Podcast: Play in new window | Download (30.6MB)
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Pandora | iHeartRadio | JioSaavn | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
By Davy Crockett
You can read, listen, or watch
The Comrades Marathon (about 55 miles), held in South Africa, is the world’s largest and oldest ultramarathon race that is still held today with fields that have topped 23,000 runners.
The year 2021, marked the 100th anniversary of Comrades Marathon “The Ultimate Human Race.” Comrades today is one of the most paramount ultrarunning events on the international calendar. It has a rich 100-year history packed with amazing accomplishments by more than 400,000 finishers through the years. How did it start and what kept it going for a century? This episode will cover the first two years of the race in 1921 and 1922.
| New Book! Classic Ultramarathon Beginnings Read about the early history of Comrades and other classic Ultramarathons. Available on Amazon. |
In the late 1970s, Hawaii had the most runners per-capita than any other state. Some called it the “running capital of the world.” Hawaii was also an early adopter of the 100-mile race and other ultras distances races. Similar to the Fort Mead 100 in Maryland (
The Strolling Jim 40, held in Wartrace, Tennessee, is one of the top-five oldest ultras in America that is still being held to the present-day (2021). It is a road race that runs on very hilly paved and dirt roads, the brainchild of Gary Cantrell (Lazarus Lake). Because its distance is a non-standard ultra-distance of 41.2 miles, the race perhaps has not received as much publicity as it deserves among the ultrarunning sport. But buried within, is a storied history along with a seemly unbreakable course record set in 1991 by Andy Jones of Canada (and Cincinnati, Ohio), one of the greatest North American ultrarunners who most of the current generation of ultrarunners have never heard of before.
In the 1970s, a 24-hour relay craze took place at high schools, colleges and running clubs. By 1972, Runner’s World Magazine, in Mountain View, California, was publishing results along with some standardized rules for these relays participated by hundreds of runners. The Washington and Baltimore Road Runners Clubs were early adopters the relay format when they established a 24-hour 10-man-team relay race in 1970 on the track at Mullins Field in Fort Meade where participants would run one-mile legs. The event would eventually expand to 50-mile and 100-mile solo races competed by many of the best American ultrarunners of the time.
1978 was the year when more 100-mile and 24-hour races started to be established in the United States. In 1976, Tom Osler of New Jersey brought renewed American ultrarunning attention to the 24-hour run when he ran a solo 24-hour run on that track at Glassboro State College where he was teaching. (
Early conditioning can be very important. Wally Hayward came from a very tough background. His father, Wallace George Hayward, the son of a coal agent, had been born in Peckham in London, England in 1880, and emigrated to South Africa sometime between 1901 and 1906, in his early twenties. It looks probable he actually arrived soon after 1904 when the sand bar which had restricted Durban Harbour to bigger ships was dredged and deepened. This allowed the weekly Union Castle passenger ships from Southampton to enter the port. Bearing in mind Wallace’s later employment, and absence from Union Castle passenger lists, it is possible that he served as a barman on one of these passenger ships, departing the ship at Durban.