(B)Roadies

A running bromance forged on tar.

- Ian Macleod

MY SOLO TRAINING RUNS for my first Comrades – with only soothing ballads by Journey to keep me company – were intense therapy.

Whatever your situation, the body- and mind-altering experience of building towards your rookie attempt will change you; part of you will ever after be wrought iron. But I have to admit, my experience was a lonely one. When I decided to run my second Comrades, in 2016, I resolved to find a training buddy.

But finding a partner willing to run 1887km with you, over five months, is no simple task. Naas lasted one trot around Delta Park. The less said about Big Jamo T and Dino’s respective tenures, the better. I’m still wearing down Jig’s defences for 2018. The partnership I found, eventually, was entered into when I least expected it…

Sipping beers at a pavement café in Parkhurst on a sunny Friday afternoon, I made my pitch to my old buddy Tino. Standing 1.92m, and built like a Currie Cup lock, the man looks anything but an ultra-marathoner.

“I’ll do it,” he said. There was conviction in his voice, but I had been hurt before. I knew young Constantinos would need to repeat a mission no less epic than that of Pheidippides, when he ran from Marathon to Athens with news of a great military victory for the Greeks over the Persians.