Comrades Marathon, Part 1

Friday

I slept in Friday morning as long as I could before getting up to go for a short run on the Durban Corniche with Holly, Erin, and James. What a strange and pleasant feeling to be running outside in the sunshine at 830 in the morning without melting into a pool of sweat. We did a short out and back to the World Cup stadium (a gorgeous building) and saw lots of other Comrades runners along the way, including the Russian twins who have won the women's race the past 11 years. Long and lean they are not, which just goes to show that you don't need a so-called perfect floating stride to be the best of the best elite runners.

Wendy, Erin, Holly, James, and me
Durban beachfront after breakfast on Friday

After a delicious breakfast on the beachfront at Circus Circus and a quick change of clothes, we were off to the expo to pick up our bibs and do some shopping. I felt I was tempting fate by buying Comrades gear before finishing the race, but I really didn't have much choice. I wasn't coming all the way down to South Africa for a race of this magnitude and going home empty handed. The selection of shirts was pretty good, but there weren't many jackets to choose from. I found an understated grey hooded one, a much nicer option than the satiny-looking one with COMRADES in large block letters across the shoulders that Erin felt would have been more at home on a boxer. Handy tip for anyone planning to enter Comrades in the future: do whatever you can to register as an International runner. The entry fee is higher, but the perks are more than worth it. We had our own registration area with maybe a 10-minute line whereas the South African runners had to wait upwards of two hours in order to pick up their bibs. That's a long time to stand in line two days before an 89 km run.

While at the expo, we met up with some of the other Doha runners including Scott, Keith, and Wendy. We sat down with Wendy for a bit to discuss the game plan for Sunday morning. A veteran of 11 previous Comrades, she graciously offered to forego her own race and run with us to help us with strategy, pacing, course highlights, and whatever else she could do to get us across the finish line. Running a race this far is pretty daunting in the base case. Throw in the extreme hills and the added pressure of the strict 12-hour time limit, and things get downright scary. Knowing we'd have Wendy with us on race day helped keep me calm.

We stopped at a grocery store on the way back to the hotel from the expo to pick up some water and Powerade to get us through until the race. Seeing a liquor store in the same building, Holly and I thought we should grab a bottle of champagne and some beer to stock the fridge and have waiting for us after the race. With the most expensive bottle of bubbly being all of $4 and the best beer Carling Black Label, we hightailed it out of there. Post-race beverages would have to be found elsewhere.

The rest of the afternoon was spent wandering along the beach to find lunch, watching a kids surfing contest, lounging around the hotel room watching the Giro d'Italia, digging through the goody bags to see if anything worthwhile was in there, and beginning to put our race gear together. Comrades doesn't provide you with an official drop bag, you're free to use pretty much anything you want. We didn't know this until the expo, so I bought a nice Comrades duffel bag to use as a drop bag. Me and thousands of other people, I bet. The bag was plenty big enough for Holly and I to share for our race gear and the clothes and things we'd need Saturday night at the hotel in PMB.

Dinner Friday night was at an Italian restaurant in north Durban near where James' sister-in-law Vanessa, her husband Simon, and their daughters live. We feasted on bruschetta, calamari, prosciutto, and huge plates of fresh pasta with cold beer (me and Erin) and red wine (everyone else) to wash it all down. We talked about the race a lot, of course, but none of us three novices were really that nervous. At this point, our training was done and there was nothing we could do about our fitness, the weather, or anything else related to the race. Rather than stress over every little detail, it seemed a better choice to have a beer, make some new friends, and relax, so I did.

Saturday

I woke up to perhaps my favorite workout that Mary gives me: rest and eat lots of pancakes. That's always a much more enjoyable task than running four hours in the heat and humidity of Doha, so back to Circus Circus we went. Erin arrived first and thankfully found a table because the place was packed with runners loading up just like us. After polishing off colossal stacks of pancakes with extra sides of bacon and sausage, the three of us went back to the hotel to relax, pack, and kill time until James came to pick us up for the drive up to PMB. I started in on my pre-race fueling strategy of alternating bottles of water with a bottle of Powerade and taking a high-test version of Imodium every 6 hours until the start of the race. I wasn't having any GI issues but felt that the pills were worth using in hopes of not having to make any stops during the race. The last thing I wanted to do was slow down Holly, Erin, and Wendy by having to hit the porta-potty multiple times along the way. With only 12 hours to get across the line, every minute and every second are precious.

