A very big thanks to all the donors for all your support! It was an adventure for the Madikwe Mambas to travel to Durban to run the 2017 Comrades 86.73km up-run to Pietermaritzburg.

The Madikwe Mambas participants were 10 runners and our 3 supporters who set off from Madikwe at 3am on Friday; arriving in Durban 11.5 hours later at 2:30pm to collect our race numbers at the Durban Expo. Then we drove to Umhlanga Rocks and relaxed enjoying the view of the sea. Some of our team have never seen a sea before! We explored Umhlanga whilst discussing our Sunday ultra-marathon, where nervousness came, but we supported each other (I personally have ran comrades marathon 6 times but it is not something you used to it).

The big day on Sunday came and we arrived at 5am and went to our different seeding as comrades marathon is attended by more than 18,000 people from all over the world. The race started at 5:30am in the morning as the cut off time to finish is 12 hours.

We ran all the way to Pietermaritzburg and it was a bit warm and all our experienced runners finish their Comrades marathon. Only one guy couldn’t finish as it was his first Comrades marathon, and at halfway he missed the cut-off time; but now he got an idea of the race and he will train more to prepare for next year.

Madikwe Mambas Race Times:

Spenser Moraope 8:25:37

Julius Nikani 8:25:52

Lesley Chifumbi 8:40:04

Elias Dire 8:58:16

Isaac Mokawane 9:27:43

Tertius Mokoma 9:44:19

Bethuel Kosietsile 9:57:36

Colin Lombard 11:20:43

Frank Botlhole 11:39:47

Phakamile Xanda 6:04:50 (completing 42.7km)

I would like to thank all the donors for their support and thanks to all who donated already, we still asking for more donations because without your support we won’t be able to uplift our local community, we got lots of projects coming this year, and we still need more donations. We proud to have Madikwe Mambas that was sponsored by Vance and our donors to make a huge different to our local communities.

Best wishes,

Bethuel (chairperson of Madikwe Mambas)