The Comrades ultra-marathon legend and City of Roses resident for many a moon, Johan Burger (Nedbank Bloemfontein Achilles), left for Pietermaritzburg yesterday with only one mission – to complete the Comrades Ultra-marathon (90 km) within the official cut-off time of 12 hours for the 30th time.
Looking back at Burger’s record of the Comrades, it reads like a fairy tale and he surely has never entered the race to “just complete it in just under 12 hours”.
The reserved, though determined 58-year-old Burger told Courant: “I will be aiming for a time of 9:30 this year and if I run anything faster, I will consider it a bonus. A time of under 9:00 is at this stage improbable, but not impossible. That will be an additional bonus for my 30th”, he added.
If you are going to page through the results after Sunday’s race, which is a down-run (Pietermaritzburg to Durban) this year, be sure, you will not find scores of finishers of Burger’s age who ran a time of sub-nine hours.
As a matter of interest, Burger’s slowest time of his 29 completed Comrades, is 10:02 (2011), a time the majority of Sunday’s finishers can only dream of.
Burger finished his first Comrades in 1985, but only started rocking the boat during the 1990s, after which he was on a roll.
He finished within the top-100 no less than 14 times and even more impressive, of his 29 completions, he won silver medals a staggering 21 times. This means that in only eight races, he ran slower than 7:30 and any Comrades addict will agree that this alone is remarkable.
Burger also boasts the distinction of stopping the clock no less than three times under the six-hours barrier. In 1993 (5:57) he finished 15th overall and in 1996 (5:52) he collected the 18th position card.
But, his best was yet to come. Before the Comrades in 1998, Burger turned 40 and that qualified him to compete in the veteran section. He finished 15th overall once again, and was crowned Comrades veteran champion, all with an exceptional time of 5:51.
Burger also turned in three close-to-six-hours times in his lustrous career by clocking 6:02, 6:03 and 6:12 in respective years. Yet another great performance was when he ran under seven hours (2007), this at the age of 49.
He did not finish his 29 races in succession. He said: “In 1999 I underwent three knee surgeries which kept me out of it and in 2008, for no reason at all, I decided that I was just, in good Afrikaans, gatvol and gave it a break”.
But, when he finishes on Sunday and you add all his times in his 30 races, it will be among the top of the list of all athletes who completed the race 30 years before Burger. Reason being – Burger doesn’t run to complete the Comrades, he races it. – RUFUS BOTHA
