For 100 years, people have run 90 kilometres through the hills of South Africa. Side by side. Strangers becoming family. This is a celebration of that. This is an invitation.
Where it began
The Great War had just ended. Vic Clapham, a soldier who had marched through East Africa, believed that a long-distance race could honour the endurance of his fellow soldiers. People thought he was mad. He wrote to the papers. He begged for support. Eventually, thirty-four men lined up between Pietermaritzburg and Durban.
No entry fees. No sponsors. No medal designers or pace buses. Just a road, a distance that seemed impossible, and the stubborn belief that human beings are capable of extraordinary things when they move together.
All thirty-four finished.
100 years of running
Then and now
The Spanish Flu had just killed 50 million people.
There were no commercial airlines.
Radio was a novelty. Television didn't exist.
Most people never left the country they were born in.
34 runners. 1 country. Dirt roads.
A global pandemic is still in our rearview mirror.
You can fly anywhere on Earth in a day.
A phone in your pocket connects you to 8 billion people.
The world has never been more connected — or more divided.
22,000 runners. 100 countries. Same road.
What never changed
The hills are still steep. The sun still burns. Your legs still scream. And somewhere around kilometre 60, you still have to decide: do I keep going?
"The answer, for 100 years, has been yes."
Not because of prize money. Not for fame. Not for a time on a clock. But because something in us needs to know we can. And something in us needs to do it together.
Why this. Why now. Why us.
We're not the Comrades Marathon Association. We're not a corporation. We're runners. We're one person who had an idea over coffee: what if the 100th edition had 100 countries? What if running clubs from every corner of the planet sent their champion?
A runner has a story. A club has a community. When your club's runner comes home with that medal — the whole club wants to go. You can't just do one Comrades. You have to do an up and a down. That's the flywheel. That's how this outlives us.
Not a race. Not a marketing activation. The world needs a reason for people from 100 countries to stand on the same start line, run the same road, hurt the same hurt, and share the same finish line. Ubuntu. I am because we are.
We live in a world that tears things down. A 90-kilometre race that has survived two world wars, a pandemic, apartheid, and everything else — and keeps going? That deserves more than a commemorative t-shirt. That deserves 100 flags on a start line.
Ubuntu was born here. The rainbow nation was built here. Braais, hospitality, and the Drakensberg at sunrise — all here. This country knows something about bringing people together when the world says it can't be done.
It's easy to feel like the best is behind us. It's not. History is being made — right now, on this road, by people who choose to move forward together. The 100th Comrades is proof that the extraordinary doesn't have an expiry date.
100 running clubs. 100 countries. The 100th Comrades Marathon. June 2027. South Africa.
Your club sends your champion. They get themselves to South Africa with a Comrades entry. We handle the rest — the Race Village, the experience, the celebration, Cape Town or Safari. All of it.
Because for 100 years, people have been running this road. And the best way to celebrate that is to run it together.
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