There are a lot of Comrades race reports on-line, and if you read a bunch of them you get a pretty good feel for the course and race day experience. I'm just going to add a little to all the noise with a few of my own recollections of the 2012 Comrades Marathon.
I set my alarm for 12:30 am on race day - that makes for a pretty early start to the day! The hotel (the Southern Sun, on North Beach in Durban) had a lot of runners, and opened their nice breakfast to runners starting at 1:00 am. I had breakfast, and grabbed a few things to eat while waiting at the start. Here is a picture of me just before leaving the hotel in the morning.
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| Race day - morning |
At 2:00 am, our bus was rolling on the hour-long ride to the starting line in Pietermaritzburg. It was a little surprising to see a bar/club still open right at the start, with patrons standing outside smoking and watching the runners start to assemble. Walked around a bit, viewing the starting line up front, people watching, and exploring the starting corral setup, eventually picking a spot near my corral and sitting on the curb to wait (and eat a bit more breakfast). It actually grew colder during the wait - I had a sweatshirt and full-length garbage bag on as a windbreaker. I got rid of the garbage bag just before the start, but ran in the sweatshirt for several hours and was glad to have it.
Thanks to the homework I had done, the singing, Chariots of Fire music, the rooster crow, and the cannon seemed like a familiar sequence of events. There is no 'chip time' at Comrades - you start your watch when the gun fires. I had set up my Garmin watch with a 'virtual runner' who took off at the gun running a perfectly paced 12 hour Comrades. My pacing goal was to catch up with him and finish ahead of him.
I ran with a water bottle (with double strength Perpetuem) on my waist, and bunch of Clif ShotBloks. The aid stations on the course are plentiful, I think there was one every 2 km. I drank water from the aid stations to effectively dilute the Perpetuem, and mixed up a second batch of Perpetuem about the 5 hour point. There were plenty of salted boiled potatoes at many of the aid stations, and a fairly sugary drink called Energade.
The hills ... what can I say. Mary and I toured the course in a bus on the day before the race - I'm really glad she got to see it. You do spend a lot of the day going up and down grades, and some of them are long, but less steep then you will find on a trail run. Looking at my pace data, I walked about 9 miles of the course, a lot of that in the second half.
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| Mike 'smiling' for the finish |
I averaged 12 minute miles for the day, finishing in 11:24 gun-to-finish line. I fell pretty hard after the half way point, scratching myself up a bit, practically tearing the number off my chest and biting my lip, finished with no real problems - a little stiff and sore later though. The tour organizer had arranged a couple of large bins with ice baths by the pool on the roof of our hotel - I credit my time in the ice bath with the pretty rapid post race recovery.
We did spend time after the race touring a bit of South Africa (Cape Town / Cape Point, the wine country, and Kruger) which was very interesting. I went overboard in Kruger park, taking over a 1000 pictures of animals.
All in all, as they say, it was a very lekker trip!
