Two-Hour Marathon Barrier Broken
A monumental achievement---with a huge asterisk.
WSJ (“Running’s Two-Hour Marathon Barrier Just Fell in London—Twice“):
Two men broke a previously inconceivable barrier at the London Marathon on Sunday, both running 26.2 miles in under two hours and smashing the world record.
Kenya’s Sabastian Sawe finished in 1:59:30, obliterating the previous record of 2:00:35 set at the 2023 Chicago Marathon by Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum. Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha finished in 1:59:41.
It was the first time any human had run a marathon in less than two hours in a record-eligible race. The astonishing results capped a decade of technological and training innovation that has pushed the sport into uncharted territory over road racing’s most iconic distance.
The world record has now been broken four times in less than a decade—lowering the 2014 record by a total of 3 minutes, 37 seconds.
On Sunday, the two men pushed each other along the flat, fast course, especially late in the race. Sawe actually gained speed, running the second half nearly 1 ½ minutes faster than the first half.
The first officially recognized world record was set by American Johnny Hayes in the 1908 London Olympics. He ran the event in 2:55:18.4. Times have gradually gotten faster ever since, with the 2:40 barrier broken in 1913, 2:30 in 1925, and 2:10 in 1967. The record has been reset eleven times since the turn of the millennium. Sawe’s 1:59:30 is more than five full minutes faster than Khalid Khannouchi’s 2:05:42, which is where the record stood at the end of the 20th Century.
Alas, it appears that more than sheer grit and willpower is at work.
Even London’s third-place runner broke the previous world record: Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo finished in 2:00:28 to complete the podium.
The London Marathon has long been known for record-setting performances. But Sunday also was the culmination of a decade of breakneck innovation across the sport. And nothing has propelled runners more than the revolution in footwear.
A decade ago, Nike created mysterious prototypes featuring giant soles and rigid interior plates that functioned like springs, unleashing the “super shoe” era across the sport. Since then, high-tech foams have been perfected to return more energy to the runner than ever and come in lighter than previous materials. Studies show super shoes can increase running economy by roughly 4%—a massive help during a 26-mile race.
In 2019, Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge wore a Nike super shoe called the Vaporfly to run a 1:59:40 marathon on a closed course in a specially tailored race in Vienna. Because of Kipchoge’s use of wind-breaking pacemakers and other measures, the mark wasn’t eligible for a world record.
Despite initial controversy that super shoes were fundamentally changing the sport, the world governing body of running, World Athletics, eventually legalized them with only a few limitations.
On Sunday in London, Sawe and Kejelcha wore Adidas’ lightest model yet. The Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 weighs just 3.4 ounces, barely more than a deck of cards, for a men’s size 9.
Kiplimo, the third-place finisher, wears Nike.
The blistering finishes in London could spur suspicion, since several marathon runners have been disqualified for doping offenses in recent years. So as Sawe began chasing the world record last year, he took the extraordinary step of undergoing extra drug testing. He underwent 25 out-of-competition tests in the two months before he won the Berlin Marathon last year. That extra testing has continued into this year, his support staff has said.
“I am so happy,” Sawe said. “It is a day to remember for me.”
One can’t begrudge competitors from using the tools legally available to them. Still, the whole point of keeping records in these events is to allow comparison over time. But we simply have no idea how Sawe’s performance compares to Khannouchi’s, let alone Hayes’.
By this metric, just about every new record in every athletic endeavor should come with an asterisk no? Humans have gotten bigger over time, due to better nutrition/healthcare etc; average height up ~4 inches since the industrial revolution’s onset. Training and equipment gets better in every generation, across sports. Modern athletes are faster, across sports. Including shoeless in pools. Seasons are longer in many sports; the debate about what that means for record-keeping is not new — the Roger Maris question is notorious. And then population growth = hundreds of millions more potential competitors — does that make the modern elite athlete’s journey more impressive? Or no?
So if the point of record keeping in sport really is to provide a 1:1 linear comparison across eras, that was always a fool’s errand. We enjoy these Wilt v. Kareem v. MJ v. LeBron or Laver v. Borg v. Sampras v. Federer/Nadal/Djokovic GOAT throwdowns, but just for fun and games. Athletics and athletes keep changing. So there is no one GOAT across decades because you can only really compare an athlete to his or her peers, apologies to the recordbook.
@DK: You can further include, in some sports at least, the evolution of the rules. Brady is the GOAT in the NFL, but also wasn’t playing in the same rules environment as Bradshaw, Montana, or Aikman, to name three multi-SB winners from three different decades.
@DK: I for one won’t recognize this new record unless he runs it without drinking water and while sipping whisky or champagne to keep up his animal spirits like they did at the turn of the 19th century. All this newfangled “science” is ruining what used to be a fun sport where competitors regularly went to the hospital after collapsing on-course.
If you look at the Kentucky Derby, you see that the fastest times are scattered across decades with the 1973 effort by Secretariat the leader. I believe that this represents that centuries of breeding and training reach an asymptote. The timed events in human athletics represent the stochastic appearance of talent in the human population. We have removed the barriers that initially made the Olympics a plaything of rich people, today’s Jim Thorpes are allowed to compete. The total number of people has increased, and thus we now see the one in eight billion performers rather than the one in two billion of the pre WW II world. https://www.twinspires.com/edge/racing/top-10-fastest-kentucky-derby-times-in-history/
Horse performance is the result of biology. Human performance is the result of technology.
For real though, this is an amazing indication of how far sports science has come in just 20 years. Runners around 2000 were still working off feel, didn’t have stable metrics to monitor, and improved often by virtue of living in the right place – the high plateaus of Kenya and Ethiopia are a great training ground with rolling terrain, O2 limited, temperatures that can range across the day. Runners in those places had huge incentives to be successful, but limited resources.
