Eight weeks out from Comrades Marathon on 14 June, Gerda Steyn is the best-prepared she has ever been for the Up Run — and the race organisers have quietly arranged the richest single-race payday in South African road-running history to fall on her shoulders if she can match that preparation with a result on the day. Steyn, 34, holds the women's Up Run course record of 5:49:46, set on the 2024 edition; the Comrades Marathon Association has attached a R605,000 bonus to any course-record-breaking performance this year, on top of the R925,000 on offer to the overall race winner. A repeat of her 2024 mark combined with a clear win on the route between Durban and Pietermaritzburg would deliver a total purse of more than R1.5 million — roughly £65,000 at current rates and far and away the biggest winner's cheque Comrades has ever written.
Steyn has already laid down her form. At Two Oceans Marathon in Cape Town on 4 April, she claimed a seventh consecutive title in 3:29:10, more than ten minutes clear of Dutch runner Stephanie van Rossum, and she has since spent three weeks at altitude in Dullstroom putting in the first of two Comrades-specific blocks with coach Jean Verster. Verster told South African Runner's World last week that the plan is not to try to break Frith van der Merwe's iconic 5:54:43 from 1989 on the Up Run — that mark fell to Steyn in 2024 — but to push nearer 5:45 on a course that has been slightly re-routed this year to add a one-kilometre detour around a construction site in Durban North, a tweak the Association says adds roughly ninety seconds to the likely winning time.
The rest of the women's field is, as ever at Comrades, a mix of genuine contenders and unknown quantities. Alexandra Morozova, the 2019 champion who only recently returned to training after the maternity break that interrupted her 2025 build-up, is listed on the provisional elite start list, as is Great Britain's Charlie Harpur, running her Comrades debut after a second-place finish at the Centurion Thames Path 100 this month. South Africa's Carla Molinaro, the fastest female land's-end-to-John-o'-Groats runner in history, is also entered; she finished seventh in 2024 and has moved coaches over the winter. If any of them manage to stay with Steyn past the midpoint climb at Botha's Hill, the race becomes interesting; if nobody does, the day becomes a solo time trial with a pace car.
The men's race is shaping up to be a more open contest. Defending champion Piet Wiersma has announced he will not start, citing a sacroiliac injury picked up at the Hamburg Marathon in March, and Tete Dijana, the 2023 winner, is listed as an entrant but has not raced since February. That leaves the two-time champion Edward Mothibi and the 2025 runner-up Onalenna Khonkhobe as the men's pre-race favourites on an Up Run route that no man has yet broken 5:20 on. The men's up-run record of 5:24:49, set by Leonid Shvetsov in 2008, has stood for nearly two decades; only Dijana in 2023 has come within three minutes of it in the modern era.
Organisers say the 2026 edition is the most lucrative Comrades in the race's 101-year history, with a total prize pool of R18.6 million across all categories and record-breaking bonuses on both the Up and Down Runs for the first time. Entries closed in November at a record 26,800, and the field is expected to include 10,400 international runners — the highest overseas participation since 2019. The race starts in Durban at 05:30 local time on Sunday 14 June; SuperSport and YouTube will carry full live coverage for the entire 12-hour cut-off window. For Steyn, the morning shapes up as a straightforward three-way equation: run fast enough, and the numbers that follow her back down from Pietermaritzburg will be genuinely historic.