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  What We Know About the 28,000-Runner Centenary Race Welcome, fellow runners and fitness enthusiasts. The 2027 Comrades Marathon is taking shape, and there's a lot for runners to keep track of. It'll run on Sunday 13 June 2027, from Pietermaritzburg to Durban; the 100th edition of the race, and the 50th time it's gone in the Down direction. The field is also getting bigger: the entry cap is now 28,000 runners, the largest in the race's history. That number alone changes the feel of race weekend. More people in Pietermaritzburg beforehand, more supporters lining the route, and a much bigger job for organisers at the Durban finish. But if you're actually planning to run it, the questions that matter are simpler. How do you get in? What's the qualifying time? How long is the course really going to be? What does it cost? And what should you be doing right now, in August 2026, if you want to be on that start line? Here's what's confirmed so far. The da...

  Three Days Out: The Training Is Done There is a specific kind of quiet that settles over a runner in the final days before Comrades. The alarm still goes off early out of habit. The legs feel oddly restless. You find yourself checking your race number again even though you checked it yesterday. This is normal. This is the taper talking. If you are reading this with race day less than 72 hours away, there is one thing worth saying before anything else: you have already done the hard part. The kilometres are banked. The body has adapted. Whatever fitness you were going to build from months of early alarms and long Sunday runs - it is sitting in your legs right now, waiting for Sunday morning. Nothing you do this week will add to it. A hard session today will not sharpen you. A long run on Friday will not fill a gap you imagine is there. What it will do is cost you, and the bill comes due somewhere between the 60km mark and Polly Shortts. The temptation to do more is real. Runn...

There is a sound that stops time. It has been doing it since 1949. A rooster crow, scratchy and unmistakable, recorded by a man named Max Trimborn who thought it would be a fun way to mark race morning. Trimborn kept crowing at the start of Comrades until he died. Now his voice lives on a recording, and every year on race day, thousands of runners hear it and feel something shift in their chests. That is the Comrades Marathon in miniature - a race so old, so strange, and so deeply human that it has its own ghost. On Sunday, 14 June 2026, that rooster crows again. And this year carries weight that even seasoned Comrades veterans will feel.