Ashley “Blokkie” Smith, 26, hit the road to write his name i

• Published date: 23 September 2022
• Publication title: Southern Suburbs Tatler

The star middle distance runner was first to cross the finish line in Sunday’s 21km Gun Run in Green Point, becoming the first Cape Town-born runner since Owen Machelm in 1998, to win the race

“I’m grateful to bring it back home after almost 25 years,” said Smith who has been in excellent form over the past 12 months, winning his second SA title this year and finishing a mile in under four minutes to capture another “dream mile”.

A 3 000m steeplechase specialist, Smith joined an exclusive band of runners at Coetzenburg Stadium, in 2021, clocking a sub-4 in the mile to join the Dream Mile Club. His finishing time of 3min.58.63sec saw him walk away as the highest World Athletics points scoring athlete at last year’s invitational meet in Stellenbosch and the first Western Province athlete since Ebeneza Felix, in 1997, to accomplish a Dream Mile.

Smith considers himself a track athlete first, but also enjoys being out on the road.

“The purpose of the Gun Run is just to make me stronger on the track and to be able to close faster towards the end track races,” he said.

Despite struggling with an Achilles injury for almost seven months and switching coaches, Smith continued his fine form at the African Championships in Mauritius earlier this year, finishing in eighth place against some of the best steeplechase runners in the world.

A former pupil at Imperial Primary School, in Beacon Valley, Mitchell’s Plain and the Western Cape Sports School, in Kuils River, Blokkie Vannie Plain, as he calls himself on social media, started out doing cross-country, but later switched to track and field.

After matriculating in 2014, he studied sport coaching for a year at Northlink College, followed by a year in America as a student at California Baptist University from 2016 to 2017 and headed back to the Mother City in 2018.

The global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 may have halted immediate plans but Blokkie always kept an eye on the future, sticking to his schedule, training and studying. “It’s just that there were no races and studying was online, which was not hard to adapt to,” he said.

As far as preparations for Sunday’s race were concerned, it was business as usual. “I knew the race was going to be tough, because it was my debut 21km. That last 3km and with the two Olympians in the race, I told myself to just be tough, stay in the moment and stay focused and at least try to stick with them until the last 100m.

“I knew that if I could do that, my track speed...