Since then, money has poured into the sport. We understand better what oxygen saturation means, how to incorporate data on respiration, heart rate, and skin temperature, and water and carbohydrate intake. We have a ton of data on building targeted muscle mass for distance running and for improving performance short-term to prepare for races. Training plans have been refined to pull in new cross-population data and can be better tailored to individuals based on real-time information. Shoe technology has gone from “here’s a thing to protect from road crap” to “here’s a thing that will shear in a specific direction to maximize your forward motion.”
Yes, the sport is different. These athletes are different too. Conditions were essentially perfect, and Sawe’s race was incredible. He had a huge negative split for the second half marathon. He posted the fastest ever 10k in any marathon from 30k-40k. He nailed the training, he nailed the tactics, he had all the best tech and research backing him up. It should be no surprise that he broke the record.
@DK: My grandfather was an Olympic bronze medalist in pole vault, clearing the height of 12’6″ in 1912 (on the team with Jim Thorpe and George Patton). I expect junior high school students clear that height nowadays. He also had a pole made of ash wood and had to land standing up in a sand pit. It’s a different sport now, but that’s how this rolls.
@Steven L. Taylor:
As late as the early 70s, some pro football players held off season jobs to make ends meet. This meant they couldn’t train as much during that time, and pre-season training camp came later. There were like 6 preseason games, and the seasons were 14 games long.
@DK: @ptfe: @Slugger: @ptfe: I view improvements in training, nutrition, etc. differently than I do improvements in technology. In Hayes’ day and for a good while after, the sport was essentially limited to rich white dudes with a lot of time on their hands. It was truly amateur, but limited. Over time, we expanded the pool of potential competitors. They’re much better fed and there have been substantial improvements in nutrition science, exercise science, etc. They now train full time for decades. Still, all of those are simply the evolution of the performance of the individual athletes competing.
Conversely, a lot of the improvements in many track events have come from radically better shoes, vaulting poles, rubberized tracks, etc. That changes the nature of the competition. Even in swimming, there have been changes in the nature of the pool and, especially, performance swimsuits that radically reduce resistance.
None of this is bad, per se. It just makes cross-era comparisons problematic. That the three fastest times in recorded history happened on the same day in the same race is a huge red flag.
@Steven L. Taylor: @Kathy: Football records are relatively meaningless for that reason, but most fans understand that to be the case. The rules are changed on literally an annual basis, usually to advantage offensive production. And, yes, we’ve gone from 14- to 16- to 17-game regular seasons over the time I’ve watched the NFL.
@James Joyner: I take the point, to a degree. I just think that it is almost certainly impossible to say that any sports record isn’t in some way tainted by the evolution of these contests. And technological changes are everywhere, some more obvious than others.
@James Joyner:
In 1990, ESPN aired a simulation using doctored NFL films footage to match teams from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, called The Dream Season.
It was fun, but it won’t settle any arguments. I think there were instances of someone coaching against himself, and of the same person playing for one team and coaching the other. They didn’t produce full games, but rather short highlight reels.
Of course, it was 100% accurate in that the 1978 Steelers won the Dream Bowl against the 1972 Dolphins, in a close match 😉
Honestly, as long as a runner is not using dubious means, such as doping, to shatter a world record I feel there should be no asterisk next to their name.
Also, color me surprised that the shoes they were using only cost $500, in theory I could actually afford this shoe but a shoe will only do so much considering I have no long distance running training under my belt.
It’s a little odd that there’s an official world record in marathon running because every race is run over different courses, at different elevations, with different degrees of difficulty over the course.
@Pylonius:
I vaguely recall reading that for things like marathons, march, and cycling races on open roads, there’s a “best performance” rather than a “world record,” precisely because the courses are not standardized.
@Joe: My son cleared 14’3″ his senior year in high school. He had the school record for exactly 1 year. I’ll have to tell him about the 1912 Olympics. He’ll get a kick out of those facts.
@Kathy: I just did 5 minutes of research and the so called major marathon times are within 5-6 minutes of each other. Sydney is traditionally the hardest. London and Chicago are the “easiest”.
Where I live, there aren’t even many full marathons. No one wants a full one in Banff, despite the scenery.
@Steven L. Taylor: “Brady slander will not be tolerated” is one my family sayings. Due to arguments between me and my brother, with our late oldest brother, my Dad and uncles, and our late granddad. We all had different favorites, often based on birth year. “Nobody knows who Otto Graham is” and “Y’all don’t know smashmouth football!” are also in our family lexicon, for this reason.
My Dad hates that we grew up idolizing Tommy, for many reasons. One is that unlike his childhood idol Bart Starr, Brady has allegedly been protected by new rules and never played “smashmouth football!” Whatever Dad. They hate Tommy’s GOATness because he’s pretty. Beauty is a curse.
@Joe:
!
Uh, this family lore is impeccable. So you always win the “fun fact about me” icebreaker then.
My favorite example of technology is for vision, just because no one thinks about it. First there were glasses, then contacts, and today baseball players can have their corneas sculpted to provide 20/15 vision or better. Picking up the rotation of the ball because you can see the threads a fraction sooner makes a difference for a good hitter. Tiger Woods was quoted earlier in his career that Lasik improved his game noticeably.
My sister once complained to me that no matter how hard she worked at it, she couldn’t shoot an open-sight rifle as accurately as our father. “See the neighbor’s garage over there?” I asked. “Can you count the boards?” She looked for a moment and then said she could. “If the light’s good, Dad can count the nail heads.”