by Brett Larner My first awareness of South Africa's Comrades Marathon was Alberto Salazar 's seemingly random win when I was 20 and his subsequent crediting of the performance benefits he received from taking the drug Prozac, but it was at the Boston Marathon the next spring that it really caught my imagination. At the pre-race pasta party an older Irish runner sitting at the same table told my friend Bruce and I about Comrades, its epic scale, the intense drama of its finish line cutoff, the camaraderie of those trying to help each other to the line and the devastation of the unlucky stopped just a stride away. Ever since then I've wanted to run it. In 2010 JRN associate editor Mika Tokairin and I planned to do it, but with the change of course direction due to the World Cup we opted to wait for another uphill year. This year things finally aligned. Our experience was no different from any other blog account of Comrades you can find. And yet it w...