Fan Reveals Harry Styles’ Honest Goal Before Running Berlin Marathon Sub-3 Record

At this year’s Berlin Marathon, no one had really paid much attention to the name that wore bib no. 31261. After all, Sted Sarandos, apart from having a weirdly similar name to Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, didn’t have anything remarkable about it. However, as the dust settled on the 26.2-mile race, the track and field community learned with shock that the name was actually the pseudonym used by former One Direction member Harry Styles for his second Marathon of the year!

The 31-year-old crossed the finishing line in a remarkable 2:59:13, posting a sub-3-hour personal best that’s highly revered by even the most seasoned marathoners. With that, Styles shaved more than 24 minutes from his March run, when he finished the Tokyo Marathon in 3:24:07. But while experts began breaking down Harry’s Sunday race after its finish, the pop icon probably had it in his head that he would enter the competition with the goal of probing his worth beyond the singing stage.

Harry Crave, a Harry Styles fanpage handle, took to X on September 23 to share how the 3x Grammy winner had told his peers about his objective of drastically improving his figures from Tokyo. “I asked him what his goal was, and he replied that he was aiming for 3 hours. He was very calm and asked me what my goal was…,” the social media post quoted a fan’s comment to underscore how Styles had entered the 2025 BMW Berlin Marathon with the sole target of posting a new personal best.

“Harry’s goal was aiming for 3 hours, he finished in 2.59!! We have a professional runner here and we’re proud,” the X post simply couldn’t stop gushing about the Harry’s House artist and his iron will to show his skills for the world to witness. Well, truth be told, they aren’t alone in their sentiment. If your favorite celebrity suddenly decided to enter a marathon under a false name and casually bagged a sub-3-hour figure, you’d be screaming too!

And that’s exactly what the community has been doing. Ever since Paralympic Gold medalist Richard Whitehead posted a picture of himself with Harry on social media, fans have been going berserk about just how good the latter was at this year’s Berlin Marathon. While it can be argued that Styles entered the battlefield with the right equipment, like the Nike Alphafly 3 (the same shoes he wore at the Tokyo Marathon), the singer’s personal toil to radically lower his personal best by almost half an hour is something that demands all the laurels in the world.

But the final time wasn’t the only impressive thing about his German marathon debut.

Harry Styles is working his way through the ranks

In Tokyo, Harry ran 7:47 per mile to outpace more than 20,000 runners at the event. That’s pretty admirable, in case you’re not used to track and field stats. In Berlin, he significantly improved the numbers and posted 6:50 per mile, which is almost a full minute faster than when he ran the Tokyo Marathon in March.

Thanks to such an impressive pace, Styles finished the race, which saw about 55,000 entrants this year, to finish 2,241st overall and 524th in the over-30 age group. Now that’s something that’s worthy of going on your resume! But will this thunderous new PR be big enough source of endorphin to prompt Harry Styles back into the recording studio to start working on his new album?

Who knows!