It’s a Long Race, and to Run It Is to Win

When you consider that her family didn’t have a television until she was 12, you realize that Lindsey Fernandez’s earliest memories of the annual epic race that riveted her South African countrymen were not visual. Instead, they sprang from radio or news reports and conversations passed down through the generations.

Fernandez is now a grown-up woman of 40, a businesswoman living in Tustin with her husband and far from her native land.

But this June, she’ll fly to South Africa and finally stitch her name into the permanent fabric of her homeland. She expects to run in her first Comrades Marathon, a 54-mile race that is as much South Africa as the Super Bowl is America. Created to honor its fallen soldiers in World War I, the marathon celebrates its 80th running this year.

“The entire country gets up on the day of Comrades and starts watching it on TV,” Fernandez says. “You watch these people struggling for hours and hours on end -- if I talk about it, I get goose flesh -- and one of the most supportive areas is outside a school for blind and handicapped kids. They’re standing on the side of the road and they’re supporting you.”

I’d planned to spend my time with Fernandez asking why anyone would want to run for 54 miles, but when you think about it, that’s just a matter of running two normal marathons and then tacking on another mile or so. No big deal.

And the more we talked, the more it seemed that the 54-mile distance is a mere detail. This is Fernandez’s long-awaited chance to be one of the people cheered on by countrymen, one of the people to feel the true meaning of comradeship in a country that trekked from segregation to inclusiveness in the last generation.

“I’m a U.S. citizen now, but I just think there’s something that will be very rich over there,” Fernandez says. “For the majority of the people, it’s not a competition. It’s the experience.”

The race will be run June 16, known as Youth Day, but also the anniversary of the day in 1976 when blacks in Soweto rioted and signaled the beginning of the end of the apartheid society. For decades, of course, the race was for whites only.

And for Fernandez, running the Comrades means she’ll be in the same pack with the legendary Bruce Fordyce, the Lance Armstrong of South Africa, who won the marathon eight straight years in the 1980s and again in 1990. Fordyce won his first Comrades race wearing a black armband in protest of apartheid policies.

Before South Africa beckons, however, Fernandez has to tend to business this Sunday. To qualify for the Comrades, she needs to finish the L.A. Marathon in under five hours, which she says shouldn’t be a problem if she doesn’t get injured.

A professional fitness trainer, Fernandez is “pretty sure” she can finish the Comrades, which offers the twist that, at exactly the 12-hour mark, the race ends. If you’re 50 yards from the finish line and just got your second wind, tough luck.

Fernandez hopes to finish in something over 10 hours. She has run only two previous marathons but plans on running four more between now and June.

Subjecting yourself to that sounds insane to me. Fernandez laughs. She’s heard it before and even said it herself last year while climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.

But the Comrades isn’t about proving a point. It’s about a trip home she’ll never forget.

“When I first climbed Kilimanjaro,” she says, “I would have said it’s a notch. But when you get to the top and you’re crying and there’s just this incredible beauty that surrounds you -- it’s just an incredible view -- you realize it’s not a notch anymore and it’s all about the experience.

“So if you’d asked me a year ago what the Comrades was about, I’d have said, ‘It’d be such a great thing to say I’ve done it.’ Now, it’s not about saying I’ve done it. It’s the experience to live it. I want to live it. I don’t want to watch it on TV anymore.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.