Humorous Anecdotes, Observations & Accounts of Marathon Running & Agile Adventures.
Luke Jacobs, a Partnership Sales Manager with HYROX South Africa, decided to run the Two Oceans half marathon in Larissa Parekh’s race number. He finished as 7th lady. As you can see from the photos below he does not run in a sports bra.
Previous Two Oceans administrations have failed to impose consequences on cheaters but the current Two Oceans board has taken decisive action to uphold the integrity of the race. After the new board was formed in October 2025, a number of sub-committees were formed as part of the event’s revival plan.
READ MORE: Is Two Oceans soft on Cheating?
One of these was a Disciplinary Sub-Committee (SC) which I found myself chairing, with fellow board members Nombini Zaku and Wietse van der Westhuizen also putting their names forward to join the SC. We immediately reviewed all suspected cases of cheating at the 2025 event and implemented robust measures to safeguard the integrity of the event.
Continue reading “No More Free Passes: Inside Two Oceans’ New Stance on Cheating”
There are currently just three women who’ve run the Two Oceans ultra marathon 30 times or more. Matilda le Roux sits on exactly 30 whilst Sharon Bosch and Lucille Damon lead the way with 32 finishes each.
In 2026, a fourth lady is looking to add her name to this illustrious list – Jeppe Quondam’s Kim Pain. Kim ran her first Two Oceans in 1990 and will also become just the second woman, after Sharon Bosch, to earn a triple laurel at Two Oceans and Comrades (Kim has 32 Comrades finishes).
Boasting the most perfectly on‑brand surname in ultra running, it felt irresponsible not to check how many Pains had tackled Two Oceans. The answer is five (including her dad Alf), but Kim is in a league of her own. She hasn’t just run farther than her father — she has quite literally experienced more Pain than anyone else over the Two Oceans route.
Continue reading “Jeppe’s Queen of Pain tackles 30th Two Oceans Marathon”
After hitting rock bottom in 2025, the Two Oceans Marathon is undergoing a complete renaissance. A great deal of the credit for the revival must go to Stillwater Sports who were chosen as the event’s professional staging partner. However, perhaps their most impressive achievement to date has gone largely unnoticed – landing a dozen new sponsors for the 2026 event. Even more impressive is that Stillwater Sports only started engaging with prospective sponsors in September 2025.
I had a fascinating chat with Stillwater Sports MD Michael Meyer about just what is involved in securing sponsorship deals for the Two Oceans Marathon and some behind the scenes insights.
Continue reading “Two Oceans Revival: Sponsors flock back (an interview with Stillwater CEO Michael Meyer)”
No one has written more about cutoffs than I have. I covered the empty finish line at Comrades 2023 (and kept pushing until we finally got an apology and some recompense for the runners seven weeks later), then came Two Oceans’ own cutoff debacle in 2024 (and the resultant post-race digimag update scandal that followed) and in 2024 Comrades were determined to repeat their same mistake until I threatened them with actuaries (and a spread bet) before they finally relented, added 10 minutes to the final cutoff at Mkondeni (which resulted in 117 additional runners earning their medal).
In short in-race cutoffs have come with a lot of drama at South African ultra marathons in recent years but they shouldn’t. In-race cutoffs should be boring. And at Two Oceans 2026 I am hoping that we achieve this goal.
Continue reading “Two Oceans 2026 Cutoffs (and why they don’t matter)”
[For anyone late to the party, this article was published on 1 April as an April Fool’s joke – but it does provide a satirical commentary on the South African road running scene.]
In a joint statement, Comrades and Two Oceans announced that they would be doing away with qualification marathons and the need for South African athletes to qualify at their respective 2027 events. International athletes would still need to submit a qualifier. This comes after the announcement of a new AI running database called KONA (an acronym for Knowledge Of National Athletes) that has been “fully tested and implemented”.
AI KONA’s engine will automatically evaluate results databases and Strava profiles to determine which athletes are most likely to finish each race and will automatically select those athletes in the ballot system. The developers believe that the system is over 99.9% accurate at predicting whether or not a specific runner will finish within the cutoff time.
Continue reading “AI to replace qualifiers at 2027 Comrades & Two Oceans Marathons”
Running a negative split at an ultra marathon is hard. At Comrades about 4% of the starters manage this on a Down run and just over 12% on the Up run. However, when I dug deeper into the Comrades data, I found some really surprising statistics like in 2024 that over 50% of H Batch (the slowest of the herd) ran the final split from the top of Polly Shortts as their fastest average pace of the day.
There are no such surprises when one looks at negative splits at Two Oceans.
Continue reading “Running Negative Splits at Two Oceans”
The 2026 Two Oceans half and ultra marathon batch seedings are out. What’s new, what’s different and how much difference does a good seeding make? This article explains it all.
The one big change this year is that the seeding batches are much smaller, downsizing from about 1200 to 770 runners per batch in the half and just below 700 per batch in the full. This has resulted in an increase in the number of batches to 19 in the ultra and 23 in the half.
All batches will leave at two minute intervals* and, in the event that there is a start time delay, the in-race cutoffs will automatically be adjusted based on the time that the last batch actually starts. I will do a separate article on the cutoffs but I can confirm that they are both sensible and fair in 2026.
Continue reading “Everything you need to know about Two Oceans 2026 batch seedings”
After travelling all over the country to get my marathon fixes, it’s good to know that there are still a few marathons that can take one’s breath away – both literally and figuratively. However, I was not expecting Barberton to be that place. It is a town I had never visited and I might never have found my way to the eastern extremities of South Africa if they did not host a marathon.
In past years, it was easy to determine whether you should use your fastest marathon time or an ultra as your qualifier for Two Oceans as the seeding batches were large (typically 2000 to 4000 runners per batch), there were just six batches and there were published “time tables” for each seeding per ultra distance.
The move to dynamic allocation of seeding batches and much smaller batches makes this process a lot more difficult. In 2025 there were 14 batches (each with 800 – 900 runners) and this will be increased to around 20 in 2026. Hopefully this article will make the process transparent and which time to use as easy as possible.
Continue reading “Should you use your marathon, ultra or Comrades time for your Two Oceans qualifier?”