A Few Months Towards Comrades Ultra Marathon

Comrades Ultra Marathon, an 89 KM road run on a hilly terrain, between 2 cities in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg and Durban), is the world's oldest and largest Ultra Marathon that attracts around 20,000 runners from across the world. It happened first in 1921. The name Comrades is due to the The League of Comrades of The Great War (First World War). Vic Clapham, a soldier, who campaigned for the League dreamt about an endurance race between his home town Pietermaritzburg and Durban, and realised it 3 years later in 1921.

Several months back, a couple of my friends from Runners For Ever, had been bitten by this Comrades bug and decided to take it on in 2016. Allegedly, one of them has been suffering from the bug-bite for several years. There are a few things that make this run particularly challenging. The first one is, of course, the distance. It's 89 KM, which is a little more than 2 Marathons. It should be covered in 12 hours and there are 5 intermediate cut-offs as well. Then comes the icing on the cake, the terrain. Majority of the course is hilly, with some serious elevation gain/loss. Though I am not good at runs that expect a certain pace, and also not much into Ultra Marathons (distance runs that go beyond 42.195 KM), they somehow convinced me that I too should make an attempt.

Comrades Marathon usually happens on the last weekend of May. We started our planned training from Mumbai Marathon in January. 4 months training is quite short for such a run. But, as we are not too young in the world of distance running, we decided to make an attempt. We picked the most challenging routes (Pipeline Road and Nandi Hills) available in Bangalore for some of our weekend runs, that would equip us to handle the hilly terrain of Comrades. We threw a couple of day long cycle rides in the schedule that would make us be on our legs for the whole day. Also, thanks to the growing popularity of distance runs in India, I could fit one organised Marathon every month in the schedule. That made the last four months of journey towards Comrades quite occupied.

Apart from these weekend runs, we added at least one run during weekdays that's 2 hour long. And, of course, strengthening and conditioning through out the week. It's, by no means, a rigorous training. But, a bare minimum one to make a good attempt. We have 3 more weeks to go and we just started tapering down. All of us have 5+ years of running and a lot of Marathons and a few Ultra Marathons to our credit. Hope, all that experience and the bodies that have been used to enduring time & distances would be of help!