Gerda Steyn (2nd from left), 'The Smiling Assassin’, captivates the public by openly sharing her training and race strategies, achieving remarkable feats like her recent Two Oceans Marathon victory with impressive split times and securing her seventh win in the iconic race. Picture: Mark Sampson
Image: Mark Sampson
One of the things that always stands out about Gerda Steyn is that she freely shares her training runs, race goals, and strategies with the public, and this makes her probably the most relatable elite runner that I’ve encountered.
Traditionally, elite runners don’t share this kind of information, especially about what kind of training sessions and mileage they do. That can be for a number of reasons, but the most likely is to guard their routines from their competitors.
Of course, Steyn is almost peerless when it comes to ultra-marathon running in South Africa - but even when she was just beginning to dominate back in 2018, she adopted the same approach.
There was never anything top-secret about her training approach, and she would always share with any journalists what kind of activities she would include in her fitness plans. Of course, it helps that Steyn can compete strongly in any road race in South Africa, from 10km to the marathon, and that's the key ingredient as to why in longer races like Two Oceans and Comrades, she completely dominates.
The latest are the stats Steyn shared after her Two Oceans Marathon victory on April 11, in that she shared her target splits and achieved times during the race.
These stats are quite staggering for the average runner. Like her 20km time, Steyn aimed to do it in one hour 11 minutes and 30 seconds (1:11:30), and she was just four seconds off that mark at 1:11:34.
To put that in perspective, 1:11 is around the average time for a 10k runner in a road race. If you manage that time in a field of 2000 runners, you will come almost exactly 1000th.
Steyn, though, does double the distance in that time.
All her split goals and times achieved are equally impressive, like her 5km goal time of 17:40, which she beat by three seconds.
As for her 10k goal time, that was set at 35:10. Though she wasn’t able to detail what her time at that marker was, it’s a good bet she was also ahead of her goal.
Steyn also blasted through the marathon mark (42.2km) in 2:34:33, which was 17 seconds ahead of her goal.
Ultimately, it was only in the final six km of her race that she began missing her marks, as the goal time of 3:26:50 was a bridge too far. That time would have beaten her own course record, Steyn set in 2024, but her finish time of 3:27:43 was still not far off, and more importantly, it secured her seventh victory in the iconic race.
Whichever way you look at it, times or achievements, Steyn is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of athlete.
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