James and Vanessa stopped by to get us around 315, and after rounding up Erin and Scott at their hotels, we were on our way. As the car pulled onto the highway, James and Scott began giving us a reverse tour of the route, pointing out the toll bridge at 5 km to go, the short & steep ramp to get onto the highway before the bridge, and some of the other key parts of the course close in to Durban. He asked Vanessa to stay on the highway a while longer so we could see what Field's Hill looked like. It's one of the five named hills on the route and it's a doozy, climbing 213 meters in 3 kilometers (roughly 700 feet in 1.8 miles). We'd be running down this, James reminded us, and we needed to make sure we go very slowly and carefully to avoid blowing out our quads for the last 25 km. Cresting the hill, the car got very quiet. Erin, Holly, and I sat in silence trying to comprehend descending that hill 65 km into the race, along with climbing all the ones we could now see stretched out before us towards Pietermaritzburg just to get to that point.

The down run elevation profile

James had mercy on us and decided not to show us any of the other major climbs. Those we'd get to experience for ourselves the next morning. Instead, he drove us down the Green Mile where Nedbank, one of the major Comrades sponsors, sets up a huge spectator and cheering zone for well over a mile of the route. During the race, the Green Mile comes with roughly 26 km left to go and is a kilometer or two before the top of Field's Hill. He told us we'd hear it before we saw it and to be on the lookout for the women in the swings hanging from the trees. I wasn't really paying much attention at this point. I was too shell-shocked by all the ups and downs of the road as we made our way to the hotel. The scenery was truly gorgeous and reminded me a lot of California – green trees, acres of fields of brown and green grass an crops, and hills without end. The longest hill I found to run on in Doha, maybe a few hundred meters long at best, paled in comparison to the ones we now found ourselves driving over. As calm as I had been up to this point, I now had a pit in my stomach and for the first time really wondered what I had gotten myself into.

Checking into the hotel was quite the adventure. Getting our room was easy, but the staff had a very hard time trying to sort out the shuttle to the race in the morning. Holly had already been in contact with a shuttle company, and no one really knew if that was the same company, what time departure was, or how to pay for the trip. We heard everything from a free shuttle leaving at 330am to having to call and reserve a taxi. In the end, we just decided to be in the lobby at 330, assuming that one way or another, the company that Holly made our reservations with would be there.

Once in the room, Holly and I set about organizing things for the race rather than wait until after dinner. Not that I'd be able to sleep much or well, but I wanted to be able to lie down and relax as best I could. The list of stuff I had for the race sounds like a lot, and it was, but I think I made good use of all of it at one point or another: running shoes, socks, compression shorts, shirt, red sparkle skirt, Garmin, hat, sunglasses, Band-aids, Bodyglide, chip, bib, salt tabs, gels/bloks/beans, SPI belt, long-sleeve running top for the first few hours, Qatar Airways PJs to keep warm before the start. My belt strained to hold everything, but I wanted to make sure I had enough on hand to keep up with my fueling plan – one salt tab per hour, one Clif shot or three Clif bloks or one pack of sport beans per hour. Not that I ever could or would eat that much sugar along the way. I planned on switching to salted potatoes once I found them being offered, but it was mentally comforting to know I had the gels if I or anyone else really needed them.

Dinner Saturday night was another super-Imodium and a pretty decent buffet in the hotel's restaurant. I ate as simply as possible – potatoes, pasta with garlic, and a slice of warm bread and butter – and left before I felt full. The last thing I wanted was to wake up Sunday morning feeling heavy from a solid rock of pasta still in my stomach. Back upstairs, I downed a salt tab and was in bed with the lights off by 8pm. That 245am alarm was going to come very early.