From obesity to Comrades: Meet inspirational runner Carli van Niekerk

Some say running the Comrades Marathon is the hardest thing you can do. Others will say it’s the training that’s the toughest part.

For some though, the biggest challenge is not on the day of the race or the weeks and months spent preparing for the big day, but rather taking the first steps out the door … the process of actually becoming a runner and committing to it.

Everyone who takes on the Comrades Marathon has a story to tell.

For some, that story is about giving up one’s lifestyle and making a 180 degree turn and starting a new one … taking the first small steps to something that is better than it was before.

For Carli van Niekerk, running the Comrades Marathon is proof anyone can conquer their demons and change their life.

‘I was there, but I wasn’t’

Having being diagnosed as being morbidly obese at the age of 34 and staring an uncertain, dangerous future in the face, the mother of two young boys decided enough was enough, it was time to live again.

“I had some hormonal issues when I was younger, I wasn’t very active and I lived on convenient foods … I was on a downward spiral,” says Van Niekerk about her life in her 20s, when she tipped the scales at 130kg.

“Then, one day in 2011, the turning point came. I was sitting on the patio at home watching my husband and two boys playing on the lawn … I was there, but I wasn’t. I was too big to join them. I was living life as a spectator.”

Van Niekerk says she decided there and then she needed an intervention. She wasn’t living her life as she wanted to, she was merely existing. And she decided to claim her life back.

Dieting hadn’t worked – “I was yo-yoing between all sorts of different plans” – so she decided on a procedure called gastric bypass surgery “to bury my Siamese twin”. That was in 2012.

“By 2013 I had lost half my body weight,” says Van Niekerk, who then weighed around 63kg.

Hit the road

Unfortunately, as is often the case, over time she started to regain the weight she’d “lost” because she relied too heavily on the surgery to keep her body weight in check. But she decided she was not going to be big again; she’d lived that life once before and didn’t like it.

“Then in July 2017 I did my first parkrun one Saturday morning,” says Van Niekerk, and that’s where her running story and new life really began.

She got herself some proper running shoes, joined a club and hit the road.

Not even a year later she ran her first half-marathon, in memory of her late brother who’d passed away in a motor vehicle accident.

A 42.2km marathon would follow in time, and while she was able to run a qualifying time for the 2020 Comrades, the race would be cancelled due to Covid. Not that she’d ever previously imagined herself running the Comrades marathon, a race between two cities of close to 90km.

But South Africa’s ‘Ultimate Human Race’, the Comrades, would eventually suck her in.

It took another three years for her to get to KZN for the 2023 Comrades down run, her first last year, after running a qualifying time at the Two Oceans ultra-marathon in Cape Town a few months earlier.

A second chance at life

“I decided to raise money for CHOC at Comrades, as I am doing this year as well, and was lucky enough to start in the batch reserved for runners raising money for charities and finished in 10 hours and 44 minutes,” says Van Niekerk, who represents Run Zone Athletics Club.

“It was the most empowering thing I’ve ever done, and I proved to myself that anything is possible. Running has literally changed my life,” she says, after also being able to maintain her ideal weight now for several years.

“I decided to support CHOC (a support group for children and teenagers diagnosed with cancer) because we all deserve a second chance at life. It’s a privilege and blessing to be fit and healthy and this is my way of giving back.”

Van Niekerk lives by the motto “Don’t downgrade your dream to match your reality, upgrade your faith to match your destiny” and says her message to everyone out there living an unhealthy life and struggling with their weight is “Claim back your life and time, because no one is going to give it to you. It’s up to you.”

Next Sunday, June 9, Van Niekerk will line up with over 20,000 other runners in Durban to take on the up run to Pietermaritzburg in this year’s Comrades marathon, as she seeks her back-to-back medal.

“It’s been a hard, tough build-up again, juggling work, home and training, but it’s all worth it. I’m alive and living my life.”