Runners waiting for the start of the Comrades outside the Pietermaritzburg city hall on Sunday morning. The nearly 15,000 people who finished the race produced the equivalent of around 100 megawatt hours of power.Call it the Escomrades. The 14,895 runners who completed the 87.7km ultra-marathon from Pietermaritzburg to Durban on Sunday pushed out enough power to run the riverside city of Parys for more than half a day.
From winner Tete Dijana, who set a 5 hr 13 min 58 sec Down best time, all the way down to last-placed finisher Tebello Skasa in 11:58:59, the tar-pounders averaged about 7,000 watt hours each during the race, says Wits University physics professor Kevin Goldstein.— 5,400 homes for 12 hours, or;The Comrades runners in total produced the same output as the 420MWh-Kelvin power station in Gauteng does in 15 minutes, he added.
Eskom’s website says Parys, in the northern Free State, runs on 8MW an hour, meaning the entrants would keep the lights burning there for about 13 hours. There’s no way to harness the power of the runners out on the road, which is a perhaps not a bad thing considering what — or watt — might happen were Eskom to organise the Comrades or any other race, for that matter.