World champion pulls out of Comrades

Cape Town - Camille Herron, the world champion over both 50km and 100km, has had to withdraw for the Comrades on Sunday, May 29 due to a torn hamstring.

The American, who was going to compete in the colours of the Nedbank Green Dream Team, has good reason to be disappointed.

In 2014 Herron fell ill the day before Comrades. Despite her illness she still tried to compete, but after 83km her body decided that enough was enough and she had to drop out.

According to Herron her training had been going really well up to a few weeks ago.

“My fitness was great and I was feeling really strong, but then I developed a pain in my hip. It wasn’t too bad, so I continued to run.  However, I had an MRI a couple of days ago and it turned out that I have a partially torn hamstring. I had hoped that it would resolve in time for me to race, but I have been advised to take things easy and let it heal thoroughly before racing again.

“As you may imagine, this is terribly disappointing to me. I was very excited about running for the Nedbank Green Dream Team as I consider Comrades to be the largest and most prestigious ultra-race in the world. I also had unfinished business as far as the Comrades is concerned. I can only hope that I will be able to race next year,” said Herron who works as a research assistant in osteoimmunology at the University of Oklahoma when not running.

Last year was the American’s breakout year. In December she won the IAU World 50km Championships in Doha, Qatar by an impressive margin of more than seven minutes.

In September, she won the IAU World 100km Championship title in Winschoten, Holland with a scorching time of 7:08:35, the fourth fastest women’s 100km time in history.  

She also led a powerful American women’s team to the team Championship and clocked a 50-mile split of 5:38, two minutes faster than the current world and American record for 50 miles.