Comrades 2015

He is running. “This is great” he thinks to himself, “I want to run the comrades when I’m older. I am only 10yrs old now but I will run the comrades some day!”.  With a big smile on his face and the fresh morning air filling his lungs he is running at full stride alongside the famous Comrades route. Giggling and skipping alongside the road and then BOOM! That poor little bugger – Barbara threw the bus door open with imperfect timing and that poor, happy, little bugger ran full tilt into 5 tons of solid bus door. He lay there, silent, wrenching in pain. We canned ourselves laughing…. Poor form….

Early start at 04:00am on Sunday morning as we head out in our bus to Winston Park cut off point. We are part of the team of Medical Support buses that are to collect the maimed and incapacitated along the rusty-nail route and ferry them back to the fluffy pillow that is Pietermaritzburg. Comrades, for those of you who don’t know, is massive. Its 90 km of hills, bends and 30 degree heat. It is known as “The Ultimate Human Race” and for seriously good reason. However, we had the advantage of a 250hp diesel motor that made the hill climbs a little easier.

We started off in Winston Park and after Barbara smashed that kids lights out with the door we settled in for a long day ahead. 09:30 is the cut off time at this point, 30km into the run. The first runner glided through at just under 2 hours with the bulk of the traffic following him an hour from that. First cut off went quite well. We loaded up the bus full of understandably despondent but fairly healthy runners that said things like “oh well there is always next year” and “how embarrassing, I will have to train harder”. A little over an hour later we dropped them off at the “Bailer Tent” (yes that’s actually what is named) and we headed back out.

Bailer tent. Shame man. The athletes firstly have to endure the big flashing timer clock at the cut off line basically shouting to them “Come on you porker, that Granny ran faster than you”. Then, the official pulls up a tatty bit of hazard tape in front of you just to add salt to the wounds. Then, you are channeled off like the Jews in Germany, you have your race number stripped from your chest and you are crammed into bus. Right. So now, where does the bus take you? Home? A restful spot? Oh no, they (we) drive you past the entire fleet of runners that all made it past the cut off. So you, the failed athlete, sit there and drive the route you failed miserably to run. With each passing kilometer feeling more and more like a looser. Right, that should be it hey? Enough torture already. But wait. There’s more. Like a sadistic sign that I would picture at the top of the stairway to hell, you are funneled into an area marked as the “Bailer Tent”.

Anyway, off the topic there. We head back to Durban along the N3 and noticed all sorts of chaos with the traffic on the other side. Up to Drummond where we started a sweep from behind the last runner. We picked up a few stragglers here and there, offered our assistance to the strays and the forgotten. We hit Cato Ridge and loaded up another 35 passengers. This time, after 6 hours in the sun running up a hill, the crowd were a lot less optimistic. The one chap went as far to say “I love your country, I will be back. But this race…Never again.” He was a Scottish fella. Now, to break a Scott is a seriously hard task. I mean, they run in short skirts where the thorny thistles are waist high. Tough buggers.

Just as we set off back to Pietermaritzburg we received instruction on the radio that the N3 (the fastest route) is entirely traffic jammed. Some guy’s hot exhaust set the veld grass on fire and in Mother Nature’s scorn She set fire to two cars. 30 km of traffic jam. We are instructed to tie in behind the last runner and find an alternate route. The air conditioner in the bus had about as much influence as a fart in a perfume factory. It is now 32 degrees outside and about 40 inside the bus.  The one coloured guy is wrenching in pain trying his best to throw up his intestines, the Scott has all but died and the chap from France had turned a remarkably almost opaque colour. He managed to get some stomach contents out onto the floor and then took a sleep. We had one lady, on her 18^th comrades run, pass out into the stairwell of the bus just sort of bobbing about there like a big sweaty beach ball. Barbara was running up and down serving cold water (that we had to steal from the Nedbank stand), blocks of ice and bananas. We went through 15 cotch bags in the 3 hour journey. It was carnage.

We got home after 15 hours of this and took a crusty shower. Lying in bed with my back pounding from being bent over in hostess/ GPS/ car guard/ thief position all day, I could only think of one memory. It wasn’t the Comrades. It wasn’t the heat, the pain and the punishment. It wasn’t the stress, the medical cases or the ambient smell of that bus. It was a memory I will hold onto. A memory that I believe explains the Comrades to people like me – people that just don’t get it.

During our second run, somewhere near Umlaas road, we loaded up this tiny morsel of a woman from the cut-off point. Thin, meager and severely dehydrated in her little ski pants and running kit. As she hobbled onto the bus I unpinned her race number off her chest and it was as if I had just ripped out her soul. She looked up me, her eyes filled with tears, she grabbed my arm and in the most broken English said “Please Sir, I want”. I looked into the crumbled paper in my hands and spotted the little Japanese Flag sticker on the top corner. I handed it back to her, she clutched onto it, pushed it up against her heart and made her way to her seat where the other passengers patted her on the back and offered her their water. This lady, without knowing 5 words of English has flown out from the other side of the globe just to be a part of the Greatest Human Race. She failed, and in her failure all she had was the support of the people on that bus and the sticker on that piece of paper.  If that doesn’t melt your heart then nothing will.

It makes me think of us, our generation, and how we have had no great war. We have never experienced the level of comradeship that soldiers in war feel to one another. Brother in Arms carrying each other through the pain and having the guts not only to push yourself to the limits but also to motivate your fellow man to push on when every natural instinct is calling for them to give up.

This marathon, this epic test of endurance, does just that.