All Time Fastest Up Times & Pace
The tables below show the all-time women’s Comrades Up run pace and time charts. I place more emphasis on pace (especially as we had the shortest ever Comrades distance this year).
34-year-old Gerda Steyn replaces 29-year-old Gerda Steyn at the top of the table. Just how much better is Gerda than any other female on the Up run? An incredible 10.42 seconds per kilometre!
Alexandra Morozova is not fast enough to outpace Carline Cherry’s 2015 win but does get her second entry on the list in 4th. Courtney Olsen’s impressive debut run also features in the top 10.
Just 1 minute separated 4th and 7th on the finish line in 2024 and this same cohort occupies positions 15 – 18 on the chart. 8th placed Jenet Mbhele, the first black South African lady to win a two Gold medals, and 9th placed Dominika Stelmach also secure their places on the list. The only Gold medallist not to make the Top 30 is 10th placed Yulia Ryzhankova who is 48th.
With a mammoth 9 entries in the top 30 (next best is 2004 with 4), there is no doubt that the female class of 2024 was the most competitive ever on the Up run.
The much shorter distance (about 1.4km off the ‘normal’ distance) means that, whilst the same 9 names appear, everyone except Gerda has a higher placed entry on the finish time chart than the pace chart. The 6 fastest 2024 ladies all make the top 10 which is unprecedented.
Another good illustration of the improving depth of the women’s field is that 17 ladies managed to earn an Isavel Roche-Kelly medal this year by finishing outside of the top 10 but under 7 hours. In any other year on the Up run a sub-7 finish would have secured you a Gold medal. The only other years where sub 7 hours did not earn a Gold were all Down runs: 2023 (15), 2018 (2) and 2010 (2).
Still wondering whether the women’s 2024 race was the most competitive Up run of all time? The Top 10 pace and finish time by position provides the definitive answer. Every graduating Gold member of the women’s class of 2024 is both the fastest by pace and finish time by position.
One other key difference to note between the men’s and women’s table is that the women’s table is dominated by more recent years and has very few entries from the 90s (whereas the men’s list still contains many names from the 80s).
How the Women’s Up run Went Down
Gerda Steyn starts as the race favourite and lives up to the bill. Only Carla Molinaro is able to keep her company until Pinetown but from then on everyone else is racing for second. Morozova, who finished second to Steyn at the last Up run in 2019, admitted as much in the post-race interview.
Morozova seems to have paced her race perfectly for her third second place finish at the Up run (she has a win, a third and a fourth on the Down run) and is one of the few female runners whose slowest split is Pinetown to Winston Park (which was the recipe for success in the men’s Golds).
The other Gold medallist to run the Winston Park split the slowest was Caitriona Jennings who will be rueing the shorter distance in 2024. Jennings is one of the very few women to score perfect top 10 splits over the second half and just 60 seconds separated her 7th placed finish from Molinaro in 4th.
Molinaro has a habit of going of hard and seeing what happens. In 2019 this resulted in an implosion which saw her finish in 7h51 but she battled hard in 2024 to hold on for 4th position after getting overtaken by and re-overtaking various competitors in what was some of the most enthralling viewing of the day.
Third place went to American debutant Courtney Olsen who made her move on the Umlaas Road split and looked very strong at the finish. Another American, Andrea Pomaranski, was touted for a Gold medal but provides one of the few examples of femicide at Comrades. After being high in the Gold standings for the first two-thirds of the race, Pomaranski takes almost 9:00/km to summit Polly Shortts (2723 other women ran faster than her over this split) and plods home for 39th place.
Something that seems to have gone unnoticed in the media (traditional and social) is that when Zimbabwean Nobukhosi Tshuma crossed the line in 5th she became the first African lady outside of South Africa to win Gold at Comrades. Her husband, Givemore Madzinganyama, finished 10th in the men’s race so this is also one of those rare occurrences when a husband and wife both claim Gold.
Another notable achievement is Jenet Mbhele from the non-professional Xcel Running Club following up her 10th place in 2023 with an 8th placed finish in 2024. Black female South African Gold medal winners are very rare and Jenet becomes the first to achieve two Golds. [Note: Farwa Mentoor, who is classified as Coloured, has the 10 Gold medals which is the most for a South African lady.]
A massive 93 of the top 100 women have the climb up Polly Shortts as their slowest split. However, 46 follow that up with their fastest split of the day to the finish line. Considering how much better women are at pacing at Comrades a surprisingly large number (25) run their fastest split over the first 5.5km and a further 17 over the second split to Pinetown.
I’m always interested to see who the fastest non-Gold medal winner is over the final split. This year the honours go to Hollywood AC’s Melinda Jansen Van Vuuren who wins the first Silver medal for women since 2019 with her 27th place just over the 7 hour mark.
Just how far ahead Steyn is from the rest of the field is highlighted by the Split Rankings table where she ‘wins’ all 6 final splits. The Split Pace Summary provides a further illustration of her dominance. Steyn’s 2019 run was the first time a woman broke the 6 hour barrier on the Up run. The Top 3 graphs also includes her 2019 splits as a pace comparison. Steyn now holds the two fastest times and the two fastest paces on the Comrades Up and, with over R2million in prize money and incentives, also has the bank balance to show for it.
