COLUMN
I sat there at Kingston Beach Club this week, surrounded by legends and Champions who have collectively run further than I care to calculate, celebrating the 100th running of the Comrades Marathon, and I made a decision, right there and then. I ' m not running it next year.
I know. Let that settle in for a second. I ' ve started this race six times and finished four, I have an actual " CHAMPION " tattoo on my arm as though the ink itself qualifies me, and I am telling you, publicly, in print, that I ' m choosing not to run the 100th edition of the greatest ultramarathon on earth. I ' m writing it here so there is no turning back.
Now, before anyone starts a WhatsApp group about my fitness levels, I was fortunate in the TTOM ballot, so I ' ll be running that ultramarathon instead. Don ' t for one second think this Champion is going to stop training. I ' m just redirecting the mileage.
Here ' s why. Last year I traded my running shoes for a microphone and joined the CMA ' s broadcast team, and I wrote about it in this very column, how it wrecked me more than running ever has, how total strangers cried for total strangers on the side of the road, how I sobbed and called it " professional broadcast tears ". At the time I said I ' d created " a genuine problem " for myself, because I wasn ' t sure I could give up telling the stories to go back to running the greatest race on earth.( I will keep on referring to Comrades Marathon as that because I firmly believe it is.)
Then I went to the 100 th edition launch this week, watched the highlights package from last year ' s race one more time, and something in my heart quietly filed the paperwork. I don ' t want to be out there fighting for my life up Inchanga, wondering who that runner next to me is and what got them here. I want to be the one asking them. Chasing that answer down, microphone in hand, while 28,000 other humans do something almost incomprehensible around us.
Twenty-eight thousand runners. Twenty-eight thousand reasons. Somewhere in that number there ' s a person running for a parent they lost, a person running on a dare from mates who didn ' t think they ' d actually do it, a person running their first, their 10 th, their 40th, because a legend called Colin Goosen is out there again, and by my maths he ' ll be closing in on number 45. Every single one of them has a story, and for one day, on one road, between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, I get to go looking for it. That ' s not a consolation prize. That ' s the actual prize.
Will I have running FOMO? Obsessively. There will be a moment, probably somewhere past halfway, watching a runner dig deeper than they thought they had, when my legs will genuinely ache with jealousy for a race I ' m not even in. I ' ve made peace with that. It ' s the tax you pay for choosing the microphone. Besides, by then Two Oceans will already be banked, so at least I ' ll have earned the right to feel that particular kind of jealousy.
But this isn ' t just any Comrades. It ' s the 100 th. One of the oldest, most recognised, most respected sporting events on the planet, and South Africa gets to host its hundredth birthday party in front of the world. To be trusted with even a small part of telling that story, the heart of the race, the heart of the runners, the heart of a country that somehow becomes its best self for one Sunday a year, is not something I take lightly. It ' s an honour. A proper, no-jokes, handon-heart honour, and a massive responsibility which I happily grab with both hands.
And, my Champions, just the thought of that puts a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye.
So here ' s the plan. I ' ll be there. Not in my running gear wearing Vaseline in all the dark and moist parts, but right in amongst it, chasing down the stories that make this race what it is, one more time, for the biggest one yet. I ' ll do my suffering in April instead, up Chapman’ s Peak and I ' ll do it gladly, because a Champion never actually stops training- he just changes what he ' s training for.
See you on the road! I love you. 43-nils. www. modernathlete. co. za 19