COMRADES MARATHON HISTORY: A CENTURY ON THE ROAD BETWEEN DURBAN AND PIETERMARITZBURG
The Comrades Marathon covers roughly 88 kilometres of tarred road through the hills of KwaZulu-Natal, between the South African cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. It has been run since 1921, and over more than 90 editions it has grown from a field of 34 starters into the largest ultramarathon in the world, with an entrant cap that now sits at 22,000. The race is older than most national marathon championships and predates almost every other ultra on the calendar.
This is the story of how it started, how the course works, and the runners who built its record book.
A Soldier's Idea
The race was the idea of Vic Clapham, a railway engine driver who had served in the First World War. Clapham enlisted with the 8th South African Infantry and was sent to German East Africa, in what is now Tanzania, where his unit marched more than 2,700 kilometres in pursuit of German forces. He came home wanting to commemorate the South African soldiers who had died in the war, and he settled on an endurance event that would test ordinary men against the kind of distance he and his comrades had covered on foot.
Clapham proposed a footrace between Durban and Pietermaritzburg. The League of Comrades of the Great War, the veterans' organisation he approached, was initially reluctant, and it took him three years of lobbying before he was granted permission and a loan to stage it. The name he chose, Comrades, fixed the race's purpose from the start. It was a memorial as much as a sporting event, and that framing has survived for more than a century.
The First Race
The inaugural Comrades Marathon was run on 24 May 1921, Empire Day, starting outside the City Hall in Pietermaritzburg. Thirty-four runners set off under a 12-hour time limit. Bill Rowan won in 8:59:00, finishing some 40 minutes clear of the runner-up, Harry Phillips. Of the 34 who started, only 16 reached the finish.
The distance and the difficulty were the point. There was no prize money and no professional field. The first Comrades was a test of whether amateur runners could cover close to 90 kilometres over hilly terrain inside a single day, and the answer, for half the field, was that they could not. That balance between the people who finish and the people who do not has defined the race ever since.
Up Run and Down Run
Comrades is unusual among major races because its course changes direction every year. In odd configurations the race runs from Pietermaritzburg down to Durban, and in others it climbs from Durban up to Pietermaritzburg. The two directions are known as the down run and the up run, and they alternate annually.
The difference is more than symbolic. Pietermaritzburg sits roughly 600 metres above Durban, so the up run is a net climb from the coast to the interior, while the down run loses that elevation. Neither direction is flat. The up run measures about 87.6 kilometres and the down run about 90 kilometres, and both cross a series of named climbs that runners learn by heart. The most famous of these are Polly Shortts, Inchanga, Botha's Hill, Field's Hill, and Cowies Hill, collectively known as the Big Five.
Because the two courses are run in opposite directions, the race keeps separate records for each. A fast up-run time and a fast down-run time are not directly comparable, and the record book reflects that split.
The terrain rewards runners who pace the early kilometres conservatively. On the up run, the worst of the climbing comes late, with Polly Shortts looming inside the final 10 kilometres after the legs are already spent. On the down run, the steep descents through Field's Hill and Botha's Hill batter the quadriceps and can wreck a runner who has gone out too fast. Local knowledge of where the hills fall is one of the reasons South African runners have historically held an advantage over visitors arriving with road-marathon credentials but no experience of the route.
The Records
On the down run, Tete Dijana holds the men's course record at 5:13:58, set in 2023. The women's down-run record also belongs to that 2023 edition, where Gerda Steyn ran 5:44:54.
The up-run records stand to two different runners. The men's up-run record of 5:24:39 has belonged to Leonid Shvetsov of Russia since 2008, one of the longest-standing marks in the race's history. Steyn set the women's up-run record of 5:49:46 in 2024, becoming the first woman to run the up course inside 5:50. Her run that year took almost 10 minutes off the previous best and confirmed her as the dominant female ultrarunner of the era.
Bruce Fordyce and the Great Champions
No runner is more associated with Comrades than Bruce Fordyce, who won the race nine times, including eight years in a row through the 1980s. Fordyce arrived as a postgraduate student and left as the defining figure of the sport in South Africa, and his win total remains the men's record. His era coincided with the race's growth from a regional event into a national institution broadcast across the country.
Before Fordyce there was Wally Hayward, a five-time winner whose career stretched across decades. Hayward won his first Comrades in 1930 and his last in 1954, then returned as a veteran and finished the race at the age of 80 in 1989, an example of the longevity that the event tends to produce.
More recent winners have kept the race competitive at the front. Bongmusa Mthembu won three times in the 2010s, and Tete Dijana followed with the down-run record and back-to-back titles. David Gatebe ran 5:18:19 on the 2016 down run, a time that stood as the men's down-run record until Dijana broke it. The men's race remains overwhelmingly South African at the top, with occasional wins by international runners such as Piet Wiersma, the Dutchman who took the 2024 up-run title.
On the women's side, Elena Nurgalieva of Russia won eight times, the most by any woman, often alongside her twin sister Olesya. Steyn, with multiple titles and the records on both the up and down courses, has since become the face of the modern women's race.
The Women's Race
Women ran Comrades unofficially for decades before the race recognised them. The most famous of the early unofficial runners was Frances Hayward, who completed the 1923 race without a number. Women were officially admitted only in 1975, and Elizabeth Cavanagh became the first official women's winner that year.
The performance that defined the women's race for a generation came in 1989, when Frith van der Merwe ran the down run in 5:54:43. She finished 15th overall against the full men's field, a result that has rarely been approached since, and her time stood as the women's down-run record for more than 30 years. It was finally broken by Gerda Steyn in 2023, when Steyn lowered the mark to 5:44:54. The span between those two runs, from 1989 to 2023, traces the arc of the women's race from van der Merwe's breakthrough to Steyn's era of dominance.
Medals, Green Numbers, and the Cutoff
Comrades is built around the people who simply finish. The race awards a tiered set of medals based on finishing time, so a runner battling the cutoff is chasing a defined goal rather than just survival. A runner who completes 10 Comrades is awarded a permanent race number, the green number, which is retired to that individual for life. The green number is one of the most recognised symbols in the sport and a central part of why runners come back year after year.
The cutoff is strict. The race was historically capped at 11 hours, and in 2003 the limit was extended to 12 hours. When the gun fires at the finish, the line closes, and runners who arrive a step late are recorded as non-finishers regardless of how far they have come. The image of the final-cutoff scene, with officials turning their backs to the course as the clock expires, is one of the enduring pictures of the race.
The record for the most completions belongs to Louis Massyn, who has finished the race 50 times, a tally that spans much of the modern history of the event.
A Memorial That Became a Movement
More than 300,000 runners have completed the course between Durban and Pietermaritzburg since 1921. The race that Vic Clapham fought to stage as a tribute to dead soldiers now fills its entry cap within hours of opening and draws fields from across the world.
What has not changed is the basic test. The distance is still close to 90 kilometres, the hills are still there, and the clock still closes at 12 hours. A century after Bill Rowan crossed the line in Durban, the Comrades Marathon remains a race defined less by who wins than by who finishes, and that is the reason it has lasted.