potential disqualification. I saw this is as an admin side issue, I never thought I’d need to join a club to actually go running – I’ll just do my training and the rest of the things I can work out on my own.

The obvious thing was to join my closest club, Fish Hoek AC, but look at that kit, it’s a yellow and black prison outfit – there had to be a better option?! I figured I might only do Comrades once, so might as well get some nice pictures. I settled on the best option of becoming a country member of this club in Benoni that uses the chappies bubblegum design for their vests.

Turns out my wife knows half the stalwarts at the Fishhoek and it’s apparently a great vibe, so she signed us up as a family before my sudden dose of unneccesary vanity could get in the way. The upsides from then on kept on coming.  

There’s a thing on the Saturday morning called a “club run”. You can go do anything from 12-25km (and building) in little groups and every 5km or so there’s a car that stops on the side of the road to setup a water station. Things like water/biscuits/coke/jellybabies are just there and members take turns to run it. INCREDIBLE development, all of a sudden getting up at 5:45am on a Saturday morning wasn’t such an issue.

Without me really realizing it, the entire calendar for the first half of the year is clearly structured around Comrades. It just builds up in distance and the training follows suit. It was during this time that it dawned on me that this whole Comrades malarkey wouldn’t quite be the breeze I expected. And that’s where a club and more importantly clubmates come in. Feeling undertrained/overcome/injured/anxious/overconfident/windgat/aimless….there’s someone who’s been there done that and happy to share your issues and add their own experience to ease the anxiety. You can’t put a price on that.

Westcoast marathon would be my first lots of things for a while, but mostly I’d be running in that kit for the first time. Amongst many things I got to greet fellow strangers on overtaking(en), a quick acknowledgement of your club mate is somehow a much bigger deal than I thought it would be.

Two Oceans is the highlight and focus of the running season for many, in my mind I had it as a convenient training exercise that popped into the schedule nicely. Amongst many things I learnt that a quirky kit is recognizable if nothing else. The random support you get from strangers just on your outfit is probably worth a hundred free strides each. The day after the run there was a sneaky get together at the club to celebrate everyone and their achievements. I’ve done lots of big events but there’s something special when a group gets together to celebrate all and sundry and their own achievements no matter what they were.

In the background there’s a guy pulling all sort of strings and levers for the Comrades runners from the club to have a good experience. Long runs, a talk by Bruce, special kit for the race it’s all done and so appreciated. Tonight I got celebrated with 35 other club members as the group going to take this on in the club colours. There’s a big contingent of us doing our first, quite a few green numbers (10+) not running but way out there Beaumont is doing his 25th and final. I first met him in the shops looking at kit, did a few hundred metres together at Oceans and today he bought me a jager celebrating my first.

I never thought I’d be a “club runner”, but now I get it. Everyone runs for their own reasons, it really can be the loneliest of pursuits plodding on the road. Solitude has its place but it’s so much easier when you’re in company suffering together. I might not even do another Comrades, but I’ll definitely stay a club member. A FHACing proud one too. I forgot to mention, I'm raising money for SANparks honorary rangers with this blog - please go donate some money here

“Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face.”

That quote is attributed to Mike Tyson, it’s maybe not even what he actually said as it seems to alternate between “face/mouth”. It’s also difficult to do detailed research on this as it said in an interview and not a live press conference. I quickly gave up trying to confirm it, as the internet is full of twitter videos of him actually punching someone in the face (mostly a passenger on a plane, clearly didn’t want the aisle seat?). We’re going down the wrong track here far too quickly, but it’s a fitting metaphor. I had a nicely laid out plan for this blog mini-series and what to write. Then I got the flu, and that changed both my program and my desire to open a computer for a good 72 hours. The quick news is that it is the night before the Slave Route Half marathon and I will not be running it in jeanpants. I won’t be doing anything more taxing than making tea (I gave my entry away on Friday already). We have lovely children who sometimes come with germs and for a brief period we got to reminisce what it was like during that wonderful lockdown of 2020s when the 75% of the family had covid. I’m definitely not here to talk about vaccines (there’s no desire for this blog to go viral), but in hindsight would have got the flu jab as a precaution measure to my overall running plan.

So back to the plan then (well keep coming back to see how these reports go, but) how does this affect my training/race strategy? More importantly, what is my training/race strategy?

I’ve always done a bit of this and a bit of that. Living in Cape Town and right by the sea I like to think that I can be on the water/ in the mountains /on a bike (delete where applicable by time/weather available). It’s too windy you say…well I do windsports too, because that’s like not skiing in a snowresort! If you’ve been around long enough to remember the Totalsports challenge, a 7 leg relay event from Gordon’s Bay to Kleinmond – I did it as a solo 5 times, even won prize money sometimes!

