BRUCE FORDYCE - The true meaning of the Comrades

My friend Thami Ngubane died last week. I miss him already. He was in his early 40s and should have been here with us all this weekend, sharing the hustle and bustle and excitement that is the Comrades Marathon.

He should have been lining up for his 24th Comrades medal on Sunday, listening to Max Trimborn's famous cockerel crow and nervously taking his first running steps, instead of being dead and buried in the hard, cold winter earth of Vosloorus.

Thami loved the traditions of the race and was pretty adept at copying Trimborn's strangled call that has started every Comrades since the 1930s.

He was particularly proud of the green-number tradition where runners who have completed 10 Comrades have their numbers awarded in perpetuity and are proud owners of a Comrades green number.

Thami was not only the proud owner of green number 11Â 777, he was a double green, a runner who has run at least 20 Comrades. His collection of 23 medals included 18 silver medals awarded to the elite, to those who run the race in less than seven-and-a-half hours.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Thami's double green number is that he must have been one of the first black runners to have achieved the honour. Not many modern Comrades runners know that black runners have been allowed to run the race officially only since 1975. Women too.

Thami would have insisted on being co-driver or at least conductor of our bus. A bus, in running parlance, is a group of like-minded runners aiming for the same finishing time, who run together to share drinks, information and encouragement.

He understood that one of the duties of a highly experienced double-green number is to be a bus driver and escort first-time runners or novices through to their first medals. How he would have enjoyed the irrepressible Stacey Barbaglia, so nervous, excited and courageous, who decided at a party in Plett in late December that she was going to run.

"You just don't understand, doll," she said to me, "for New Year some people give up smoking, some people give up their husbands. Me, I'm running Comrades!"

And she is - and she will be trying to beat that final dreadful cut-off gun, when a race official turns his back on the struggling back markers and fires his revolver into the night air, cutting off even those runners who are a mere stride away from the finish line.

Of all the Comrades traditions, this is the one that visiting overseas runners find the hardest to comprehend. In the New York, London, Paris and Berlin marathons there are no vicious cut-offs. If you, and your mate, decide to dress as a pantomime horse to raise money for charity and you take a week to finish, someone will be there to greet you and hand you your medal. Not so the Comrades Marathon.

Thami would have delighted in keeping Stacey moving forwards to the finish in Durban over some of the most famous hills in road running: Inchanga, Cowie's, 45th Cutting.

He would have enjoyed driving novice Frank Schwegler to a Bill Rowan medal. After all, Thami won three Bill Rowan medals for breaking nine hours. The medal is named after the first winner of the Comrades. Rowan ran exactly nine hours in 1921 and runners like Schwegler love to take pride in saying: "At least I would have won the first Comrades Marathon."

Thami always shed a tear or two when he ran the last kilometres of a Comrades, so he would have consoled and congratulated novice Rob Taylor who, at the end of this year's Two Oceans, burst into tears while clutching his medal.

The words he spoke then concerned his Two Oceans medal, but Thami would have agreed they apply equally to the Comrades. "You can't buy one of these medals, china," Rob said. "You have to earn it."

If he could talk to us I know that Thami would agree with our friends John Cameron-Dow and Gary Harlow who, because of frustrating injuries, cannot run this year.

"Bruce, on Sunday night you will be sunburned from your head to your toes, every crease and crevice in your body will be chafing, your legs will be cramping, your body will be aching and your toenails will be falling off, and we will be sick with envy," they said. There is no creature sadder or more envious than a Comrades runner who cannot run.

At the side of the Comrades road, just after the village of Drummond that marks halfway, there is an embankment that is covered in hundreds of yellow and green plaques. The embankment looks out across the Valley of a Thousand Hills, where hundreds of small homesteads cling to the mountains and the Umgeni River snakes its way to the sea.

It is a view that all Comrades runners enjoy. It seems a fitting place to build a wall of honour and to cover it with plaques in memory of past and present runners. These plaques stretch along the embankment for a couple of hundred metres now -- and each year the wall gets a little longer.

The plaques are placed there by runners who have completed the Comrades or by family members of runners who forgot to buy a plaque or died before they could. Sadly some of the plaques prop up posies of flowers, or have the words "in memory of" or "Joe so loved this race".

As you read this the names Stacey Barbaglia, Rob Taylor and Frank Schwegler are not yet on the wall of honour. But, on Monday June 18, they will be.

I know that Thami Ngubane never found the time or money to buy his plaque so, this weekend, I will buy a plaque for him so that double green number 11Â 777 can have its rightful place looking at the view over the Valley of a Thousand Hills.