With still summer here, the hills have been alive with the sound of takkies hitting the tarmac and scores of people chasing their new year goals.
If you’re looking for motivation to push your 2020 goals to the next level, consider this fact about South African ultrarunners: in a study released this month titled, “The State of Ultra Running 2020”, we’ve been lauded as the fastest ultramarathon runners in the world.
“The best ultrarunners are from South Africa with an average pace of 10:36 min/mile. The runners-up are Sweden (11:56 min/mile) and Germany (12:01 min/mile),” says the report, which “analyzed 5 010 730 results from 15 451 ultrarunning events, making this the largest study ever done on the sport”.
Runner’s World South Africa asked the study researchers why Kenya, renowned for its marathon runners, didn’t make the cut, and their reasoning was: “In the country analysis, the report only included the top nations with the highest participation, since many countries have too low participation to make reliable findings. Kenya being one of those countries. However, the report does include all countries when it comes to gender, pace, and so forth.”
So our runners are fast, and we have high participation numbers. We’ll take it! And to help our ultrarunners prepare for the upcoming months we’ve compiled a list of ultramarathons for you to diarise.
Upcoming South African ultramarathons to diarise
| Date | Event | Distance |
| 4 April 2020 | Arthur Cresswell Memorial Ultra-Marathon | 52km |
| 11 April 2020 | Two Oceans Marathon | 56km |
| 18 April 2020 | Forever Resorts 50km Loskop Marathon | 50km |
| 23 May 2020 | Mac Mac Ultra | 46km |
| 14 June 2020 | Comrades Marathon | 90km (down run) |
| 18 July 2020 | Cape Town Festival of Running | 50km or 100km |