Eliud Kipchoge, greatest marathon runner of all time, just smashed the world recordby more than a minute in Berlin.
He’s one of my favorite athletes. Watching him run is like watching poetry in motion. He has this humble, low-key demeanour yet still projects this supreme confidence in our ability to always push ourselves beyond what we thought was possible - it’s truly inspirational.
If you haven’t seen it, the Breaking2 project (Nike’s project aimed at breaking the 2-hour barrier for the marathon) is a wonderful hour of your live.
I ran across something about that when I read that the Boston Marathon course would not be legal for a world record. Searching just now I found this site that lists criteria for verifying road racing courses. Nothing there about wind, but there is this:
I think the point of having that rule at all is to mitigate the effect of wind. You couldn’t just build a course 26 miles long and straight downwind.
Couldn’t find anything specifically about wind limits during a marathon.
Nope. Any drag reduction came almost entire from pacers vs running alone. The car and clock alone -at most - saved only 26 seconds - basically one second per mile at the very most, under perfectly ideally conditions. Under race conditions, estimate is basically a savings of half that (maybe). The car and clock were pretty much non-factors.
Analysis here.
The pacers are in the low pressure area. It appears the pacers are larger than a typical world-leading marathon runner and would not be able to sustain that pace without help. Their size is providing more than the usual shielding for Kipchoge. Plus the formation is not typical of real world race pacing. The car (and laser designator) also provide inhumanly precise pacing.
And the pacers were cycled in and out (which is why Monza was not considered to be a marathon world record). No one’s disputing that. The pacers had a huge impact; the car and clock, not so much - in fact, almost none. One of the outcomes from the Breaking2 project was the idea that we might start to see ‘teams’ in big races, kind of like what you see in bike racing, with pacers playing the role of ‘domestique’. If you watched the Berlin race, you saw Kipchoge motioning frequently to his pacers to get back in position. The problem of course - as we saw in Berlin yesterday - is finding people fast enough to go at world-record marathon pace for more than 25km…
I saw that “Breaking 2” program on NatGeo. It boggles my mind that people can run 26 miles without a break in the first place, and to maintain that pace? Someone had to hit the genetic jackpot to do that.
For some time, it was believed that this marathon record would never be broken, but then again, a lot of people thought that Bob Beamon’s long jump world record from the previous year would never be broken either.
The thing about Beamon’s jump was that it was at high altitude (there’s a reason the Olympics haven’t been held at altitude since Mexico City…), and he had a big tailwind. Beamon’s jump looked unbeatable simply because of how much farther he had jumped versus the record at the time, although some people at the time thought Carl Lewis might make a run at it.
I don’t think anyone thought the marathon world record would never be broken again; it’s a common topic every year Berlin comes around.
As often happens I suspect we’ll start seeing more people break 2:02 now that one person has punctured the seal, so to speak.
If altitude was a factor, there would have been a buttload of PRs among the competitors and there should have been more closer to and maybe over the old record.
The wind was only 4.47 mph, hardly enough to account for a 22 inch crushing of the WR.
Here are both thequalifying and final results.
I’m not sure what you’re arguing. Of course altitude was the key factor. The max allowed tailwind sure didn’t hurt, but altitude was key. As for PRs and such:
The silver medalist in Mexico was Klaus Beer. He jumped 8.19m. He beat his 1964 record by almost a full meter (7.27m). He had never cleared 8 meters before Mexico City.
Beamon himself had never jumped more than 8.33m before Mexico.
The bronze medal winner was Ralph Boston. He didn’t come close to a PR in Mexico but he had stopped improving on his jumps all the way back in 1965 at 8.35m. Mexico was his third Olympics (Rome in 1960, Tokyo in 1964) so reasonable to suspect that age had taken its toll. Ditto Ter-Ovanesyan, who was a year older than Boston; he had jumped 8.31m more than five years previously, in 1962, and only managed a 7.99m in 1964 (Tokyo). He did set a new PR of 8.35 in 1967…in Mexico City.
Fifth place was Lepik, from what I can find his 8.09m in Mexico City was a PR.
Sixth place was Crawley. Don’t see any record of him breaking 8m other than Mexico City.
Seventh place was Pani. He jumped 7.97m in Mexico, appears to be a PR.
And so on. So we did have what appears to be plenty of PRs and such, although I haven’t spent a ton of time going through the minutia.
The men’s triple jump record had stood for 8 years, then in two days it was broken 5 times by 3 different athletes. I read somewhere there were also a suspiciously large number of jumps with the maximum 2.0m/s wind speed, the suggestion being that perhaps it was a bit sticky. No evidence to back this up though.
Posting this, just thinking folk in this thread might be interested.
My wife and I just hiked down the Grand Canyon and back (not rim to rim.) Our path was around 7 miles down and 8 miles up (different trails). (Rim-to-rim is 21 miles.)
We are in our late 50s, and we took our time. 6:45 down and 8:45 up. It was considerable effort.
We we’re ASTOUNDED to hear the record rim-to-rim was around 2:40. And fastest time ever for 42 miles rim-to-rim-to-rim is under 6:00.
Suffice it to say it is DEFINITELY not a paved course…
We just did the hike to the top of Half Dome and back in a day, and our pace and exertion level sounds similar to yours. Likewise I’m amazed at the times the super-fit hikers achieve.
I’ve run a few marathons with just OK amateur-level times. And though I’m more endurance-oriented than a sprinter, it amazes me that these world-class marathoners average per mile a time that’s quicker than I can sprint just one mile. Eliud Kipchoge in the marathon mentioned above averaged just under 4:40 per mile - your average home treadmill doesn’t have a setting that fast (~13 MPH). :eek:
