Steyn’s chances of breaking Comrades down run record increase with shorter route distance

Not that Gerda Steyn would have needed any help adding the Comrades Marathon down run 'record' to her list of South African road running major achievements. 

But the announcement, that the distance for this year’s running of the popular ultra race between Pietermaritzburg and Durban will be 87.701km, would have seen the popular athlete gleefully anticipating June 11. 

In the form of her life having just shattered her own record in winning the Two Oceans Marathon an unprecedented fourth successive time, Steyn is now a good bet to break Frith van Der Merwe’s long-standing mark of 5:54:43. 

It was Van Der Merwe’s Two Oceans record from 1989 that Steyn shattered last year before she went on to improve it this year. 

Speaking ahead of the 56km Mother City ultra last month, the Phantane Athletics Club runner confirmed that she would also be racing the Ultimate Human Race at which she holds the Up Run record of 5:58:53. 

And now that the race will be ending at the Kingsmead Cricket Stadium instead of the Moses Mabhida Stadium which will be hosting the Cosafa Cup, the shorter distance is sure to make for faster times. 

Steyn’s down run PB is a 6:15:34 which she ran in 2018. 

She has improved vastly since then, the 33-year-old now also a holder of the national marathon record with the 2:25:28 she ran in Italy in 2021. 

As such, there is good reason to expect her to fly into Kingsmead with the clock not far from Van der Merwe’s 5:54:43. 

After all, she will be running a good 1.899km shorter than the schoolteacher from Benoni did nearly a year before Steyn was born. 

This year’s distance is also 2.2km shorter than last year’s 89.885km distance and there is also every chance that the men’s down record set by David Gatebe in 2016 will be a thing of the past before noon on June 11. 

Gatebe ran a scintillating race to set a very fast 5:18.19 record, finishing at the same venue on an 89.208km route. 

Unlike the women’s race, where Steyn is the outright favourite, the men’s race is going to be a very open one, with no-one standing out as an obvious winner. 

But the smart money will be on John Adamson’s Nedbank running group that dominated the podium last year when Tete Dijana won ahead of Up Run title holder Edward Mothibi and Dan Mtshailwe who finished third. 

Mtshailwe was impressive in his Two Oceans debut last month when he finished second, and is sure to go to the Comrades confident he can depose his teammate Dijana as champion. 

With the prize money normalised after the shocking devaluation of the race post the Covid-19 pandemic, there will be extra motivation for the athletes who stand to double up on the half a million rand winner’s prize money should they break the down run best times set by Van Der Merwe and Gatebe. 

And if there is one runner you can bet on doing just that, it has to be Gerda Steyn, not just purely on her recent form and achievements but also because of the shortened distance of the race in comparison to when the records were set. 

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