Olympic Triathlon Champion Jan Frodeno Runs His First City Marathon in Berlin

Nearly every marathon Jan Frodeno has run came at the end of a 2.4-mile swim and a 112-mile bike ride. On Sunday in Berlin he finally got to start one on fresh legs, and the 45-year-old German made good use of them, finishing the Berlin Marathon in 2:23:33 in his first city marathon, 1:27 inside the 2:25 target he had set himself.

Frodeno, the 2008 Olympic triathlon champion and a three-time Ironman world champion, had put that number on Instagram before the race, along with a video of track intervals close to marathon pace. Holding 3:26 per kilometer would have got him there, and he was a little quicker than that from the gun. He reached halfway in 1:12:03 and then came home in 1:11:30, a negative split worth 33 seconds, for an average of 5:28 per mile (3:24/km).

Up front, Guye Adola won the men’s race in 2:02:50 and Tigst Assefa set a women’s course record of 2:11:04. Behind them, only 126 of the roughly 56,000 runners beat Frodeno to the line, and just two of those were men in his own age group, which left him third in the men’s 45-49 category.

His 5K splits show just how evenly he ran it.

Apart from a 17:15 between 10K and 15K, every 5K stretch fell between 16:55 and 17:06, and his fastest one came between 30K and 35K, the stretch where marathons so often start to come apart. He then covered the last 2.2K at 3:21/km, the quickest pace he held all morning. Berlin has seen plenty of men go the other way over the years: a study of 873,334 Berlin finishers from 1999 to 2025, published this summer in Scientific Reports, found men were twice as likely as women to slow by 20 percent or more in the second half.

When Frodeno won his third Ironman world title in Kona in 2019, in what was then a course record of 7:51:13, he ran the marathon in 2:42:43, according to Slowtwitch. With no swim or bike ride beforehand, Berlin was 19:10 quicker.

A month earlier, on Aug. 27, Frodeno had won the men’s 45-49 category at the OCC in Chamonix, placing 58th overall in 6:31:55 on a mountain course of about 60 kilometers (37 miles) and 3,500 meters of climbing. Trails have taken up most of his racing since he stopped competing as a professional triathlete in 2023, and his UTMB results profile has him 17th over 24.9K at Trail 100 Andorra in June and 16th in the 54.5K race at Nice Côte d’Azur in September 2025.

After Berlin he thanked the crowds along the course on Instagram and summed up his debut in a single line: “Finished my first-ever city marathon, and luckily I didn’t blow up.”