Having a family was a real adjustment in my outdoor activities but the sport(s) I’ve done most over the last decade was Adventure Racing. This is “the greatest team sport you’ve never heard of”, and always impossible to describe in a nutshell. For this context, I’ll be in a mixed gender team of four. We move together non-stop through sections of paddling/mountainbiking and mountain trekking with the organization moving our gear as transition between disciplines. There is no marked route but checkpoints we need to navigate to using only a map and compass (so yes no gps/google earth/phone a friend). The big event is an annual ~500km race, which will us take 4-6 days to complete with an average of 2/3 hours of broken sleep each night.

Team Rustproof AR on day 2 of ARWC

Sounds crazy, you bet! We obviously can’t move at lightning speed for this period of time, so it’s moderate riding and fast trekking until the wheels start falling off. The team can only move as fast as the slowest member, so we look after whoever that is at that particular time. We take turns to be tired/sore/sense of humourless but also get to travel through parts of the country and promise you’d never be taken to otherwise. Bruce F even did one once. 2023 was the turn of South Africa to host our first ever World Champs, and I threw myself into this more than ever before with a supportive family totally behind me. To fit into the global calendar we actually had 16 months to plan for this race but I started about 10kgs in reserve and a niggly achilles that wasn’t fixing itself like these things normally do. For the first time ever I actually went to physio, did the recommended exercises and signed up and still attend a weekly pilates class. I managed to trim down and stay injury free, and I even have a biokineticist that I haven’t visited for months but am ready to go to in a heartbeat if things don’t feel right. ARWC was late October with 100+ teams from 60+ countries, an experience of a lifetime. The ~900km course ending in Cape St Francis took us 8 days and 8 hours, and I was cheeky enough to do a parkrun the next morning (blister management just about satisfactory). I felt like I had some well deserved rest lined up, but an incredible base to keep for the next big thing which was of course Comrades in June.

didn't monitor the scale closely, but the belt records 10sm of shrinkage

In hindsight I can see I was overconfident for this challenge for two large reasons.

* Long duration road running was no longer in my conditioning
* I picked up tickbite fever somewhere on the course and it klapped me
Let’s look at the second only, as I’ll get to the first in another post. We go bundu bashing through the veld and sometimes just sleep in a comfy looking spot in the gamadoelas. I’ve got it from 2 races before in the past, so jumped on getting the right medication as soon as I suspected it. My previous experience was that it just made you really tired but you could bounce back pretty quickly, but this race we got incredibly hungry and I think my body/metabolism might have been in a bit of shock from starvation.

I’ve never had a defined training plan for anything, but rather went on what felt right and was available and most of all fun. A GPS to record everything and a handy platform to monitor it all is incredible to co-ordinate this all better. As a team we all use Strava to help monitor each other, celebrate big sessions and “nudge” those who need to pull up their socks. I hadn’t realized it at first, but Strava premium gives you rudimentary coaching diagnostics that you can use to analyse training load/recovery and “overall fitness”. I don’t know how much intelligence it really has, they just ask for your sex, age and weight and I’d only use it as a rough guide; but the graphics do show some interesting things.

Strava diagnostics

As you can see it took a long time to build up fitness that was then totally wiped out in 6 weeks. I can add a massive pinch of salt here; while I’ll try to record all my training/races on my watch I can’t use it for adventure races because it’s a GPS so banned and wouldn’t have the battery life to last 200 hours. We did have a team recorder that was allowed, but I’m not sure if any of those metrics record in for me as it’s just one big activity (Discovery definitely didn’t reward me with a free coffee, but that’s ok).

What’s my point, when I started running properly again in January, I might have been starting from a much lower base than I envisioned. Probably a good thing I did a fair bit of Cederberg hiking first in the December break.

I considered the two training plan extremes of winging it (with additional advice at the running club bar) and getting an actual coach. The middle ground was to pick one of the training schedules you download off the Comrades website. I went for this, they’re done by Lindsay Parry the “official coach of Comrades” who has been in this game for a while. It’s free, but obviously very generalised and limited to the goal time you have in mind. My thinking was to see if this worked for me for two months and then reassess. It really slotted into my thumbsuck of building up mileage gradually with a qualifying marathon end of march ( Two oceans idea came later). That is how I got three A4 pages stuck to the inside of my cupboard door. I’d look at them every day, taking it week by week, and adjusting my schedule and plans for the coming days. Every 6 weeks I’d take them down and physically compare my actual time on foot/distance to the goal.

