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Comrades Marathon // Posts categorised as Comrades Marathon
Four quick thoughts on Comrades 2012
A more “South African-centric” post today, since it covers a very South African race. Hopefully, one that promotes or encourages more international presence for the race though. Here are some thoughts on the Comrades Ultra-Marathon. Yesterday saw the 2012 running of South Africa’s biggest ultra-marathon, the Comrades Ultra-marathon. This race, for those who don’t know, […]
Comrades 2008 Postmortem
We have two posts today. The first (this one) is just a recap of the race, and some of the physiology behind it. The second (which you can find below) is a little more “South African-centric”, and focuses on the very weak display of the SA runners, and some of the financial reasons why this […]
Comrades 2008 and SA athletics
I have no idea what the average salary is in Russia. I’m “reliably” informed by Wikipedia that it’s $640 per year. I don’t know much about the typical Russian’s financial position, other than what I read in the news and Time magazine, and I won’t claim to be an expert in Russian-South African relations. But […]
Comrades Marathon 2008 result
Leonid Shvetsov has broken the “Up” run record in winning the 2008 Comrades title in 5:24:47. The 39-year old Russian, who won last year’s “Down” run in a new record time, was again untouchable, breaking Kotov’s old record of 5:25:33 by 46 seconds. He is completely in a class of his own, and the rest […]
The “real” Comrades Marathon
Yesterday we did a post , an 87km haul from Durban in Pietermaritzburg. And while the elite men and women will garner most of the media attention and focus on race day, they represent only a very tiny, perhaps “insignificant” part of what the Comrades is really all about. So I thought that today, I’d […]
Comrades Marathon 2008
If it’s mid-June, then it must be Comrades! Our overseas readers may not be familiar with Comrades concept (and lifestyle, for many SA runners), so I thought it would be interesting to give a brief run-down of the race, and then look at some of the “behind the scenes” aspects of what goes into running […]
The Comrades Ultra Marathon
Last week, we received an email from Alan, and he asked us to look at the following three performances from this year’s Comrades Marathon: I said , however, that we would probably end up sitting on the fence, and stop short of ranking them, because they’re so different and can’t really be compared directly. One […]
Comrades marathon – some really fascinating questions
Every once in a while, we get some absolute pearls from visitors to the blog. And this email, which we recieved yesterday evening, is an example of one. I will paraphrase Mr Alan Sleath’s questions, which we at The Science of Sport will attempt to address over the next while. Alan’s questions were the following: […]
The Comrades they don’t show on TV
Today is our final look at the behind the scenes of the Comrades marathon, and as promised, we’ll have a look at some of the human interest stories and the science behind Comrades training. This is probably a bit late for many, but hopefully it’ll be interesting and stimulate some decent training for the next […]