Almost every runner who has run the Comrades Marathon will recall that when they first heard people race over 90km, they would have considered them mad.
What, then, do you call a man for whom Comrades would be a mere athletic appetiser?
Such a man is South African trail-running star Ryan Sandes, who has just finished fifth in the Marathon des Sables, which at 270km is three times as far as Comrades and, because it is across the desert, rightly regarded as one of the toughest footraces on the planet.
Apart from the physical effort of the race, merely coping with living conditions – no sleeping mats, pillows or even a change of clothes for days on end – would finish off most of us within a day.
Coping with such an intense physical effort is the classic case of mind over matter, as an ultra-athlete will tell you. Once your body has physiologically repeatedly hit its wall, it is mental toughness which pushes you on.
Undoubtedly, it helps, as Comrades champion Bruce Fordyce once said, to “have the right genes” and a body which can do more with less than the other bodies around it. Sandes and the others who believe in regular pilgrimages to the shrines of pain are psychologically and physiologically super-human specimens.
Even as Sandes was testing the limits of ultra-marathoning, Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe became the first person to dip under two hours in the standard 42.2km marathon… a feat many experts said was beyond the physical capabilities of human beings.
People like Sawe and Sandes are among a small band of elite performers who are taking humanity’s supposed limitations and throwing them away.
Not all of us can go sub-two in a marathon or cover 270km of blistering desert, but these men remind us our own limits are there to be pushed.
