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The Comrades Marathon runs between Durban and Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal, on tarred public road closed to traffic for the day, and it has been run since 1921. The direction alternates: the Up Run climbs from Durban to Pietermaritzburg, and the next year the Down Run comes back the other way. Every runner gets 12 hours from their own start gun, and the field is more than twenty thousand strong. South Africa calls it The Ultimate Human Race, and it is the oldest and biggest ultramarathon in the world.
Vic Clapham came home from the Great War and wanted a way to honour the men who did not. He borrowed a pound from the Comrades of the Great War association and put on a race between Pietermaritzburg and Durban on 24 May 1921. Forty-eight men entered, thirty-four started, and sixteen finished inside 12 hours. Bill Rowan won in 8h59m, which is still the slowest winning time, and the Bill Rowan medal was named for him in 2000. The early fields ran on gravel roads caked in up to five centimetres of dust, with no refreshment stations, and stopped at hotels and taverns along the way for water. The route was fully tarred by 1931. The race has been run nearly every year since, apart from five years during the Second World War and two years during the COVID pandemic. The 2027 edition will be the 100th.
17 people have been out there with a camera or a microphone.
+ 9 more.
These are other people's work and we link straight to them. Watching costs nothing and needs no account. More of them: every race we hold, on film.
Nobody sees it until we have read it. No account, no sign-in.
This changes nothing on the page on its own. Somebody checks it against the race first.
Somebody watches it before it goes anywhere near this page. What we are after is footage of this course, on the ground. If it would be just as true of any other race, it is not this.
We want the address of the file the race publishes, not the file. We download it from there so the page can say where the line came from.
We read every one of these and we write back. Every fact here carries the source it came from, and the way a wrong one gets fixed is a person checking it against what you tell us.
Cutoffs move, races get postponed, lotteries open and close. We read the race's own sources and record where every fact came from. Put your email in and we will send you what changed, and where we read it.
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What happens to your email. Nothing else. I do not sell it, and I will not send you anything except this race changing. One click gets you out.
I keep this catalog because the information is scattered and hard to trust. Telling you when it moves is the same job.
