How Do You Remember 19 Comrades?

We make route maps for people who run. When we finished the Comrades one, I couldn't stop looking at it, and it struck me that the first one wasn't something to put up for sale and move on from. It needed to go to someone who had run the race and would know exactly what they were looking at.

That person was my Uncle Navie.

Uncle Navie has run nineteen Comrades. He grew up in Durban, ran his whole life on those roads, and only moved up to Joburg later on. When I handed him the map he went quiet. He and his wife held it between them and looked at it for a long time, and neither of them said a word about the print or the elevation or any of the parts I'd worried over. They said it was beautiful. Then they started naming people. This uncle. That auntie. An old running friend from the club. Minutes later, he was on a video call to an old running clubmate, a man who has run thirty-six Comrades back to back.

He looked at the map and thought about the friends and family he had made along the way. That's the whole thing, really, and it's where I want to start.

A newspaper and a fun run

Uncle Navie didn't grow up a runner. In 1984, he read about a fourteen kilometre fun run in the Daily News, and at the time, he couldn't run four km. He and a mate signed up anyway and started building it two kilometres at a time, out and back, a little further each week. They finished the fun run and liked it enough to join a club, Savages Athletics Club, which was one of the few around back then.

From there, the distances grew the way they do. Five kilometres became eight, then eighteen, then twenty-one. In February 1985 they ran the Hillcrest marathon and came in under the qualifying time for the Comrades. For advice, they went to Uncle Navie's uncle, who had five Comrades behind him and he told them what it really took: training, diet, carbo loading. He suggested a hundred kilometres a week. They thought that was mad and settled on eighty.

Uncle Navie ran his first Comrades in 1985. The longest he had ever run was fifty-two kilometres, and the cut-off back then was eleven hours. He had toast and coffee, packed a few gels, and set off. His wife couldn't face the early start, so she met him out on the route instead. It went well. No cramps the whole way. He saw his family at seventy two kilometres, and he says the last fifteen kilometres, the crowd more or less carries you to the finish. He came in at eight hours thirty-four minutes.

The next morning, he was up at six, washing his car, when a neighbour walked past and asked if he'd run the Comrades the day before. Yeah, he said. I did.

How do you eat an elephant

Someone once asked Uncle Navie how you run a race like the Comrades. He asked them how you eat an elephant. In small pieces.

That was the whole approach. He kept a logbook, an actual book with pages, and every day he wrote down what he ran and how long it took. But the times were the least of it. He wrote down what happened on the run. Cramped at twelve kilometres. Felt something in the leg, probably went out too fast. Big dinner on Saturday, Sunday's long run felt heavy. Then he'd read back through it and find the pattern, the way the food and the pace and the rest all turned up later in his legs.

We have Strava now, Garmin, and apps that write the training plan for you. Uncle Navie had a pen, and he was reading his own body more closely than most of us manage with all of it. He wasn't logging numbers for the sake of it. He just knew which ones mattered. That's the kind of attention it takes to get a man from four kilometres to the Comrades start line, and to keep him coming back for nineteen of them.

Reading the route

Put the map in front of him, and the race comes back in pieces.

The up run is the hard one, he says, and it's the climbing that does it. Inchanga is a long, mean stretch. Closer to the eighty-kilometre mark, you reach Polly Shortts, and there are two of them, Little Polly first and then the big one, right at the end when there's nothing left to give. The down run has its own trap waiting at Field's Hill, which is steep enough that coming down it punishes your knees, so you have to hold something back for it with Durban still a long way off. On the map, you can see exactly what he means. Field's Hill drops away from everything around it. I couldn't have pictured that before. Now I can.

His favourite stretch is Drummond, halfway in, where the support is unlike anywhere else on the route. People come out year after year to cheer runners they will never meet. He mentions that Inchanga is beautiful too, then admits he never really saw it. He's one of those who runs with his head down.

What it leaves you

He's been retired from racing since 2010. I asked him what the nineteen meant to him now, and he didn't reach for anything clever. Everything, he said. Priceless.

The first goal was one, then two, then next thing you know it was ten.That's what gets you green number, you earn it after finishing the Comrades ten times. After that, the number stopped being the point. It was the people. He ran with someone new every year, and the new ones turned into old friends, and the old friends turned into family. That's what he comes back to when he talks about it now, the camaraderie and the spirit of it, the ultimate human race, the way they've always called it.

So how do you remember it?

Not on your phone, and not in a drawer of medals you stop opening. You remember it by putting it somewhere you have to look at it, where other people can see it and ask.

When Uncle Navie looked at his map, he didn't see a GPS line or a column of stats. He saw a memory, and the people who were in it, and he was telling stories before I'd asked him a single question. The time, the date and the elevation are all on there, but they aren't really the point. They're the way back in. An artist tells a story through their art. A runner tells it through their route.

If someone in your family races them the way Uncle Navie has nineteen, this is the thing to give them. It puts the whole story back in front of them, up on a wall, where they can stand beside it and tell it to the people they love.

I gave my uncle a gift to recognise everything he has achieved. What he gave me back, through his stories, was bigger. It has inspired me to take on my own big challenges.

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