8 minute read
Why we run: Bruce Fordyce
Heather Dugmore tracks down the personalities behind Wits’ distinguished legacy of distance running as the Varsity Kudus Running Club turns 45 this year.
April is the cruellest month. So begins TS Eliot’s epic poem The Waste Land. And so begins the hardest month of training for the Comrades Marathon.
“The late Barry Ronge (BA 1968, BA Hons 1969) taught me English literature at Wits and I’ll never forget this line,” says Bruce Fordyce (BA 1977, BA Hons 1978, LLD honoris causa 2007), who mastered the world’s most famous ultramarathon, winning the Comrades nine times between 1981 and 1990. No other runner in the history of the 90km race has achieved this feat, earning Fordyce the title “King of Comrades”.
“If you train your hardest in April you will have a good Comrades; it’s a critical month. In the second half of May you start to throttle back ahead of the race,” says Fordyce, who held the down-run record for 21 years from 1986 to 2007 with a time of 5hr 24min 07sec. His best up-run time was 5hr 27min 42sec set in 1988, which stood as the record for 10 years.
Fordyce was a student at Wits during the 1970s legacy decade of marathon and ultramarathon running at the University. At that time, the Marathon Club was phenomenally strong, with three Wits runners in the top seven places at Comrades in 1971.
Five years later Fordyce’s historic running career started with a 10-minute jog around the Wits rugby field, part of which he walked “as I was so unfit”. After watching a post-Comrades insert on South African TV for the first time in 1976, he plucked up the courage to join the Wits Cross Country and Marathon Club. There he was encouraged by Wits’ crop of long-distance legends, including Dr David Levick (MBBCh 1975, DipPaed 1979), Trevor Parry (BSc Eng 1975), Sonja Laxton (BSc 1970, MSc 1973), Brian Chamberlain, David Hodgskiss (BCom 1971) and many others.
“Running was calling me,” says Fordyce. Running was calling many Witsies at the time. Once they got hooked on long distance running they never stopped. It’s highly addictive. The feeling of being super-fit and able to run far and conquer hills with ease brings with it an inimitable physical and psychological high, known as the runner’s high. It comes with consequences, as do all addictions. While some runners have been fortunate to escape injuries, others have knee or other road-wear issues from many thousands of kilometres – but still they run, far and often.
Like addicts
“Like addicts desperate for an illicit drug, I suspect many of us would run even if it were proved that it was a most unhealthy pursuit,” Fordyce explains. “We are addicted. We crave our regular dose of heroin-like endorphins. I can miss a day’s running, perhaps even a couple. But by the third day, I simply have to run. I hobble a bit now but I would go demented if I couldn’t run.
“I believe we runners just love to move, to experience running as our hunter-gatherer ancestors did. They were the most magnificent runners and they handed this gift of running down to us. Moving sometimes very quickly, sometimes slowly, gazing at sunsets and sunrises, running in rainstorms and with snow underfoot. There is also something special about embracing and mastering pain, making it a friend.
“Whenever I am slightly sad or depressed I run and, after a run, nothing seems to really matter that much. Running early in the morning in Parktown, Johannesburg (my favourite city), listening to the olive thrush greet the dawn and the fiery-necked nightjar calling from the Parktown Ridge with its mystical cry, ‘Good Lord deliver us, Good Lord deliver us’. ”
The blue and gold
Fordyce ran the Comrades in Wits colours for seven years and won it in 1981, 1982, 1983 and 1984 in Wits colours. He says he loved his time at the University and its marathon club: “There’s nothing better than competing in the gold and blue of Wits.” Eight of his nine Comrades wins (out of 30 races) were in consecutive years.
He says the most difficult time for him as an athlete was the 1981 race, at 25 and wearing a black armband to protest against the 20th anniversary celebrations of the apartheid republic.
“I was a target of a lot of abuse, and I had eggs and tomatoes thrown at me. I was a very unpopular winner that year,” he recalls. But he turned the crowd with his successive Comrades wins to become the darling of the nation.
In the 1982 down run, Fordyce and Alan Robb’s legendary 20km neck-and-neck duel marked the changing of the guard. Fordyce pulled ahead and took first place, eight minutes ahead of Robb. From then on Fordyce continued winning.
He had huge respect for his rival and shares an anecdote about how self-effacing Robb is.
“I was on a plane with Alan and a guy sitting next to him who had just run his first Comrades asked Alan if he ran. Alan replied ‘yes’. Then the guy asked if he had ever run Comrades and Alan said ‘yes’. The guy asked him what his Comrades time was, and Alan said 5:29. The guy looked shocked and replied, ‘With that time you could have won it!’. Alan softly said, ‘I did’.” Fordyce also won the London to Brighton in 1981, 1982 and 1983. He has run over 300 marathons all over the world.
Mental strength
Renowned for his mental strength, Fordyce says: “I think the fact that I was sent to boarding school at a young age played a large part in my mental strength. I learnt endurance there. The school was very old and had those old lead-lined window panes, and each one in my dormitory represented a week for me. I would tick off one week at a time in my head before I could go home so I learnt how to hang in when things were tough.”
In the context of running Comrades, he says: “Until half way you have a big group of runners around you, but I always ran a faster second half. On the up run, by the time I got to Polly Shortts I’d be on my own and go up as strongly as I could. Polly Shortts was my friend; there is something wonderful about reaching the top of the hill in the lead and the next guy hasn’t started it.
“You think very intensely when you run – it feels like writing a helluva hard exam at university. You are continuously focusing on your tactics and thinking about how you’re feeling, why you are breathing so hard, whether you are feeling any cramps coming on, and when to adjust your running pace and style.”
Winning not the biggest thing
“The winning was wonderful,” says Fordyce, “and I treasure every memory I had of carrying the mayor’s baton across the finish line at the end of the Comrades Marathon. I would gladly sell my soul for one more opportunity to lead the Comrades field across the finish line.
“However, as special as the victories were, the winning has not been the biggest thing. The biggest is the gift that running has given to my life, the travelling and making great, great friends,” he says. “It is also the ultimate leveller – you can be winning one week and get thrashed the next.”
There was very little prize money then; nothing like now, but Fordyce is philosophical about it: “Of course it would have been good but that was how things were then, and no amount of prize money can remotely match receiving an award from Nelson Mandela, whose words still make me chuckle, ‘Ah, here comes Bruce, the man with more Comrades than my ANC’.”
Today, Fordyce is the CEO of Parkrun South Africa, which he started in November 2011 at Delta Park, Johannesburg. Parkrun is a five-kilometre free timed run or walk taking place every Saturday. It was first started in England in 2004. There is a parkrun at Wits, which began in 2018.
Two years ago, Fordyce started Fordycefusion to assist runners at every level with their training. He has authored two ebooks – Fordyce Diaries: The 1986 Comrades Marathon, Tackling a Down Run and Fordyce Diaries: The 1988 Comrades Marathon, Conquering the Up – and a guide to running your first Comrades, Winged Messenger (Kwartz, 2021). He is busy writing his third, which he aims to publish this year.*
