Trail-Running and gruelling endurance races over rough terrain is a challenge that is not within the physical and mental capabilities of any good athlete.

To complete races such as the Comrades marathon or even the extremely challenging Ironman triathlon is already beyond the ability of most average dedicated road athletes. If you take these kinds of ultra-races a few steps higher, you will find the elite group of athletes for whom the most extreme challenges to the capabilities of the human body and mind offer a charm.

Two of these exceptional athletes from Pretoria showed last week that they not only stand out in South Africa as some of the toughest of the tough, but that they also belong to an exclusive group worldwide who have the ability to physically and mentally reach unprecedented extremes.

– The businessman Bennie Roux is already well known to Rekord’s readers. He is the athlete who, after completing eleven Comrades and five Two Oceans ultra-marathons, started looking for new challenges and thus became a Trail Runner.

Since then he has already completed all of South Africa’s most important ultra off-road races. There was the Sky-Run in Lady Gray in the Eastern Cape which stretches over 100km at the foot of the Wittenberg Mountain along the Lesotho border. Then he took on the Otter African Trail Run over the distance of a standard marathon (42km) in the Tsitsikamma National Park in the Southern Cape. In the Eastern Cape he completed the Addo Elephant field race over 100 miles and in the Western Cape the Ultra Trail Cape Town’s route consists of a distance of over 100km was next.

In addition, he has also completed the killer Kalahari Augrabies ultra-road race over 250km and in the South of Namibia he has achieved podium places twice in the Fish River Canyon ultra-road race.

Roux is deservedly regarded as the king of probably South Africa’s most challenging endurance race, The Munga field race in Mpumalanga. He won this challenging race over a distance of 400km three years in a row from 2017 to 2019.

In 2019, Roux competed in the Moab 240-mile off-road race in the US state of Utah, where he finished third out of 122 participants. This off-road race is completed over a period of five days mainly over mountainous and desert-like terrain along the Colorado River and through the Abajo Mountains.

– Nicky Booyens is also an athlete who thrives when she is challenged to extremes.

After this data analyst from Pretoria excelled mainly as a track and field athlete, hockey player and rower in her younger days, she later began to concentrate on cycling and road races. As a cyclist she has completed the “other” Munga – the mountain bike race that stretches over 1000km through the Karoo into the Western Cape – several times.

In addition, she has also completed the Comrades marathon three times and the Two Oceans twice, while she conquered the South African Ironman triathlon in 2007.

However, when Booyens discovered Trail Running in 2015, the bug bit immediately.

Since then she has also completed the Munga Trail race in Mpumalanga three times, while field races such as the Mac-Mac Ultra 100 miler and the Addo Elephant field race are also boxes she could tick off.

In 2015, Booyens also completed the famous Festival des Templiers, the French’s oldest and most prestigious trail race.

– After Roux and Booyens’ achievements in the local Munga race, they were in 2019 invited to take part in the world famous self-navigating, self-supporting Ultra Gobi 400 race in the Chinese desert on this country’s northern border with Mongolia.

At the time, the two Pretorians were very excited about the challenge and their preparation was already well advanced when they were informed out of the blue that the Chinese borders were closed and that no athletes from overseas would be allowed to participate in the event that year. To this day, no proper explanation has been given for this drastic step, although it is known that the Covid-19 crisis arose in China a few months later.

Roux made the news again in April 2020 during Covid when some of his friends and family challenged him to try to run the distance of the Comrades marathon (90km) within one day in his yard at home in Centurion. He measured a route of about 200m from the long driveway to his house (he lives on a panhandle property) and across his yard and then managed to complete 90km on it in 12 hours.

However, after Covid, his family and his business interests kept him very busy and Roux admitted to Rekord that he neglected his exercise program to a large extent. However, this year he decided to take the bull by the horns again and he started training to qualify for the Comrades marathon, which he did. He then completed his first Comrades since 2017.

To their great joy, Roux and Booyens, mainly due to their past achievements in the local Munga Trail Race, received invitations to take part in the 2024 Ultra Gobi 400 race again this year. They seized this opportunity with both hands and began intensive preparation months ago.

The duo left for China early in October and on October 5 the race began with 54 athletes from all over the world initially lining up at the starting point.

One of the unique aspects of the Gobi 400 race is that, for large parts of the 400km that athletes have to cover, there is no prescribed route between the checkpoints in the inhospitable desert area where the race takes place. This means that some athletes literally get lost and others are lucky to find easier routes. One of the route options this year also became unexpectedly inaccessible due to the presence of desert foxes and many athletes – Roux included – were affected as a result.

Although the two South Africans had their share of adversity on the road, especially the fox episode, they persevered and did particularly well during the last two days of the race.

With American Bryon Powell declared the overall winner, Roux ended up taking a brilliant fifth place in a time of just over 80 hours. (80:06:28). He ended up missing out on a place on the podium by just four hours and 36 minutes – the time he finished behind the bronze medallist, Bing Gu of China.

Booyens was one of the stars of the race. She ended up finishing second among the female participants and achieved an overall seventh place with a time of 86:52:11.

She was the leader among the women for a large part of the race, but was eventually overtaken shortly before the end at the eighth rest station by the eventual winner, Zheng Junyue from China.

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