COLUMN
" If South Africans and South Africa could be like this every day, where we all love and support each other no matter who we are and what country we come from, it would be the best place on earth."
Those words belong to Colin Goosen. I met him a few minutes after he crossed the finish line, while he was still doing that wobbly walk we all know, the one where your legs have officially handed in their resignation. He had just finished his 44th Comrades Marathon. Forty-fourth. I have started six and finished four, and I felt tired just standing next to his number.
What gets me about Comrades, every single year, is the strangers. Total strangers screaming and shouting and weeping for total strangers. People who will never meet again, never know each other ' s names, never sit down for a coffee, willing one another up a hill with everything they have. Friendships made on the tar that will last years. Dreams realised on the line and, heartbreakingly, some crushed within sight of it. There is no other day in this country where we behave like that toward one another so completely, so unselfconsciously, for so many hours.
I didn ' t run this year. Let ' s get that out of the way early, because it ' s the kind of thing that follows a man around at a braai. I didn ' t qualify. There was no qualifying time, no green number, no glory. What there was, instead, was a microphone, an armful of different media passes, and a spot on the Comrades Marathon Association official live stream commentary team, which meant I spent the day on the ground, in the thick of it, getting right into the heart of the race and the people running it.
And here is the thing nobody warns you about when you swap your running shoes for a microphone. It is just as emotional. Possibly more. At least when you ' re running you can blame the salt on your face on sweat. Standing on the side of the road with a mic, you have no such cover. There were tears all day. The runners cried. The supporters cried. And somewhere around the middle of the morning, holding a microphone in front of a stranger who was telling me why they were out there, I cried too. Professionally, you understand. Broadcast tears.
I asked runners why they do it, and they told me. Honestly, generously, with their whole chests, often while still moving. People opened up to me about family members they ' d lost, illnesses they ' d beaten, promises they ' d made to themselves at two in the morning when nobody was watching. One guy even said it was a dare from friends! It was an honour to walk and jog alongside them for a few metres and listen. I didn ' t earn a medal, but I think I was handed something better, which was the privilege of being trusted with the real reason somebody was breaking their body in half on a public road.
Which is exactly what Colin was getting at. He ' s done this 44 times. He has earned the right to a view. And his view, after all those starts and all those finishes, is simply that the way we treat each other on Comrades Day is the way we could treat each other every day. We just choose not to, most of the time. For one Sunday a year, we forget to be divided, and the whole country becomes briefly, gloriously, the best place on earth.
I had so much fun out there that I ' ve created a genuine problem for myself. It is now going to be very difficult to run it next year, because I ' m not sure I can give up the stories. Maybe the answer is to do both. Run the thing with a microphone, gather the beautiful nonsense and the heartbreak and the heroics as I go, and become the world ' s slowest, most over-emotional roving correspondent. The CMA may have notes on this plan. I ' m pitching it anyway.
To every single runner who lined up at the start: congratulations. Just qualifying for this beautiful monster is a feat most people will never attempt. You did the part that most of us only talk about. Whether you finished, fell short, or got pulled at a cut-off with your heart in your throat, you showed up. That ' s the whole thing.
Let ' s do it all again next year. South Africa, I love you. 2-nils. www. modernathlete. co. za 19