Hi — I’m Coach Rebecca. If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you’re a person who fits training around a job, deadlines, and family. You want to run well. You’d also like to sleep, hold down a career, and not fall apart doing it.
That’s the athlete I coach. It’s also, for a long stretch of my life, the athlete I wasn’t.
I grew up in the water
Before I was a runner, I was a swimmer. The kind who knows what a 5 a.m. pool deck smells like in January. I swam competitively through my whole childhood and went on to swim Division 1 at the University of Wisconsin, which was everything I’d worked toward and, in a lot of ways, the best years of my athletic life.
It was also where the cracks were already showing — I just didn’t have the language for them yet.
The part nobody flagged
I didn’t get my period from the age of 13 to 21.
Eight years. The prevailing message in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was that this was just what happened to serious female athletes. A sign you were training hard enough. Nothing to worry about.
What I was actually experiencing has a name: RED-S — Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport. It’s what happens when you’re not taking in enough energy to cover your training plus the basic business of being a human body. The body quietly starts shutting down the systems it considers optional. Hormones. Bone density. Immune function. Recovery. Mood. And yes, your cycle.
I don’t tell this story for sympathy. I tell it because I spent nearly a decade inside a system that had no idea it was failing me, and I came out of it with one very stubborn question: why do we treat health and performance like a trade?
That question is why I became a coach. And it’s why I went and got the training to answer it properly.
Doing the homework
I stayed at Wisconsin for a master’s in exercise physiology, then moved to South Africa for a PhD in exercise science at the University of Cape Town.
If you know the field, you know why I chose the University of Cape Town. It’s one of the genuine homes of sports science — the place where a lot of what we now take for granted about endurance performance, fatigue, and pacing was first worked out. Being there meant learning to read the research the way it’s actually meant to be read: skeptically, in context, and with a clear sense of the difference between “this was significant in a lab study of 12 male cyclists” and “this will help my athlete on a Tuesday.”
Alongside the PhD, I worked in the High Performance Centre at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa. That’s where the theory got practical. I worked across testing, training design, strength, fuelling, and recovery with athletes at every level, and I came out with a much wider toolkit than a PhD alone would have given me — and, more importantly, a much better sense of which tool to reach for and when.
And then I fell in love with Cape Town
I went for the degree. I stayed for everything else.
I spent years running trails on Table Mountain and the roads surrounding it — evenings in Newlands Forest, long weekend efforts in the mountains or on the road. It’s some of the best running terrain anywhere in the world, and I don’t say that lightly.
But it’s the people who made it. The friends I made in Cape Town are still my dear friends. There’s a running community there that is warm and welcoming and willing to meet you at 6am on the weekend for a training run.
So when Cape Town was announced as the eighth Abbott World Marathon Major — Africa’s first — I’ll be honest, I got a bit emotional about it. A city and a running community I love, finally getting the global stage it has always deserved.
That’s why we’ve built a Cape Town Marathon–specific coaching service. And it’s why I’ll be there in person on race weekend, on the ground, supporting our athletes. Not on a WhatsApp thread from another time zone. There.
How I actually coach
My coaching philosophy comes down to one line: human support, science-backed training.
The science part is non-negotiable. Your plan should be built on evidence, not on what worked for one influencer or on the training block a pro posted on Strava. But the science is only half of it. Evidence tells you what tends to work on average; it can’t tell you that you’ve got a kid with an ear infection, a product launch on Thursday, and four hours of sleep in the tank. A coach can. That’s the human half, and it’s the half that makes the science usable.
A few things that follow from that:
Everything is personalized. No templates, no plan you could have downloaded. Your training is built for your life, your history, your goals, and your body.
Minimum effective dose. This is the principle I care most about. What is the smallest amount of training that gets you to your goal? Not the most you can survive — the least that works. Extra volume that doesn’t serve your goal isn’t dedication, it’s just risk: risk of injury, risk of burnout, risk of the energy deficiency I know far too well. For busy professionals, this isn’t a compromise. It’s the whole strategy.
Holistic, genuinely. Running training is one input. We also coach sports nutrition, strength training, and time management, and we build in education so you understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. An athlete who understands their training makes better decisions in the moments a coach isn’t there — which is most moments.
Health is the foundation, not the trade-off. You can build real performance without wrecking yourself. I’ve seen both versions up close, and I know which one lasts.
What’s coming next
This is post one of a series building toward race day in Cape Town. Over the coming weeks we’ll get into course specifics and what that profile actually demands of you, fuelling strategy, how to train for a goal race when your calendar is not your own, travel and time-zone logistics, and what to expect from the city itself.
If you’re thinking about Cape Town — whether you’re chasing a Major star, a PB, or just the experience of running through one of the most beautiful cities on earth — I’d love to hear from you. Come say hi. Tell me what you’re training for.
See you on the mountain or on the roads.
— Rebecca