With just a few days to go before their 2025 Marathon on Sunday, the Cheetahs Athletic Club has seen a surge in race entries, especially after the cancellation of the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon due to inclement weather.
Cheetahs Athletic Club’s secretary-general, Dr Ntsindiso Majali, said 90% of race entries had been sold out by Wednesday morning, and they expected the race to be sold out with entries from manual registration running until Saturday afternoon.
“We are happy as the club that runners are entering our race in big numbers. We are doing everything to ensure that they have fun on the day, ensuring that the route will be safe for them.
“We are working with traffic officers to ensure safety. We will use cones to demarcate a lane for runners,” he said.
Majali said they organised more water stations for athletes running the full marathon race, half marathon, 10km races and 5km fun run to keep them hydrated as they pursued their targets.
The marathon race, run on the R61, will start from Ntlaza, with the half marathon starting from Ngidini village.
The finish is at the Mthatha Stadium, passing through rural villages where runners will negotiate challenging hills.
During the 2024 edition of the race, runners complained about running further than 42.2km and 21.1km.
Majali said this time around they had drafted Norrie Williamson to measure both the marathon and half-marathon distances to ensure runners ran accurate distances, as some would use their time to qualify for both the Two Oceans and Comrades ultra-marathons.
“To correct this and to show that we don’t undermine runners, we contracted Norrie from the World Athletics technical team to remeasure the route.
“All the points we missed last year have been corrected. We paid a lot of money for this route measurement to show that we are not proud of the error we made last year,” he said.
Cheetahs AC started hosting the marathon race in 2022, with Xolisa Tyali winning the first event in 2:24:28 and Slindile Chili taking home the female category in 3:22:05.
In the 2022 race, Tukiso Motlomelo ran 1:01:16.046 to win the half-marathon race, with Lusanda Bomvana leading the female pack with her 1:22:43.387 finish.
It is not clear if 2024 Cheetahs Marathon champion, Teboho Noosi, who set a course record with his 2:23:18 finish, will defend his title on Sunday.
However, for the women’s race, the current champion Andisiwe Njunguza of Xcel Running Club, who won the female category with a 03:07:47 course record time, said she would not defend her title due to an injury.
Phantane Athletic Club’s Cwenga Nose, the 2024 half-marathon winner, said he would not be defending his title because he was preparing for the SA 10km championships taking place in Bloemfontein next weekend.
There will be a shakeout run on Saturday morning from the Mthatha Stadium starting at 6.30am for all runners. — WATCH: WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS NEWS AGENCY
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