Did Harry Styles's relationship with Zoë Kravitz become a cover for his marathon training?

Harry Styles made headlines this weekend – and not just in the usual spaces, like pop culture websites. Sports and athletics outlets are reporting on Harry Styles, because he ran the Berlin marathon in under three hours: 2 hours, 59 minutes, 13 seconds exactly, an excellent time for a non-professional and almost 25 minutes faster than his time six months ago at the Tokyo marathon in March, which is a huge improvement.

Here’s Harry running in a bandana and shades…

…and after the race with Paralympic champion Richard Whitehead:

Harry entered the race under the name “Sted Sarandos”, a play on Ted Sarandos, the head of Netflix. Cue the conspiracy theories about whether or not he’s about to do a running documentary on Netflix, or an album documentary when it comes out next year.

But let’s focus on the achievement, because it’s impressive, not just the time but the timing. I am well-acquainted and also related to committed runners who are constantly training for marathons. And there’s a set training schedule to optimise performance. For Harry to have dropped that much time between Tokyo and Berlin, he had to have been on a program, a person doesn’t just get out of bed and run a marathon under three hours without dedicating a significant amount of time to it for months in advance.

Harry likely would have been building up to his longest training runs through the summer and then tapering three or four weeks ahead of race day. People who are training for a marathon should be running at least 3x a week and if he was working towards his longest pre-race distance, Harry would have had to be outside, in the summer, at least an hour or 90 minutes at a time, multiple times a week. Like, one of the most famous popstars in the world… for an extended period of time, regularly, and pretty much undisturbed because it’s not like we wouldn’t have seen it.

But even when he was tapering, gradually reducing distance leading up to the race to keep his body fresh and to be able to go hard on race day, he still had to be running, usually the same amount of runs, but just shorter distances. What makes this even more interesting is that his tapering probably would have started around the time of the release of Zoë Kravitz’s movie, Caught Stealing, when Harry became even more of a heatscore than usual because that’s when it was made public that he and Zoë are dating. He’s been papped a lot more than usual these past four weeks, in New York and Rome, but somehow not when he’s been running?!

Did his relationship with Zoë, hilariously, become a cover for his marathon training?! Am I the only one who finds this funny?

I can’t imagine that this will be Harry’s last marathon, especially not when he’s completed Tokyo and Berlin, two of the six cities that are part of what’s known as the Six Star Marathon aka the grand slam of marathons. Getting the Six Star means completing Tokyo, Berlin, London, New York, Boston, and Chicago. My cousin Cat is almost there, she just needs London to complete the six which she’s doing next year. For civilians this is tricky, not only because obviously marathon training is hard AF but also because it’s hard to get a spot since there are way more people who want to get in than there is space to accommodate in the lottery. Cat has had to wait three years to finally get into London. This probably will not be a problem for Harry Styles, LOL.

While we’re talking about running though, let me big up my friend Julie Hamulecki. Julie is an ultra runner which means she runs marathons like the one Harry Styles just ran (42km/26 miles) as training, LOL. And not infrequently.

Last November, Julie ran her first 100 mile race and broke the Canadian 100 mile record.

Julie is a f-cking legend! Here she is talking about her experience if you’re interested.

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