Charné breaks out her bubble

Charné Swart-Du Plessis is having a busy year.

In early March, she became only the sixth South African woman to dip under two minutes in the 800m, and later in the month, she got married and went on honeymoon.

Then last month she ran a 1min 58.98sec personal best to qualify for the world championships in Tokyo in September — all while in her fifth year as a medical student at the University of Pretoria.

It’s an impressive juggling act, but that’s the way the 23-year-old likes it. “I like being busy,” she said, admitting there are days when she’s tired.

“My sessions aren’t always great, but I think it’s a consistency thing, so if I pitch every day for class and I pitch every day for training … I really enjoy challenging myself in both domains,” said Swart-Du Plessis, an apple that fell close to a tight family tree.

Father Tommie Swart is a doctor and a former runner and mom Jacqueline is a physiotherapist. Middle sister Clarise is studying second-year medicine at Stellenbosch University, and the youngest, Micaela, is in matric, thinking about dentistry.

They’re all highly competitive too. “But they know I need to win,” smiled Swart-Du Plessis, whose husband Chris du Plessis, also an 800m runner in the same training group as her, is an IT specialist who developed a programme that makes early breast cancer detection easily accessible using a portable ultra-sound system.

Studying medicine had been an eye-opener for her, often in a painful way. “You see more hardship than happiness.

“There are some rewarding moments … a mother happy with her new little baby, when someone's pain is relieved, [or] when you start seeing the same patients and seeing some improvement, and they’re saying: ‘This is helping’.”

Early this year, while doing forensics, she witnessed the autopsy of a young teenager who had committed suicide. “I didn’t sleep for two weeks ... Your whole idea as a physician is, ‘I want to help a person, I want to prevent them from dying’, and now it’s too late.”

But talking her experiences through with family and friends had helped. “It's tough to deal with, but I think you get a bit of a professional persona around it — but you know sometimes it shakes your core a bit.”

On the track, however, Swart-Du Plessis is unflappable. When she ran her qualifying time while finishing second behind Olympian Prudence Sekgodiso, she held her form, ignoring her rival’s break on the second lap and sticking to her own race plan.

She narrowly missed out on qualifying for the Paris Olympics — classmate Edmund du Plessis made it — after struggling with a stomach bug she picked up at the 2024 African championships in Cameroon that followed her to Europe.

She still competed in the final at the continental showpiece, finishing sixth. “It was a miracle, I was so sick before,” she said, adding she had to take three Imodium tablets in the hour she was warming up before the race.

Swart-Du Plessis describes herself as a late bloomer. When she took up athletics in Grade 8, she was “quite fat” as a child, initially competing in the discus. She won her first senior medal in 2022, taking bronze at the national championships and finishing third at the 2023 World Student Games in China.

Last year she claimed her only senior title to date, winning the women’s 800m in the absence of Sekgodiso, who regained the title in Potchefstroom in April.

That two of the six sub-two-minute runners have emerged this decade — three were from the previous millennium, including Swart-Du Plessis’s long-time coach Ilse Wicksell — suggests the event is being reignited.

Swart-Du Plessis is confident a new generation of 800m women is on the rise. She believes that Caster Semenya, owner of the 1:54.25 national record, was too fast to create effective competition (Sekgodiso broke two minutes three years after Semenya’s last 800m race).

But that is changing.

“The finals we had the last two years, it’s getting a lot faster ... We’re all pushing each other and there are three or four very strong juniors training with me at the moment … If they can keep it up for the next two, three years, we’ll really have a lot of runners going sub-two, so I’m really excited for that.”

One area that interests Swart-Du Plessis is sports medicine for elite women athletes. “There’s almost no research being done on what a 20-something-year-old competitive female athlete really needs supplements-wise.”

She said beet juice was supposed to be good because it caused vasodilation, a widening of blood vessels, but added that research showed it was detrimental for women on a hormonal level.

Women athletes struggling with menstruation were simply put on a contraceptive pill, which impeded performance. “Females need that hormone fluctuation to be able to perform … If you get put on a contraceptive pill you flatline. It’s fine for someone who just casually jogs, but for elite performance it’s not going to work.”

On and off the track, Swart-Du Plessis has a lot to offer athletics.

BIO

800m progression