The Run

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Rhodes Run is a race against the mountain, the weather, and yourself.

What it is

The Rhodes Run is a 52 kilometre mountain trail run held every year in the winter school holidays, starting and finishing in the village of Rhodes in the Eastern Cape Highlands. The route climbs from 1 800 metres to 2 680 metres, spends most of its length above 2 500 metres, and puts roughly 1 600 metres of cumulative climb into your legs. Runners have nine hours to finish.

Not for the faint hearted

This is not a race you enter on a whim. The ground is broken, slippery and at times genuinely dangerous.

There are hard cut offs on the route and they are enforced. If you do not hand in your tags at a check point we will assume you are lost and send a search and rescue team after you, and if you were in fact safely back in the village you will be billed for it.

 

We say all of this up front because the mountain does not negotiate. Come fit, come prepared, and come with the right gear.

Preparation and gear

No prize money. There never has been.

Why people come

There is no prize money. There never has been. Other than a few floating trophies, every runner is treated exactly the same and receives exactly the same pre and post race hand outs, which in themselves are usually rather special.

What people come for is harder to put in a brochure. The bells at dawn. The silence on the Border Road. The bottle of Old Brown someone hands you at the finish before you have caught your breath. The winners standing at the line in the last hour, handing medals to the runners still coming in. The village of Rhodes filling up with people who drove seven hours on gravel to be there. Most of them come back. That is the whole answer, really.

Bring the family

Rhodes is remote and it is meant to be. The last legs in are gravel and they cannot be rushed. There is no fuel station in the village, so you fill up in Barkly East, Khowa, Maclear or Mount Fletcher before you turn off. Most runners bring their families, arrive early and stay the week, because it is winter school holidays and because there is more here than a race.
Rhodes Village
Accommodation

The landowners

The route crosses private farmland. Every year the landowners of this valley open their land so that a few hundred strangers can run across it in the cold. The route we run is the route they agree to, and it can change at short notice for stock, for weather or for ground conditions. We are grateful to them, and we ask every runner to treat their land accordingly.

Working towards the Snowflake

Finish three Rhodes Runs and you are awarded a permanent number and a blue Snowflake. Twenty finishes turns it mauve. Thirty turns it gold. The number confers no privileges whatsoever. It simply records you in the annals of the race, which for most people turns out to be enough.
Permanent numbers and run colours
The Rhodes Run Snowflake badge
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