Running at someone else's pace: lessons from (watching) Comrades 2026

The house was completely still when the alarm went off. Just hours earlier, the living room had been alive with the tension of the World Cup matches, keeping the kids and me awake far past our bedtimes. So when Comrades morning arrived, I chose to stay in bed, leaving my husband to creep into the quiet kitchen alone.

In the Lotz family, Comrades is practically a tradition. Whether we actually have runners out on the road testing their limits or we are just watching from home, the day is always marked on our calendars.

And there is a lonely, beautiful sort of dedication to watching the start of the ultimate human race at an early Sunday morning. Sitting in the dark, coffee mug in hand, waiting for the beautiful sound of Shosholoza to echo through the quiet house.

By the time the rest of us gathered around the screen, the magic had already taken over. It happens every year. You think you’ll just glance at the screen while making breakfast, and suddenly you are completely hooked.

We watched the beauty - and craziness-  of it all. The pure joy of the winners crossing the line. The heartbreaking, final crack of the cut-off gun. And those unforgettable moments at the back of the pack where total strangers literally carry each other forward, refusing to let someone fail alone.

But as the hours ticked by and the midday heat set in, a familiar, painful pattern emerged on the road.

Time and time again, you see brilliant, capable athletes who completely lose their strategy. They get swept up in the adrenaline of the crowd or the tempo of the frontrunners. They abandon the rehearsed, calculated pace they spent months preparing for in training. Instead, they try to match someone else’s rhythm.

And almost inevitably, the road catches up to them.

They break down. They hit the wall sooner, burn through their reserves, and finish far worse than if they had simply trusted their own system. Some don’t finish at all.

Watching them struggle on screen, I realised how this is a life lesson for our everyday mindset. The commentator mentioned that the ultimate trap of the Comrades isn't the steep hills or the heat; it is the presence of other runners. It is the temptation to look outside yourself to decide how fast you should move.

That is when I realised that the road between Durban and Pietermaritzburg isn't the only place where we abandon our training.

In life, we do this constantly. We look at the pace of those around us—the speed of a colleague’s career, the lifestyle of a neighbour, the milestones of a peer, the relentless output of someone else in our field. And silently, almost unconsciously, we change our stride to match theirs. We accelerate when our bodies and minds are screaming for a rest day. We measure our internal dashboard against someone else’s external tempo.

But trying to run at another person’s pace in life will only break us down.

We forget that their training is not our training. Their capacity, their terrain, their background, and their ultimate destination are entirely different from ours. When we adopt a tempo that isn’t ours, we aren’t actually competing—we are just draining our energy bank on a journey that wasn't designed for us.

Perhaps the hardest part of any marathon—literal or metaphorical—is the discipline of restraint.

It is the courage to let others pass you by early on. It is the quiet trust that your steady cadence is exactly what will get you across your own finish line.

The goal isn't to win someone else's race.

The goal is to finish your own, intact.

...and with the smile of a winner (like Gerda's)....