Never afraid to chase: A Black woman aims for ultramarathon history

The TV cameras swept across the row of elite runners gathered at the start of the 2023 Comrades ultramarathon. Skin prickling with goosebumps in the 40-degree morning, they waved and flashed nervous smiles. 

Ahead of them, the race’s 55-mile course curled into the still pitch-black winter day. At their backs, 16,000 hobby runners sang and snapped selfies as speakers croaked pop songs over the crowd. 

Galaletsang Mekgoe could have been in the front row, if she wanted. The year before, she’d finished fifth in the Comrades, which is – by a considerable margin – the world’s largest race longer than a standard marathon. The 26-year-old firefighter from a rural South African village had picked off a field that included an American runner who was the most decorated female ultrarunner in the world. In the Comrades’ centurylong history, no Black woman had ever come so close to winning the race. 

Now, however, as the cameras dipped and panned over the elite field, Ms. Mekgoe was nowhere to be seen. “I don’t like to stand out,” she explained a few days earlier, running her tongue over the braces she’d gotten a few months before to make her feel more confident in photos. “I’m not that type.” And so on race morning, she tucked herself into the third row of runners, where she could be alone with the nerves blooming in her stomach. 

The starting gun popped, and she sprinted into the darkness after the leaders. 

She could handle that though. Ms. Mekgoe had never been afraid to chase.

Making history

The week before, on a misty Thursday morning, she jogged onto the main street in the tourist town of Dullstroom, where she’d spent the month before the Comrades at a high-altitude training camp with six of her running club teammates. Their pack of lanky runners wound up the road, past old white ladies walking fluffy dogs in sweaters and gift shops selling local gins and wedges of fancy cheese. When they reached the edge of town, where a ribbon of road stretched out towards the pine tree plantations in the distance, they tucked in their arms and started to sprint. 

Ms. Mekgoe, who is slight and lanky, was the only woman in the group, and within a few seconds, she’d fallen to the back of the pack. 

It was always like this. 

“It takes a lot of mental strength to run with the boys,” her teammate Edward “Slender” Mothibi, a former Comrades champion, observed. “It is not easy to be the one chasing all the time.” 

By now, though, she’d gotten used to it. Ms. Mekgoe had spent more than a year training with these men, who in 2022 claimed five of the top 10 spots at the Comrades. “There’s no other lady from our area who’s fast enough to run with Gala,” said her coach, Dave Adams, a retired mining engineer. She was in her mid-20s and already pulling down times that put her in a global elite among ultradistance runners. So yes, running with the guys was her best option. 

And anyway, they adored each other as much as they respected each other. “She’s our last-born sister,” said Tete Dijana, who had won the Comrades men’s race in 2022. It wasn’t just that they ran together. At night, Mr. Adams cooked them heaping plates of spaghetti bolognese and cottage pie, and they scrunched together on their guesthouse’s couches, laughing and joking about dyeing their hair a rainbow of colors before the big race.    

Most of them came from the same place, the rundown villages that cluster around South Africa’s magnificently wealthy platinum mines. They’d been raised by mothers who scraped a living as domestic workers and fathers who worked punishing hours in the mines before coming home to their tiny, crowded houses. They were hungry, in a way that was hard to explain to outsiders, for a life bigger than what had been scripted for them.

“Definitely, I am here to make history,” Ms. Mekgoe said. 

A hundred years ago, in May 1923, six dozen runners lined up on the same start line as Ms. Mekgoe and her teammates, in front of the same soaring red brick city hall in Pietermaritzburg. They were there to participate in a harebrained race between that city and coastal Durban, which had been started two years earlier by a World War I veteran wanting to honor his fallen comrades. 

The race was only open to white men. But that morning, to the great delight of the local press, a “plucky lady runner” sidled up to the start line, dressed in “a businesslike green gymnasium costume” and canvas sneakers.

The gun fired, and Frances Hayward took off with the rest of the pack. Eleven hours and 35 minutes later, the 31-year-old typist jogged across the finish line in Durban, more than 50 miles away. “They were very nice to me,” she said simply of her reception from the crowd, before heading out to an evening at the theater. 

But for decades, women and runners of color remained a race novelty – and for organizers, a frustrating one. “To my way of thinking, the Comrades Marathon is a serious athletic event, and when one has women and non-whites participating, it becomes a bit of a circus,” explained a ruffled race official in 1971. 

