[Marathon #292 / Unique Marathon #179 / 15 November 2025]
There are two trends I’ve found when running Bloemfontein marathons:
- I return home a lot more tweetalig than when I departed (and have tried to channel some of this bilingualism into this race report) .
- Things don’t just happen in Bloemfontein, you have to make them happen (or, failing that, you have to be very observant to spot the cultural nuances and intricacies).
I should never have been in Bloemfontein on the second weekend in November in the first place. However, a late cancellation of the Waterberg Marathon due to roadworks meant I headed south instead of north on a Friday afternoon.
When a soutie heads into Bloem, it is advisable to take a translator / protection and Marius Potgieter duly obliged. Marius was also supposed to be running Waterberg.
It rained a bit on the drive down. Marius, who was at primary school in Bloemfontein, told me that no one ever complains about the rain in Bloem. It rained heavily overnight and continued into the morning. Truth be told, I don’t actually remember anyone complaining about the rain during the race, but at the start it did look like a few entrants had chickened out as the field was a little smaller than expected.
The event also features a half marathon and a 10km, the latter of which also served as the official SA championships this year*. The marathon was the first to set off into the gloom at 5am in the morning after the obligatory prayer amidst umbrellas and rain jackets for the officials and supporters.
* South Africa’s 10km champs for 2025 were Chris Mhlanga (29:00) and Tayla Kavanagh (33:05)
After a short stint through the suburbs you head out into the farmland and, from 4km to the halfway mark, you run an isosceles triangle through the Free State’s fertile fields. Whilst the first half of this route is flat like a pannekoek, the second half is hilly like a bruidskoek.
Perhaps this was why the 4h45 bus inexplicably opted for a “buy now, pay later” pacing strategy and were well ahead of the 4h30 bus for most of the first quarter of the race – much to the bemusement of those on the 4h30 bus and runners not making use of public transport like myself.
Normal order was restored at around the 12km mark, after which there was a bit of tailgating. I did receive regular updates on the fate of the glycogen depleted carnage in the wake of the 4h45 bus’s massive positive split strategy. This is best illustrated in the photo below.
Over the second half of the route we ran past several schools which provided an additional opportunity for bus empathy. You know you are in for a bruising morning when a bus called “Komandant” pulls up outside of your school on a Saturday for a rugby match massacre. It would be even worse if you are not a Free State school. I expect that students practice their rolling mauls by pushing the bus long distances with the handbrake up.
As I said earlier, if you want to be able to write a full race report from a Bloemfontein marathon you need sharp eyes to hunt down the cultural nuances and intricacies that need exposure. One of these was a sign for “Bloem Eye”.
Whilst it is possible that Bloem Eye is a chronic medical condition that, similar to Pink Eye, makes your retina display everything with an orange hue, as in “Have I got Bloem Eye or has Trump got even oranger recently?” However, my thoughts were that it’s time for a South African version of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” called “Bloem Eye for the English Guy*” which would be a heartwarming clash of clothes, culture and cuisine…
* There are also plenty of opportunities for spin-off shows like “Bloem Eye for the Zulu Guy”, “Bloem Eye for the Sotho Guy”, “Bloem Eye for the Sandton socialite”, etc.
Another local Free State reality show variant that I’d like to see is “Pimp my windpomp.” During the farmland traverse I’d spotted the below windpomp that had got pomped hard by the overnight wind and could definitely have used some love and attention. I was just glad that despite the rain and infrastructure damage, the marathon still went ahead. Most of my previous forays into the Free State have involved finishing with the temperatures in the high 30s but today no sunglasses or sunblock was required.
The real work in this marathon starts at around the 23km mark when you are back into the suburbs. There is a slow climb to just before the 26km mark followed by a very short drop into the pit of Happy Valley. To escape Happy Valley you are faced with a proper 1km climb that locals use for hill repeats.
There is another proper 2.5km hill just after the 30km mark. At some stage they ran out of ideas for road names in this part of Bloemfontein and started naming everything after Lucas Steyn (who was Chief Justice of South Africa from 1959 to 1971). This also appears to be how South Africa’s judicial capital addresses bilingualism – there is a Lucas Steyn Road which intersects with Lucas Steyn Weg. Further along there is another Lucas Steyn intersection which is even more confusing.
I was now on the alert and kept a high focus on the street names in this area. The last place in the world where you expect to extend your English vocabulary is on Bloemfontein road signs but I am always happy to have my biases checked and be educated.
Who or what is a “Hippocrene” I asked Marius as we passed the intersection below. A few years ago I might never have known but thanks to ChatGPT I can inform you that in Greek mythology the “Hippocrene” is a spring that burst open when a hoof of the winged horse Pegasus struck the ground on Mount Helicon. Poets are said to “drink from Hippocrene” to gain creativity or divine inspiration.
On the other hand, I am still not totally sure what a “Limousin” is. Based on extensive research it could be (a) a historical region in central France, (b) a muscular breed of cattle with a golden-red coat or (c) something you do in the back seat of a car before or after your matric dance that you wouldn’t want your mother to find out about.
There is one final steady pull from 36km to 40km. If you are tired at the top, the good news is that you just have one kilometre to go. The race could have done with some additional marshals at certain points on the route and one in particular which seems to regularly offer a distance discount of about 1.4km as everyone misses a loop somewhere in the early 20s*.
* Those running this in future years should add an extra kilometre or so onto my second half distance markers assuming that the organisers address this ‘shortcoming’.
After crossing the finish line, Sthembizo Jwele greeted me and lamented that it was not the first time there’d been an unwanted distance discount at the marathon. He showed me correspondence he’d had with the organisers in 2023 when the same thing happened. The problem was acknowledged as, “Yes, we know about that problem. Both a marshal and traffic [police] was meant to be there but dropped us.”
Sthembizo also told me that he could have claimed a FPB (fake PB) on both occasions but decided to do his own loop to correct the distance instead. I suspect that there are still several FPBs being claimed from this race. FPBs (or PBs for that matter) are no longer a problem that I need to worry about. However, my official marathon count is a totally different matter.
A boer maak ‘n plan and soutie must correct a foutie. Marius and I had already decided we were going to run back to the car and, if needed, around the Northridge Mall parking lot until we got our marathon distance in, which we duly did to ensure that another official marathon distance was in the books. And of course the logical answer we gave to anyone who asked us what we were doing was, “We’re looking for the missing kilometre!”
