Grandmother-of-eight Patsy Clemmans, 70, is the oldest female athlete who will join 22 365 other runners as they race to The Oval in Pietermaritzburg on Sunday.
The Durban woman started running the Comrades Marathon in 1982 and she has since completed the race 14 times.
Clemmans is planning to call it quits after this Comrades and said she did not want to push her body to run 90km anymore.
“I’ve been really blessed; I’m fit, I’m healthy, but to push for the double green number (20 years) wouldn’t be realistic at my age,” she said.
Clemmans hasn’t always been into road running, but at the age of 36 she started slowly getting into it because she was unhappy with her weight and her smoking habit.
She has fond memories of her first Comrades to Durban, and couldn’t believe it when she was the 20th woman to cross the finishing line.
“I kept going back to running the race, because I wanted to improve on my times, so I trained hard.
“My best time was 7:48 in 1990,” she pointed out.
She is saying goodbye to the Comrades, but Clemmans said she would never stop running, and next year she will be off to Cape Town for the Old Mutual Two Oceans.
Her best memory of the marathon was when she volunteered to be part of the organising team that set up at the finishing line.
“The experience taught me to appreciate the work done by the volunteers, because the whole set-up took three weeks to put together. They take time out to make sure that everything goes according to plan on the race day,” Clemmans said.
After missing last year’s Comrades, veteran Gauteng runner Robert Bezuidenhout has signed up as the oldest male in this year’s event.
The 82-year-old was reported to have had knee problems which hampered his attempt to meet the required time during the qualifying period.
Twenty-year-olds Ngwako Mautle and Sumare Diedericks are among the 7 143 novice runners who have signed up this year. Mautle made the Comrades minimum age requirement only two weeks ago when he turned 20.
KwaZulu-Natal might be home to this epic race, but the province comes second to Gauteng, which has 9 897 entrants.
Fewer than 500 athletes are expected to come down from the rest of Africa for the marathon, while 1 500 from outside the continent are in the starting list.
The winners, male and female, will take home R375 000 each with the top 10 finishers also getting prize money.
The winners could also bank R1.5 million if they manage to break the best time previously recorded for the up-run.
In 2013, Claude Moshiwa completed the race in 5:32:09, and eight-time Comrades winner Elena Nurgalieva of Russia did it in 6:27:09.
But it is no clear-cut victory as top medals and cash prizes will be issued only once the athletes have received clearance after a drug test. - The Star