AT H L E T I CS True endurance test

We can be forgiven for not quite being able to place those vaguely familiar names, Willie Mtolo, Mark Plaatjes, David Tsebe and Josia Thugwane.

All four were part of a golden generation of internationally competitive SA marathon runners from the 1990s, a generation that is all but extinct, years of plenty having given way to famine. Famines are almost always socially engineered, and the marathon has been as badly hit as athletics as a whole in recent years, the institutional pillars of support (such as programmes on the mines) having collapsed and the culture having shrunk to a shadow of its former self.

Elana Meyer, being a former marathoner herself (she won silver in the event at Barcelona in the 1992 Olympics), knows all about the sacrifices required to make topclass marathoners. When she was at the London Olympics in 2012 she noticed the dearth of South Africans on the track and so the idea of starting an athletics academy specialising in endurance sports was born.

She and her partner, Janet Welham, call theirs Endurocad, and their modest hope is for it to become a nursery for the talent they know is there but all too often slips by the wayside.

Launched in June 2013, the academy is less a physical structure than it is means of creating an artificial home for aspiring athletes. Actively using social media, at the most basic level Endurocad encourages people to run in parks and in short distance events and to enjoy themselves and possibly