Comrades

Reading the excellent Science of Sport blog- written by two exercise physiologists with expertise and interest in endurance sports, especially running - I recently came across a post on the Comrades Marathon in South Africa, which was held for the 83rd time today. As has been the case over the last decade, Russian runners dominated today's run. Leonid Shvetsov won the men's race with a new course-record time of 5:24:46, a staggering 13 minutes up on the second-placed finisher, to become the first back-to-back winner of the race in  twenty years. With a time of 6:14:36, Elena Nurgalyeva won the women's event, 1:15 up on her twin sister Alesya; the Nurgalyevas have won five of the last six women's races.

The Comrades is a staggering challenge: its course cover 87 kilometers (54 miles) and a truly sickening number of significant climbs. The race route is reversed each year, so that in odd years it runs "down" from the inland city of Pietermaritzburg all the way to Durban, on the coast, and in even years it runs "up" from Durban to Pietermaritzburg. In either direction, it's brutal: exactly 4 minutes (1.2%) separate up- and down-run records, both of which are owned now by Shvetsov, and only 14:40 separates the women's records (just 4.0%).

Quite the national race, Comrades is steeped in South African history. The race was started in 1921 as a way to commemorate the then-still-new country's Great War veterans, and after World War II the race was used to both reinforce and protest apartheid. Interestingly, black runners were allowed to compete in 1975 - well ahead of the destruction of the apartheid regime in the late 1980s - and the winningest male racer, Bruce Fordyce, used his 1981 race to protest apartheid. (Wikipedia provides much more information about the race.)

Aside from the politics and elite athleticism of the race, it's also a brutal, horrid physical test. The worst part is that you can run the whole thing and - because of the strictly-enforced twelve-hour time limit - still not "finish." Here's a passage from Amby Burfoot's first-person story of running the race in 2006:

A half mile from the end of the race, I hear the first faint echoes from the finish-line announcer. Race winners Oleg Kharitonov and Elena Nurgalieva have broken the tape more than four hours ago. Here, in another 60 minutes, running's most dramatic moment will be played out. At precisely 11 hours, 59 minutes on the time clock, the director of the Comrades Marathon Association will emerge from a tent and march to the finish line. There, dressed in a dark jacket and tie, he will turn around, his back facing the oncoming stream of runners. He will raise a gun and wait for the seconds to tick down.

All around, pandemonium breaks loose. Thousands of spectators stare at the executioner, imploring, "No. No. Don't do it." Then they look the other way, to the frantic flow of runners struggling for the finish. Some are sprinting with joyously upraised arms, some walking, some being carried by teammates, some literally crawling on their hands and knees. The crowd breaks into a rhythmic, throbbing chant: "Go...Go...Go...Go..." The atmosphere is electric, the suspense building. "Long before someone invented 'Reality TV,' we had the real deal right here at Comrades," race manager Renee Smith had told me two days earlier. The national television audience skyrockets in the final minutes, as all South Africa tunes in for the tense Comrades conclusion. Who will make it? Who won't?

At 12:00:00 on the race clock, the gun is fired, and the Comrades Marathon is over. Those who fail to break 12 hours will receive no medal for their effort. No time. They won't appear in the newspaper agate or the official results program. They'll get no credit toward their "green." They will become, in effect, in this country with its wretched history of human-rights violations, a nonperson. A nonrunner. If you want, you could tell your friends that you ran Comrades. You could say you finished in, oh, 12:20. But you didn't. Because there is no record of it... There is some solace only for the first nonfinisher. He or she becomes an instant hero, interviewed live on TV and pictured on the front page of every newspaper. To many South Africans, the Comrades runner who goes all that distance, for nothing, is more symbolic, of something, than the race winner. That's another great tradition--one I think we can all embrace, even if we're not sure what it means.

Ouch, in every sense.

I feel like I should run this race.

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.