Beth Hammett's Staging Area

I ran my first Comrades up run this year. There are no flat parts to the Comrades route, no matter which direction you are running it, but the up run is particularly brutal with an elevation gain of more than 1,800m over the 87km distance. Many Comrades fanatics will inform you that the up run is better than the down run as the majority of the uphill occurs in the first 35km, so you get the difficult part over when you still have fresh legs. These people must be part mountain goat, ignore them.

I live in Canada. While South Africans are training for Comrades through their summer, those of us living in the Northern hemisphere are training through winter. In all of my Comrades race photos, I am easily spotted as the sickly white person surrounded by dark and tanned people. It is so preferable to go from warmer to colder, than the other way around. If it wasn’t for the cooler weather we were blessed with this year (and my exceedingly slow pace) I would have joined the folks hooked up to an IV at the end.

I had a horrible run. I felt sick 26km into the race. For the next 20km, I just couldn’t eat anything. Then I had no energy. I struggled to convince myself to keep moving forward. I really wanted to quit. After all that training (1242km between Jan – May) I watched my ‘A’ goal fly out the window (under 10 hours), then my ‘B’ goal disappeared (under 11 hours), and I knew I would struggle to finish the race before the 12 hours cut off.

You are never alone during Comrades. As I fought the mental struggle to keep going in spite of dashed hopes, fatigue and feet covered in blisters, I was surrounded by thousands of others, some fighting their own battles, while others cheerfully amble ahead with everything going as planned. There are crowds of supporters lining the route in many areas and it is hard not to draw energy from these people, even with your head lost in a grey cloud of negativity.

So somehow, I kept moving along until I crossed the finish line (11 hours and 41 minutes after I started) and had a medal around my neck — from this formidable but possible race.

Tips:
Bring a brightly coloured jacket (top layer). You need to be wearing colour to look good in the race day pictures against the cold white and grey background.

Purchase reusable containers for your gels (check out: humangear – GoToobs)