In 1975, the race organizers finally agreed to officially open it to women and runners of color, setting off an enormous boom in the race’s popularity. But 20 years later, when Ms. Mekgoe was born in a village near the city of Rustenberg, only one Black woman had ever cracked the race’s top 10. 

“The issue has always been resources,” says Olive Anthony, who in 1980 became the first woman of color ever to complete the race. “It’s really as simple as that.” 

Old injury

About an hour and a half after the start on race morning in 2023, the sun was still rising in pastel smudges of pink and blue when Ms. Mekgoe felt it, an old, familiar pain prickling in her leg. She tried to ignore it as the race wound past pungent chicken farms and tiny farming towns.

She thought of how the race had unfolded the year before. She had taken unpaid leave from her job as a firefighter in a nature reserve to join the training camp in Dullstroom. She hadn’t told her family, who depended on her salary, where she was until a few days before she was at the starting line of the race. When she felt tired on the course that day, “I thought of them because I am the breadwinner,” she says. “I was fighting for top 10 to pay back the risk I took.” 

In that race, she’d also started slow, steadily gaining positions as the hours dragged on. Along much of the course, a crowd pressed in on all sides, and she heard their shrieks of delight as she passed. “A Black lady!” they shouted in Zulu. “Go fight for us!”

Late in the race, she spied a willowy figure ahead of her. It was Camille Herron, an American ultrarunner with a long list of world records to her name, who is widely considered the best in the world. But out there on the Comrades course, she looked exhausted. Ms. Mekgoe kicked past her. “You never know who God has written in the big book to win the race that day,” she said of that moment. 

Later, she’d returned home from the race to a parade held in her honor, where she and her teammates stood on the back of a pickup truck as fans ululated and grabbed for their hands, screaming their names. 

Then, she had been a surprise, a prodigy. But this year, everyone was expecting something of her. There had been days at her training camp when she put away her phone so she wouldn’t see the messages from people back home. Now that she had made a name for herself, people imagined she had money to spare. It was too much sometimes. 

And now, 15 miles into today’s race, her leg was really starting to hurt. It was an old injury, flaring up on the biggest stage of her life.

Running with your soul 

Five hours and 14 minutes after the starting gun fired, Ms. Mekgoe’s teammate, Mr. Dijana, sprinted across the finish line at Kingsmead Cricket Stadium in Durban, a huge smile cracking across his face. He’d shattered the old race record by four minutes. 

Over the next 15 minutes, three more of her teammates – Mr. Mothibi, Johannes Makgetla, and Joseph Manyedi – crossed the line. As soon as Mr. Manyedi crossed in 10th place, they’d knotted themselves into a tight group hug. Mr. Dijana was crying. 

A few minutes later, the women’s winner, a South African named Gerda Steyn, crossed the line with blonde braids flying. She, too, had shattered the record. 

Still out on the course, Ms. Mekgoe was watching her own dream slip away.

Since the halfway mark, the pain had been shooting up her leg with every step, growing progressively worse. “[To end up] on the podium, it takes a lot, a lot of sacrifices,” she had stammered out in the elite athletes’ press conference two days earlier, as she sat sandwiched on the stage between eight white women. Now, those sacrifices seemed to have gotten her nowhere. She fantasized about quitting.  

In the same press conference, one of the elite male runners, Bongmusa Mthembu had described what it was like to be deep into the Comrades, at the moment when you become convinced you have nothing left. “At some point your body is finished,” he said. “You’re going to run with your mind, you’re going to run with your soul.”

Here, now, she was doing that. Every step hurt, but Ms. Mekgoe kept going. Even as she watched the 10th-place runner pull away from her, and with it her hopes of a cash prize. Even as she entered the stadium to muted cheers. 

The finish line was empty when she crossed. Her coach, Mr. Adams, had fallen sick and wasn’t at the race. The men were doing their doping testing. And her club manager had already packed up and headed off to celebrate the winners. She limped towards the finishers area, holding back tears. “My leg,” she whispered to a medic, slumping into a plastic chair. 

The next morning, she put on her club’s green tracksuit and headed to the prize-giving ceremony. She had still won a prize – for being part of the top-finishing women’s team. And when her training mates went on stage to collect their awards, she stood up and cheered louder than anyone. 

“It wasn’t this year,” she said. “But my time is still coming.”