Fastest Qualifiers
[Below if the ‘prediction post’ I did before Comrades – I’ve updated at the end with what actually happened.]
The table provides analysis on the fastest 50 female qualifiers. There are just 52 women with a marathon time below 3 hours (or adjusted marathon time where I convert an ultra to a standard marathon giving a ‘discount’ for distance).
Gerda’s South African record (at the time) of 2:24:03 in Valencia tops the list and, as the only women ever to run under 6 hours on the Up run, cements her status as favourite.
Apart from serial Gold medallists Dominika Stelmach and Alexandra Morozova, several names in the Top 10 will be unfamiliar to many. Finnish runner Noora Honkala was allowed to use her 2023 Comrades time (where she finished 8th) and this places her second on the list whilst English runner Melissah Gibson is 3rd with the second fastest standard marathon time (2:36:39 at Seville in February). There are also several “unknown” international quantities (disclaimer: I don’t follow elite running all that closely and don’t have the time to research running CVs).
However, I have had a few ‘social media chats’ with Melissah Gibson who is playing down her chances of a Gold at this year’s Up run but does have her eyes on the 2025 Down run. Gibson told me that most of her training has been on the flats and admits “I’m pretty useless up a hill”. However, with a 21st place 6:51:48 in her debut Comrades last year (commenting afterwards that she “finished with energy and had been too conservative”) and a recent 100k time of 7h13 she could definitely be in contention for a Gold medal.
Of note is that just 22 of the fastest 50 have run an Up run before and, of those, only 7 have run an Up run under 7 hours. There are also 15 novices in the fastest 50.
A dark green highlight indicates those I would consider to be favourites for a medal based on qualification time, ultra running pedigree and previous Comrades experience. No doubt there will still be a few surprises on Sunday!
Here’s what actually happened. The qualifying time is a good way to predict eventual Gold medal for women with 6 Golds coming from the top 11 and all Gold from the top 20. I managed to pick 6 of the top 10.
There were just 3 DNFs and 5 DNSs from the fastest 50 qualifiers. The biggest positive jump between ‘seeding’ and finish place was Yolande Maclean (47th fastest / 21st place) whilst Jessica Maitland-Stuart has the biggest slip (35th fastest / 115th place). This table is very different from the equivalent men’s table where there is much less consistency.
Elite Split Performance: The Difference between Good and Great
[Note: As I compare male and female performance this section is included in both articles verbatim.]
The women’s field in 2024 was far stronger than that of 2019 with every split except Winston Park to Drummond being substantially faster for both Gold medallists and the Top 100. There is a wide but fairly consistent gap of 40-50 seconds per kilometre between Golds and the Top 100 which indicates a lack of depth in the women’s field.
The men’s graph is quite different illustrating different race day tactics between 2019 and 2024. In 2019 the lead contender bunches pushed much harder to halfway whereas the racing only really got going from Cato Ridge to Umlaas Road in 2024. The graph also highlights the difference between good and great – the are plenty of men who keep up until Drummond but Inchanga sorts out the medals from the mice.
The next two graphs provide a comparison between the male and female Top 100 and Gold medallists. The larger gap in the Top 100 (compared to Gold) highlights that there is a lot more depth in the men’s field. However, the gap between the average split pace of men and women decreases steadily over the second half for Golds and the Top 100 illustrating the better pacing of female elites.
The table provides source data for the graphs (note I don’t have 5.5km split times for 2019). It also highlights just how tough Polly Shortts is – everyone has this as their slowest split. I was quite surprised at how different the 2019 and 2024 split rankings were (the men’s can be explained by race day tactics but the women’s are also quite jumbled). One thing to note is that whilst Top 100 men have the final split as their slowest, this is the fastest split for Top 100 women.
Gold Medal Demographics
[Note: Gold was only available to the top ten women from 1998 (before then, Gold was awarded to the winner from 1983, top three from 1988, top five from 1995). Where relevant Top 10 positions have been tracked rather than ‘strictly Gold’.]
This is always one of the most remarkable (and depressing) graphs, highlighting the rarity that South African women of colour that win Gold medals. This year Jenet Mbhele was the only entry this year and became the first black South African lady to win 2 Golds.
My hypothesis is that it takes a lot more than talent and hard work to be a successful ultra marathon runner – and sadly the additional support that is required for a talented female athlete to realise her potential is not available to most South African women.
Another notable achievement was that when Zimbabwean Nobukhosi Tshuma crossed the line in 5th she became the first African lady outside of South Africa to win Gold at Comrades. Her husband, Givemore Madzinganyama, finished 10th in the men’s race so this is also one of those rare occurrences when a husband and wife both claim Gold.
The graph below show Gold by region. this was the first year since 2015 when internationals won more Gold than South Africans.
The tables below provide an all time history of Top 10 and Top 3 finishers with additional segmentation by decade.
All photos courtesy Comrades Marathon Association.
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