Humorous Anecdotes, Observations & Accounts of Marathon Running & Agile Adventures.
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s November 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
The first weekend of May is last chance saloon for many aspirant Comrades runners who still need to qualify and for those who’ve already secured their goal time it’s a last long run. There is a small minority, yours truly included, for whom the weekend provides a good excuse to run a marathon before winter properly sets in.
My choice of which marathon to run before the winter doldrums was made easier when I got an invite from Teboho Lemao to the second edition of the Lemo Mall Marathon. My frequent travel partners Julian and Farai were also on the guest list but unfortunately I was not able to travel early on Friday with them due to work commitments.
As long as Limpopo continues to pump out the marathons, I’ll continue to keep heading north. Since it appeared on the running calendar in 2023, the Makoro Village Marathon has been on my radar and this year Julian and I travelled to Polokwane for the third running of the event.
The marathon is themed around Limpopo village lifestyle fusing traditional food, drinks and dance into the event and we were told to expect plenty of support from the local schoolkids who would be entertaining runners at various points along the route. The race is organised by Polokwane Athletic Club but is very different from the other races in their portfolio, all of which are ‘urban’ and centred around the city. This one is about an hour’s drive outside Polokwane City and provides an excellent opportunity to do some feral marathon running.
Continue reading “Makoro Village Marathon (A Lekgowa Special)”
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s October 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s August and September 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
Most people get injured when they run too much, I seem to get injured when I run too little. I had been taking it easy since the Mdantsane Marathon at the beginning of December with nothing longer than 10km and was just doing enough mileage to keep my beer belly in check. Let’s just say I was in a good equilibrium at the beginning of January when all of a sudden, I felt a pain at the top of my hip during my morning 10k.
Of course my immediate reaction was to try and ‘run it out’. After 5 km of steadily escalating agony, I finally breached my pain threshold and walked home. I was convinced it was a stress fracture but it later turned out to be a very badly strained gluteus medius which had detached from the bone (hence feeling like a stress fracture but with more ‘pull’).
Continue reading “Elands Marathon (there’s no such thing as an easy marathon)”
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:
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s April 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
This article provides detailed information on all South Africa’s March 2025 marathons including race descriptions and recommendations. You can find the full 2025 marathon / ultra calendar here.
A summary of your choices is below:
The whole of South Africa slows down in December and good marathons are hard to find (but a hard marathon is always good to find). Luckily the Eastern Cape provides some festive cheer for the obsessive marathon runner, hosting the only two pre-Christmas options – the 1City Marathon in Gqeberha and the Mdantsane Marathon just outside East London. Unfortunately, this presents a Christmas predicament for the marathon enthusiast as they were both run on the first Saturday in December in 2024. Having run the 1City Marathon in 2023, Julian and I opted to head to Buffalo City and tackle the hills of Mdantsane.
