The Smiling Assassin told herself to run it as if she’d never get the chance again. Then she went out and broke the record. Gerda Steyn crossed the finish line at Hollywoodbets Scottsville Racecourse in Pietermaritzburg on Sunday morning in a time of 5:44:53, claiming her fifth Comrades Marathon title and smashing her own up-run record in the process.
It was the kind of performance that makes you reach for superlatives and find none quite big enough. Five wins. Five records. The Smiling Assassin is in a league entirely of her own.
In the days before race day, Steyn had spoken publicly about the mindset she had carried through every kilometre of her preparation for the 99th edition of the Ultimate Human Race. She told journalists she had trained for this up run as though it might be the last time she would ever get to do it.
Not as a premonition, not as doubt — but as fuel. A way of extracting every last fraction of effort from herself before she even reached the start line outside Durban City Hall.
“My mantra on Sunday is to run as if I’ll never get this chance again,” she said.
She ran exactly like that.
The 85.777km route from Durban to Pietermaritzburg is the shortest up-run course in the race’s recorded history, but no one told the Inchanga climb about that. Comrades is Comrades.
The hills don’t negotiate. The hours are long and unforgiving, and the question the race asks of every runner — however fast, however prepared — is always the same. How much do you want this?
Steyn’s answer, in 5:44:53, was unambiguous.
She broke her own 2024 up-run record of 5:49:46 by nearly five minutes, taking almost five seconds off one of the greatest women’s performances this race has ever seen. Second place, Zimbabwe’s Nobukhosi Tshuma, crossed in 5:53:36 — over nine minutes back.
In a field of over 20,000 runners, there was no contest for the women’s title. There never really is, when Gerda Steyn decides to run.
JAY | JPS SAYS: “Gerda Steyn has done something that no other South African woman in history has done. Five Comrades titles, both course records, seven Two Oceans wins. At 36, still breaking her own records. If this isn’t the greatest career in South African road running, I’d love to know whose is.”
The prize money speaks to the scale of the performance. She earned R925,000 for the win, a further R605,000 for the new up-run record, and an additional R550,000 for breaking her own fastest average pace benchmark from 2024.
Total payout: R2.08 million from a single race morning. Remarkable by any measure — and earned in full.
The five-win milestone places Steyn in company so rare it barely has a name. She is now only the second woman in the entire history of the Comrades Marathon to win the race five times.
The first was Elena Nurgalieva of Russia, who accumulated eight victories over a storied career. Until Nurgalieva and Bruce Fordyce reset expectations for what sustained dominance looks like at this race, five wins was considered the benchmark for genuine legend status.
Steyn has reached it at 36, with records in both directions, and no sign of slowing down.
The story of how she got here is worth telling properly.
Her Comrades debut as a winner came in 2019, when she became the first woman in history to complete the up run in under six hours. She crossed in 5:58:53, knocking more than ten minutes off Elena Nurgalieva’s 2006 record of 6:09:24 and winning by over 18 minutes — the largest winning margin in the women’s race since the event went international.
A nation watched. The president tweeted his congratulations. Gerda Steyn, a former quantity surveyor from Bothaville in the Free State, had arrived.
She stayed away from Comrades in 2022 to focus on shorter distances, but her return in 2023 was something else entirely. The down run that year produced one of the greatest women’s ultramarathon performances ever recorded anywhere.
Frith van der Merwe’s down-run record of 5:54:43 had stood since 1989 — 34 years of supremacy, an era unto itself. Steyn erased it with a 5:44:54, beating it by nine minutes and 49 seconds. The record holder herself said she was relieved it was Gerda who finally did it.
Then came 2024, where Steyn broke her own 2019 up-run record with a 5:49:46. Then 2025, a down-run win in 5:51:19. And now 2026 — another record, another title, another morning where the Smiling Assassin did exactly what the Smiling Assassin does.
The Comrades is not the only place she has been doing this. Her name appears all over South African road running’s record books. Seven wins at the Two Oceans Marathon — the 56km race in Cape Town she has made her own since 2018.
The South African marathon record of 2:24:03, set in Valencia in 2023. Double Olympic representation. A permanent Blue Number at Two Oceans for her loyalty and longevity in the race.
At every distance, on every surface, year after year: Gerda Steyn.
The thing about the “last race” mindset she described before Sunday is what it reveals about her psychology. She is not someone who coasts. She is not someone who banks on reputation or lets the weight of accumulated titles carry her to the line. At 36, five Comrades wins to her name, she still had to invent urgency to find another edge.
That is not the approach of an athlete running out of motivation. That is the approach of an athlete who genuinely loves this race, loves what it demands, and keeps coming back not because she has to — but because she cannot imagine not.
📸 Images via MSN / Ntokozo Cele / EWN
