SLC at SA Trail Champs
The Salomon Molweni Trail Run was held on May 2-3 in the Kloof Nature Reserve just outside of Durban.
This race was also the SA Trail Championships for the marathon distance and the top two finishers in each category were selected to represent South Africa in France later this year.
The race started at 08:00 on Saturday morning with the 7km prologue to determine the starting batches for the main event which was 33km of proper trail running.
This prologue was no joke and had a lot of participants worried about the next day. At 17:00 was the race briefing for the main event and then bed time to get a good night’s rest.
At 06:30 the next morning the first batch set off with 5 minute intervals between the batches.
The top 20 men and top 10 ladies set out first, with the following batches being organized from the fastest to the slowest times from the prologue, in order to prevent congestion on the trail.
Tiaan Fullard, a staff member at Stanford Lake College, went off in the third batch, chasing the top 10 ladies and what a chase it was!
The race had 143 participants, 95 male and 48 female.
Tiaan managed to finish 23rd overall and 16th in his category, completing the route in a time of 03:57:56. The overall winner was Johardt van Heerden who smashed the route, managing a time of 03:01:22 – what a machine!
The awesome trails, beautiful scenery, friendly staff and the brilliant safety team made this an amazing race and definitely made all three of the gruelling and insane up-hills (literally climbing at some stages), worth it!
Definitely recommended for any trail enthusiast.
