Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon- GERT THYS IN STANDARD CHARTERED DUBAI MARATHON FRIDAY

Most marathon runners would kill for that pre-race requisite, the bowl of pasta. But for Gert Thys, even a few mouthfuls of the runners’ rocket-fuel would kill off any chance he had of finishing.

“If I eat pasta before a race, I might as well not go to the starting line,” says the 39 year old South African, who suffered 15 years of blowing up at the end of races before he discovered his high gluten intolerance.

“I’d be in the lead or the top two or three in races, and get to the last couple of kilometres, and my legs would go numb, I’d get dizzy, and almost black out. It would happen in training also. I’d have to sit down by the roadside until I recovered.

“I knew something was wrong with my diet. But I had tests, in the US, in England, in Australia, and at home in South Africa. I must have spent 30 to 40 thousand dollars trying to resolve it. They all said, you don’t get enough carbs (carbohydrates, ie pasta and the like).

“But that was the problem, unless I have low-carb rice and bread, my body can’t break it down. I eat mostly vegetables when I travel, but you have to eat so much to get the same energy.

“I believe if I’d detected it earlier, I could have done extraordinary things in athletics”.

His performances while suffering the problem – top six in the world half-marathon in 1997 and 1998, and first man the run three sub-2.08 marathons – and on the few occasions that the allergy took a time-out suggest that Thys’ evaluation is more than tenable. He won the Tokyo Marathon in 1999, in 2.06.33, which would have been a world record six months earlier, and is still a national record, and the course record.

“I could probably have broken the world record that day, but I was so worried that if I stretched too much in the final kilometres, the same thing would happen”.

As if Thys hadn’t had enough problems in his life. Born and raised in the Northern Cape province of apartheid South Africa, he concedes that he is far from being an intellectual. “I was not well educated, I left school early, because of the suffering at home. I couldn’t use my head to make a living. So, I decided I would have to use my legs”.

Accordingly, he went to work in the mines (albeit not underground), because they had athletics teams. The strict hours meant he was often training at 4.30am, and again in the evening, between overtime shifts to pay off the extra running shoe costs that would be deducted from salary.

It evidently did not dampen a spirit which had driven him to run his first marathon at the age of 13, as he says, before he knew any better. “It was the first marathon in Prieska, my home town, and I wanted to be part of it. I hadn’t trained, but as a schoolboy, I ran 800, 1500, 3000 metres. I ran 2.47 in the marathon”.

It was four years before he ran another one, this time in 2.19.04. To prove it wasn’t a fluke, he ran another one a month later, just one second slower. “Both at altitude,” he emphasises. Another two weeks later, he ran 43.33 for 15k, which remains a national junior record.

Then began the compendium of see-saw results, due to whether the gluten allergy struck or not. But even when that was resolved in 2001, he only had a few years’ grace before had an even worse problem.

He won the Dong-A marathon in Seoul 2006, and was told a few weeks later that he had tested positive for nandrolone. He vehemently contested the result, and in a protracted case, that has still to be fully resolved, he was exonerated by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), which was then over-ruled by the Swiss High Court. But since it had dragged on for well over two years – more than the usual suspension period – he was given clearance to compete.

His resilience was evident in his first big race back, a rain-swept Beijing Marathon last October, when he led until the final stages of the race, only to be overtaken by Siraj Gena, an Ethiopian some 13 years younger.

Now Thys tackles the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon, Friday morning, against a score of fast, and young East Africans, Kenyans and Ethiopians. On paper, he remains one of the fastest men in the field, but as he himself points out, that was 12 years ago. Nonetheless undaunted, he says, “My training times are the same as back when I was running really fast.

So, we’ll see”.

Pat Butcher
www.globerunner.org