That’s a plan, do what you can. I’ve had a full week of zero running now three weeks out from race day, which is not in the schedule. Could have been better, could have been worse and no point worrying about what you can’t change. The one thing I know is that you definitely don’t try cram it back so late in the game!

Why Comrades??

I was always going to do Comrades sometime. I must have been 4 or 5 when my brother told me that we were waking up really early to watch the cock crow, see the fast crazy guys try get on TV for a few minutes of fame and then see Bruce Fordyce slowly smash everyone to take the win as predicted. That memory planted a seed then, and while many other trees have grown the 89km one is finally in the sunlight. I’ve always tried to watch it and while interest ebbed and flowed for a bit with many other worthy pursuits it remained in firmly the (ever expanding) bucketlist.

In retrospect I’m casually surprised I haven’t done it by now, but it’s not like I’ve been on the couch. Came close to starting down the path before; even qualified for it in 2009 in a misguided idea that it would be the first leg of the Freedom Challenge Extreme triathlon (I ended up doing something much sillier, but that is a story for another day). Unogwaja almost got me roped in but it was just too much time at the time, everytime. My wife Victoria and I soft committed to doing it together in 2020 (If Caroline can do it!), the year we would both turn 40. We never followed through, and that would have been a non-story because of “you know what” anyway.

I had by now run out of good excuses, but was definitely prompted by the incredible documentary DOWN. Think of Chasing the Sun, but for running (it’s the same production crew) try watch it. South Africa is many things, but definitely excels in the doing crazy properly and then dressing it up as normal. Nowhere else on the planet will you see 16 000+ people line up in the dark, sing together and run further than two standard marathons for a chunk of metal. I don’t normally go for something mainstream, but this is a story I wanted to be a part of and add my own name to the script. I like to think I’m a glass half full type of South African, and I’d go as far to say that Comrades looks like the most integrated anything we have going for us. All races, genders, LSM, ages, hometowns thrown together to be united by a course and equal for a day (if you stretch it to counting the last finisher to the first as being an Orwellian equal). The field covers a range of athletic abilities (how I yearn to trade a bit of my wise experience for my younger running body) but anyone who can cover the course is a superhuman in my book.

Just incase I needed any further encouragement, it turns out I married into some Comrades history that I am definitely claiming as if I’ve earned it (my own mother in law has "only" finished four). Victoria’s family are mainly from KZN, so the race runs deep on both sides. Her aunt (our host in Durbs) has done a casual 24, one of them pregnant enough that it would have melted social media these days. The press even wrote about her here. An uncle on the other side was pretty quick in his day. Gold medal sort of quick, try running sub6 in the 70s with bata tekkies, oros and no strava? No spice, uncle Tim once finished this race where the only people ahead of him were an Alan R, a Bruce F and a guy called Papillon Ball.

I finished the 900km Adventure Racing World Champs feeling in good shape so figured this would be a fun challenge for 2024. The entry was easy, didn’t have a running club or even done a road race for a decade but you pays your money and you gets your chance to write your name in the book. I did it on the day it opened and only told my wife, not entirely convinced yet I was actually going to do it.

DONATE HERE – R4k and I do Slave Route 21km in Jeans on the 26th of May

Who is JeanPantRacer?

So what’s this then? A memory jot for my journey to comrades 2024 for three reasons; to write about, so I can remember it and to raise some $$$ for Sanparks honorary rangers I’ve had this blog for a long time, it got close to being an actual thing. It all started at the places where most good ideas come from, a pub. this time, Knysna 2009 where I was running the half marathon the next day. Inspired by the OG jean racer Andrew King who did comrades in jeans, I chose to run in my levi's. Can't find the photo from that, but here is some of the things I've since done:

HellyHansen Tri Challenge Theewaterskloof 2010

HellyHansen Tri Challenge Theewaterskloof 2010

Knysna Half Marathon 2010

Knysna Full marathon 2011

Argus Cycle tour 2012 But for now it’s my platform to share my story. Normally I really avoid putting myself in the spotlight where possible, but got told I can be inspiring so decided to do something positive. When you enter Comrades, you can elect to do it for charity. I’ve never done this before, but really like Sanparks Honorary Rangers. I love taking my family exploring to Sanparks properties, and do lots of running in TMNP that is my backyard too. Locally I just know that there will be some proper projects required after the summer of fires we’ve had on Table Mountain. So here’s my pledge, for now. Donate to Sanparks Honorary Rangers. If I get to R4k before for 7pm Saturday 25th of May – I’ll do the Slave route Half Marathon the next morning in jeans. DONATE HERE EDIT - Jun24: I found this one from that first Knysna half in 2009, really regret now not actually buying these photos properly! Keep your eyes out for jeanpantracer at an event near you soon!