Going the Distance

Clash of events and over-racing

Road and other forms of racing were all but non-existent during 2021 for obvious reasons. Only two clubs took “the gap” when a brief lull in restrictions on sporting events presented itself.

That all began to change, albeit slowly, in the last two months of 2021 and into 2022. With three months remaining and major races having returned or planning to return, it is almost back to “normal”.

Prior to the lull in sporting activity a phenomenon of allocating more than one road race to a given weekend crept in and took on new meaning when in 2019 Border Athletics scheduled two 10km events, one for the Saturday and the other the Sunday, just 60km apart.

One was new and challenging, the other a protégé of national championship events past, with all the potential to deliver fast times and exciting racing.

The question was and remains, does the local running community have the depth to sustain back-to-back racing of the same, or similar distances on the same weekend? It is a question I will refrain from answering because it could become more obvious when analysing results.

This was not the first time for such a clash. A year earlier Border’s fastest half marathon was cancelled for a similar reason when the provincial body allocated a clash, resulting in the loss of a long standing sponsorship arrangement.

This weekend there is another interesting scenario with a 10 and a 15km race on offer, one day apart.

I accept that the sport has changed dramatically in recent years with cut-off times extremely rare and the bulk of the field finishing way after what was the norm, when marathons had a ceiling and cut-off of four and a half hours; Two Oceans was six hours and Comrades just 11.

Races have become lucrative in terms of numbers for event organisers and results alone are no longer a benchmark of an event’s success unfortunately.

There are other arguments that can be added to any debate, and I hope that such issues are embraced as meaningful debate.

One such discussion is indeed the need to stage races close to where runners live.

The cost of transport has always been an issue, but never more so than now. Many of South Africa’s best runners have come from rural areas and there are surely hundreds more who could be discovered and developed.

Anyone who watched both the men’s and women’s races at the Berlin Marathon last weekend, will appreciate the sheer beauty in the forward motion of runners who push the boundaries of performance at such incredible speed.

The training, the planning with attention to every minute detail, the support teams and the energy provided by the thousands who line the roads to watch, are the ingredients that go into the delivery of a perfect product.

Over-racing is not an attribute that delivers such success and a man like Kenya’s Eluid Kipchoge, who broke his own world record in a time of 2:01:09, shows perfectly what longevity is about.

The women’s winner, Tigist Assefa of Ethiopia in only her second marathon, proved what focus to an event achieves, when she became the third-fastest woman of all time with her 2:15:37.

Both were dominant and inspirational performances that I hope will encourage race organisers everywhere.