Comrades Marathon Finisher The Iron
By Gugulethu Ndlovu
On Sunday 28th August 2022 I completed my first ever Comrades Marathon.
In a time of 11 hours and 08 minutes. There was no better feeling than crossing that finish line. Five months of proper training came to fruition. Amongst runners, the Comrades Marathon is one of the pinnacle races. It is the world’s largest and oldest ultra-marathon race. It’s a race that is built only for the toughest of the tough.
This is evident by the fact that there is no separate men’s or women’s qualifying time or cut-off. To put things into perspective there are around 15,000 people who enter this event. About 13,000 people make the start line (most dropouts are due to runners getting injured in training) about 9000 to 8000 finish the race of which ABOUT 70-80 of the field finish with the last hour.
I’ve never done such a challenging race in my life but proved to myself that I can do anything I put my mind to. That mental application is crucial. One has to be mentally prepared obviously physically too but because of how challenging it is, if you are weak mentally it will affect your confidence and that will negatively impact your performance. Something no words can really explain.
Along my five months of training journey, there were many lessons I learned about myself, endurance, the limits/ capacity of human performance and many more. The purpose of this post is to share these lessons. Most of the lessons I found can be applied in many areas of life outside of running.
Thank you to my family, colleagues, and my club (Manoni running club) for the support and love.
