004: Comrades 2025 - Planting a Seed

It is Race Week: Comrades 2025, #isiko_mpilo, is upon us. For the last four years, this race has been a highlight of my year. The story doesn't begin with my first run in 2022, though.

This is the first of five essays that I'll be sharing this week about my relationship with The Ultimate Human Race. This essay covers the years 1991 to 2010.

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A roundabout way to start a story:

In November 2020, my wife Nadia and I bought our first house – a fixer-upper with solid bones in a leafy suburb with enough space for both of us to work from home and raise a few kids and cats. She is a music teacher who runs her own piano studio and had been renting a studio space before we moved to our new Casa. To be ready for the move and accommodate all her students, we wanted to renovate an outside bathroom, reroute some plumbing, paint half the house and waterproof the leaky roof. Easy, right? Luckily, we had a lot of help from both sets of parents and applied copious amounts of elbow grease to get it done. In December 2020, our house was a building site. I had built up some leave and took 3 weeks off work to start the process of turning our house into a Pinterest-like creation.

As my dad did the tiling in our new guest bathroom, I was busy installing new gutters while listening to a great episode of the Rich Roll podcast with big wave surfer Laird Hamilton as the guest.  Hamilton is a one-of-a-kind maverick who is an expert in his craft. He is also a grounded family man who believes in setting a good example for your children. In the conversation, he noted that, “A lot of the seeds that you plant you won’t see until they go out of your house.”

As I was working on my own house, with my dad as a partner, I smiled and thought happily about all the good seeds that my parents had planted for me. My mother had planted the seeds of reading, appreciating beauty and maintaining a softer side when the world gets harsh. My father had planted seeds of being steadfast in your decisions, reaching for goals and always trying your best. Both parents planted the seeds of hard work, self-awareness and appreciating really good food and music. These were sees that sprouted as my sister and I were growing up in their house.

One of the seeds that took the longest to sprout, but would turn out to be one of my life's defining ones, was the seed of physical fitness through running. I was an active boy and played around in the gardens with toy cars and plastic golf sets. I was always ready for a game of rugby and later found a love for cricket, too, while always trying to run as little as possible.

My friend and legendary ultrarunner Bennie Roux put it eloquently:

Missed a tackle at rugby practice? Run a lap of the field. Missed a catch during fielding practice? Run a lap of the field. Don't think that you can escape this punishment by turning to the Arts. Did you sing the wrong notes in choir? You guessed it, run a lap, but around the church instead.

To get me to run, some mighty impression would have to be made.

Dad’s Example:

My dad is a big man. He stands 195cm tall and easily commands a room with his mere physical presence. As a fresh-faced 26-year-old donning a 90s moustache, the big man ran his first Comrades with the Down Run of 1991. He did it in a time of 10:45:36, 14 minutes and 24 seconds shy of the 11-hour cut-off that stood in those days. When I finished my first Comrades in 2022, in a time of 10:45:06, you can see that we both wore the same incredulous expression that says “what the heck did I just do?” as we approached the finish line in Durban.

 My first involvement with Comrades begins with the Up Run of 1992 at Drummond in the womb of my mother. She was seconding my father with my 9-month-old sister on her hip. A runner had come hobbling past and she had offered to rub his cramping calf with Deep Heat. My dad had no such issues as he ran to his best Comrades time of 10:20:56.

A year later, I was being breast fed under a tree in Drummond as my dad made it three in a row with a Down run of 10:34:46.

For the first Comrades in the New South Africa in 1994, he ran a 10:43:29 Up Run.

His finishing streak ended in 1995. He was better prepared than ever and went through halfway in 4:45 - all set to break 10 hours for the first time. In a cruel twist of fate dehydration set in as he went down Field’s Hill. Which meant that he had to withdraw from the race in Pinetown.

As my sister and I were getting older and his LLB studies and work commitments became more demanding, he skipped Comrades in 1996 and in 1997, he did another Down Run in 10:46:53.

