Humorous Anecdotes, Observations & Accounts of Marathon Running & Agile Adventures.
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s May 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
I asked 41-time Two Oceans ultra marathon finisher Mark Raubenheimer for a “few quotes, comments and / or anecdotes” on Ian Benson for the article I was writing on Ian’s 40th Two Oceans.
A couple of days later Mark sent me back an email saying, “I think I ended up going down a rabbit warren when you reached out to me. I wrote this as an article but am not precious about it so happy for you to use the content as you see fit.”
Pirates clearly have a tendency to go ‘overboard’ (although I understand this is known as ‘walking the plank’ in Greenside lingo).
I did use a few segments in my main article on Ian (Benson & Legends (Ian Benson’s 40th Two Oceans ultra marathon)) but I thought this would be an ideal guest blog. So here it is courtesy of Mark Raubenheimer…
Continue reading “The P.I.R.A.T.E.S. Code”
When doing research on living legends in the running space like Ian Benson, a rich source of information are their club mates. I therefore asked a mutual friend, David Case, if he has any anecdotes, stories or snippets that he could share with me. David started his description of Ian with, “He’s a typical macho male.”
David is something of a kindred spirit when it comes to beer and, as is typical of his kind, framed the follow-up sentence in a drinking context, “Ian is always in the bar but he’s not one to be holding up the bar.*”
* After writing this article, I have to say that I think David got this one wrong as it would be more appropriate to say that Ian is normally the one ‘raising the bar’.
Continue reading “Benson & Legends (Ian Benson’s 40th Two Oceans ultra marathon)”
[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 surprise move, Comrades have announced that they will be moving their 2026 race date to the October slot recently vacated by Cape Town Marathon (CTM). Comrades has traditionally been run on the second Sunday in June which would be three weeks after CTM’s new 23 May race date.
Continue reading “Breaking News: Comrades to take CTM’s October race date in 2026”