Mthatha athlete part of Comrades elite field
When thousands of runners line up for the Comrades Marathon in front of the Pietermaritzburg City Hall on Sunday morning, one of the elite runners at the front of the queue will be Eastern Cape-born athlete Musa Zweni.
Zweni, 34, runs for Pan African Resources Club and is coached by John Hamlet, who has coached several of the illustrious championship-winning ultra marathon runners.
He has been in the Comrades Marathon training camp in Dullstroom, Mpumalanga, preparing for 2025's race.
Zweni said he joined the camp in 2025, and the plan for the upcoming race was about adjusting to the training approach of his new club.
'We have got a three-year plan that we are working on with my coach,' Zweni said.
'We will just tick off this year and see other years.
'But in my head, there is something else. But the coach said before I could get there, we need to get some things right,' Zweni said, adding he did not run the Two Oceans Marathon to prepare for the Comrades.
Born in Tabase, Mthatha, Zweni's best Comrades time, which he ran in 2023 in the colours of Boxer Superstores Athletic Club, was 5 hrs 58 min 47 sec, which earned him the Wally Hayward medal.
An injury cost him running his first comrades in 2018, but his time in the race has improved tremendously from his 2019 debut where he finished in position 2,831 in 08:56:57, earning himself a Bill Rowan medal, followed by a much-improved performance finishing in 73rd spot, earning his first silver medal in 2022 after running his race in 06:30:58.
Zweni's first dream was to play professional football, but that was ended after he tore his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) at a tournament in 2012 in Soweto, where he was preparing for trials with a PSL club.
That forced surgery, with doctors saying he would never be able to run again.
His running career started in 2017 in Cape Town and he has since attracted sponsorships from top global sport brands such as Puma, Maurten Gel and Future Life.
'After that injury, I started experiencing life in the sense that I started drinking, at that time I did not even have a girlfriend because my life was about football and nothing else.
'I started experimenting with a lot of things because I felt like I had given up so much for that moment. Everything happened so fast,' he said.
Several injuries linked to his ACL injury forced Zweni to hang up his football boots at the age of 26.
While the transition to elite running was not smooth sailing, Zweni's competitive streak kicked in when his friend, Siyabonga Madala, introduced him to running.
He finished his first 10km run in 47 minutes, ran his first half marathon in 1:36:00, and his first Sanlam Cape Town Marathon in 4:00:00 from the F seeding. — WATCH: We are the Champions
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