The race winds through wealthy suburbs full of cafes and craft breweries. It cuts across the sugarcane plantations that first brought British colonizers to this region in the 1800s. The number of people running ultra marathons more than quadrupled between 2010 and 2020.
If you live in South Africa, you definitely know someone who runs ultra-marathons, probably lots of someones. Here, ultras are the stuff of a whole country’s new years resolutions and mid-life crises. They’re the kind of thing that a totally ordinary, not-athletic person wakes up one day and decides they’re going to do -- and then does. In one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, extreme distance running is a sport that feels like it includes everybody. And improbably, that inclusiveness happened during one of the darkest, most divided moments in South Africa’s history – during the final years of apartheid.
The Comrades