I’d rather not have three people breaking wind in front of me while I’m trying to run a marathon, thank you very much.
Is the imminent sub-2 hour breakthrough due to the new Nike and Adidas running shoes?
That people can run 26 miles without resting boggles my mind, and has since I was watching the 1976 Olympics, at age 12, and was glued to the TV because I didn’t think it was real.
When I decided to try and do that myself some years later, my body wasted no time in letting me know that That Wasn’t Gonna Happen. I later worked with a woman who said, “I could run it really fast, if it was 2 blocks long and there was a Dairy Queen at the end.”
But this in TWO HOURS! Boggles my mind even further!
Seriously, some people have attributed it to the Kenyan runners being raised on ugali, a cornmeal mush that is a dietary staple in the highlands.
Living at altitude is far more of a factor. Along with decades of training advancements(equipment, clothing, nutrition, understanding of training physiology and methods).
There are no magic foods that confer superhuman athletic ability.
If cornmeal mush was the X factor, every Southerner raised on grits would be threatening the marathon record.
Not even spinach?
Oh, I know that. I do remember when a local sports writer went to Kenya and introduced our area to the “magic” of ugali.
Not if you skip leg day.
ETA: looking at Popeye, his legs are in fact well developed, but in the same weird way as his arms - skinny quads and enormous calves.
It’s damn impressive, and far beyond anything I could do, but maybe I’ve become accustomed to it after watching Olympic marathons for so many years. The athletic feat that breaks my brain is the cycling grand tours; 2,000+ miles in three weeks, and racing over mountain passes that I don’t even want to think about riding over.
The peculiar thing about cycling is that it’s so gentle on your body biomechanically that it enables the exploration of these ridiculous extremes of metabolism and cardiovascular output.
In stark contrast to pro cyclists, I believe most elite marathon runners only race 5 or 6 times a year, because it does take so much out of them.
That’s why I’m utterly awed by Courtney Dauwalter, the ultramarathoner who ran three 100+ mile races in three months, this past summer. And won each one.
I’ve run marathons twice, in 4:26 and 3:49. The last time, I barely remember crossing the finish line; I chugged down two pints of chocolate milk, and fifteen minutes later barfed them all over the hotel bathroom. I can’t imagine doing it at the near sprint that elites like Kipchoge and Kiptum manage.
At an expo for a marathon I saw a couple of years ago, the Atlanta Track Club set up a treadmill moving at Kipchoge’s pace for his sub-two hour run. Even their elite 2:25 marathoners could barely keep it up for more than a few minutes.
I do a decent amount of recreational cycling, but I’d have to train a good bit to ride 26.2 miles in under 2 hours, and even then it would have to be a pretty flat course.
I’ve ridden the Boston Marathon course on my bicycle, but I didn’t time myself. I had to deal with traffic and stoplights, and there’s one small section where I was going the wrong way on a one-way street. I suspect that under race conditions with all the traffic blocked that I could do it in under 2:00. It starts with a long downhill section, which helps.
One of the reasons it’s not eligible for a world record.
I was watching a Total Running Productions video on Kiptum’s race, and the presenter pointed out that he had negative splits - he ran the second 13.1 miles of the race in 59 minutes. That’s just over 13 miles an hour. Amazing.
NPR reported the record on “All Things Considered”, and noted that it was only Kiptum’s third marathon, and that, at only twenty-three, he’s young for a marathoner. But that seems to be the trend anymore - the female winner was Sifan Hassan, and this was only her second marathon. Going back a little bit, Molly Seidel’s bronze-winning race in the Tokyo Olympics was her third ever. It’s an interesting trend.
Back when marathons used to be broadcasted live on network TV, I saw two teenage boys jump out of the crowd and run alongside the leaders. They appeared to be (and were) high school track kids, and they kept looking at each other and obviously saying, “Wow!” and were only able to keep up for a few minutes.
I think again and again how this race began after a soldier died for running 26 miles.
Despite being downhill overall, that doesn’t lead to very fast times on the Boston Marathon course in most years. There are some significant uphill sections that slow the runners down. The 2011 winner set a time that would have been a world record, but there was also a strong tailwind that year.
I tried looking to see if Boston is a fast course for wheelchair athletes, but I wasn’t able to find established records to compare to those from Boston.
But wasn’t that after a battle? I think folks would be slower if they had to throw 20 javelins and wrestle first.
Brian
- The official world record is 1:20:14, set by Swiss Heinz Frei in 1999. Marcel Hug went 1:18:04 at the 2017 Boston Marathon, which isn’t a record-eligible course.