I made an almost identical gesture across the finish line in Kingsmead Cricket Stadium, when the race finished there in 2023.

There followed a three-year hiatus and his last Comrades attempt culminated in a DNF during the legendary 2000 Up Run. It was a momentous run for our extended family with no less than 5 members running the race.

I distinctly remember a shirt that my dad received that read on the back “I am training for Comrades 2015”, where the “0” was the Comrades logo. It was significant, since 2015 is the year that my running journey started properly – but more on that later.

In this period, I really was too young to have concrete memories or stories, but I recall the early mornings that my dad used to go for runs when he wore a red hoodie adorned with his race patches. It is a great source of pride to wear that same hoodie now.

I also recall a few race finishes and there was one where I ran a lap of a running track hand-in-hand with him at the end of a marathon. The impression had been made through his awe-inspiring example of grit and perseverance. He had been doing all his Comrades while studying part-time and working a job that required him to travel almost 200km per day – every day. A seed had indeed been planted.

I just felt like running…

Not long after my dad’s last Comrades, I was chosen to be a reserve loose forward for the mighty Under-9A rugby team of Laerskool Kruinsig. To prepare us for the season we received a training programme for the December holidays. 9 year olds don’t need much fitness training, but the longest run on the programme was 3km, which I promptly ignored. I decided to build fitness by playing easy backyard cricket instead. I never made the step-up to be the starting eighthman for that team and spent most of the season sipping on the team’s Powerade drinks bottles on the bench.

From there, in large part due to my neglect of fitness sessions, my sporting career followed a predictable trajectory:

• B-team rugby – until I broke my arm playing as a chunky tighthead prop in 2004.

• Real Cricket – until I experienced the terror of a 130km/h delivery whizzing past my face in 2006.

• And finally, golf – until I simply drifted out of the sport in 2009. One Saturday I was on the range, hitting 3-woods that flew 260 metres and the next, I didn't go back.

Consequently, when I we had to do a “bleep” test for a Physical Education class in high school, I was in for a surprise. I scored a 5.5. I scored lower than many of the chain smokers in my class. I was nursing a cold on the day, but the idea of pushing through physical discomfort was not something I would ever do. My fitness mantra came from the mouth of the wise Solomon:

My idea of a good workout had turned into pulling an all-nighter playing FIFA 09 on my PlayStation 2 and taking Bradford City from League Two to the Premier League in a weekend (#gobantams).

One day in 2010, this changed.

South Africa hosted the real FIFA World Cup in 2010 which forced the government into a school calendar-reshuffle. Our usual three week June Holiday was turned into a mammoth five week winter break. My parents, cleverly planted another seed – avoidance of large crowds – when they decided to take a two weeklong camping holiday in the quiet town of Trafalgar on the KwaZulu-Natal South Coast.

The plan worked a charm as there were very few people who thought this was a good idea and we had most of the caravan park and pristine beach to ourselves. I spent the first week of the holiday reading and watching World Cup games in the park’s rec hall on an old television with a grainy feed. I could have spent some time fishing with my dad, but I generally bring bad luck when I go fishing. To this day, the only thing I have managed to catch while fly fishing, is the back of my own head.

Rather than bring bad luck to my dad next to the fishing waters, I took long, ponderous walks on the beach. At the turn of low tide on a pristine winter's afternoon, with the sand firming up under foot, I felt an urge to move faster. Forrest Gump put it best,

And with that, the seed that was planted with the Comrades-examples, had sprouted. And I ran. I don't recall for how long, but I will never forget that feeling of ending the run and thinking, "yes, I'm definitely doing that again".

My dad’s last Comrades had been in 2000, I had started running in 2010. It was a further five years before I pursued the past-time in earnest and my first Comrades was only run in 2022. This means that road from the first runs on Trafalgar beach to the Comrades start line was to be longer than the one from when the seed had been planted. On that road many lessons were to be learned.  The next post in this series will tell the story of the 12 years of running before I toed the line for my first attempt of The Ultimate Human Race.