Here’s a photo of the “clock.”
That is just silly. Why mess around? You may as well put him on a treadmill and take away wind resistance altogether, and call it a “marathon record”.
(Of course, a treadmill always involves the risk that he might become airborne.)
The main point was to advertise the Nike shoes the runners were wearing.
Just be thankful Nike doesn’t make inline skates. Powered by rockets.
The whole attempt at claiming a sub 2 hour marathon was a joke from the beginning.
I’ve seen a lot of races at Monza (on TV, never in person) and that road looks awfully narrow. I can’t figure out where that was taken.
I’m glad it’s not recognized as a record, but it’s interesting to see what can be achieved under (slightly better than) ideal conditions. If they really wanted to be a joke they’d have picked a course that was downhill and with a tailwind.
See running coach’s link in post 79 above - it has a map of the track. It’s the “junior course” and the turns aren’t banked, so it can’t be used for much (if any) actual racing.
That was Boston in 2011 . The wind took 2:50 off the course record and was :57 faster than the then world record.
Boston has never been eligible for world records-downhill and a point to point course.
If Boston didn’t have that 3 mile Newton Hills, maybe that would have been a sub 2.
I thought it might be something like that. Thanks for the link.
The turns on the road course aren’t banked, either; I assumed they’d be using that. Monza’s rather odd among Formula 1 tracks in that it does have a banked oval, but it hasn’t been used in decades that I’m aware of.
When I first moved to Boston I was reading a bit about the marathon. I knew the course wasn’t legal for record times, but I also read someone who said that even if it was legal a record would never be set here because, despite the overall drop from start to finish, there were too many uphills that would slow the runners down. I was quite surprised by the 2011 result.
I lived near the course in Wellesley for a few years. Decided to see what it was like so I rode my bike to the start in Hopkinton, then rode the whole route, then home. Had to be a bit sneaky, Hereford St. is one-way the wrong way. That was a long day.
I’ve lived in Newton, too. I was never quite sure which hill was Heartbreak Hill. They’re not much when driving a car, but I’m sure that after 20 miles on foot they can be rather nasty.
Heartbreak is the fourth one.
Besides the hills late in the race, the downhill in the first few miles not only leads to a too fast pace but the effects of the pounding doesn’t show up until later in the race.
True, but Project MOOSE certainly seems closer to the spacesuit end of things. It weighed 200 lbs and fit in a suitcase.
I was looking for this, trying to cite it, but couldn’t remember the name.
I’m guessing the astronaut might suffocate after arrival on Earth, when the heat of reentry had fused the foam into a dense, suffocating mass around the astronaut, from which he could not cut himself out of.
From the fact that your username is “running coach”, I’m pretty sure you’re vastly more knowledgeable about, and invested in, the topic than I am, but…
…it seems to me there’s a difference between “let’s see if we can set a new marathon record, which will render all other marathon world records obsolete”, vs, “you know how there’s this 2:00:00 barrier that Marathoners have been approaching? let’s see if it can be broken in an admittedly contrived and ideal setting”. The fact that they tried and failed is interesting. Had they tried and succeeded, it’s not like that would have had any real impact on normal marathons one or the other.
Any sports barrier is a test of human limits. Taking away the conditions that must be overcome means that beating that barrier is meaningless.
That’s why there are specific requirements for a course to be eligible for record breaking.
The whole thing was an advertisement for Nike, nothing more.
Maybe this is a semantic distinction, but I think it just means it’s a different, but related, question… not that it’s nonsense.
Apparently in this contrived test, the runners did 2:00:24 or something? Maybe people will try and try, finding better and better runners, and different training regimens, and they’ll eventually come up with a similar test in which someone manages, after hundreds of tries, to break 2:00:00. If so, that’s an accomplishment. It means something. And it means more than a total fakeout like “well, he couldn’t do it while running, so we just put him on a bike”.
That doesn’t mean it means the SAME thing as a real marathon, or that it trivializes or mocks “real” running competitions. It either is or is not interesting in its own right.
(All of this imho of course.)
But it’s not an accomplishment if you don’t set it under the same conditions as others.
The current record is 2:02:57. Running under 2:00:00 with assistance doesn’t mean you’re faster, it just means you had an unfair advantage.
As a comparison, the raw bench press has only gained 25 lbs from 1996-2015(730)
Using a bench press shirt the shirt record went from 678 to 1075 (1985-2008)
No one has gotten stronger, the shirts have gotten better.
I’m not quite sure that we’re disagreeing.
Here’s an analogy. The current NFL record for longest field goal is 64 yards. Suppose Nike ran a promotion where they were getting a bunch of NFL kickers, along with maybe soccer players and rugby players just to mix it up, and gave them fancy Nike kicking shoes, and had them try to kick a football through uprights from as far as possible.
Now, that might or might not be interesting to watch. Maybe it would be really fun to see if they could hit 65 yards, or 70 yards. Maybe it wouldn’t.
It certainly wouldn’t be the same as actual in-game NFL field goals. No one would claim that whatever the longest kick made was ought to be somehow added into the NFL record books. It’s possible that there might some interesting data that reflected into actual NFL games… stuff could be learned about kicking styles, about the effects of various environmental factors. And maybe nothing “useful” would come out of it at all.
But what puzzles me is that it seems that if this happened, and you were a football fan, you would be outraged, OUTRAGED, that this test was even happening. Why? Who cares? Who is it hurting? If people find it interesting, they do, and if they don’t, they don’t.
That’s a terrible analogy. If you were watching people kicking field goals outside of the context of an NFL game then it would be clear that it was something different.
The problem here is that it has been misrepresented. It has been widely reported as an attempt to run a two hour marathon. Only if you dig deep do you discover that it was something quite different from a marathon.
I personally don’t know enough about day-to-day running terminology to really meaningfully assess how deceptive the language being used is. To the extent that the promoters are deliberately misrepresenting it, I can see why a running enthusiast would be upset by it.
Even Runner’s World did a shitty job of making it clear it wasn’t legit.
Sports Illustrated was even worse.
Personally, a similar attempt of this sort in any sport would piss me off.
Home run distance in MLB using an aluminum bat.
Consecutive baskets in the NBA with an oversize hoop.
A bicycle with a motor.
And so on.
Basically, if you want to set a record, do it without artificial assistance/within the rules of the sport.
I’m more in line with running coach’s thinking on it. “Upset” isn’t really the right word, but it was more silly gimmick than attempt at a meaningful record.
The two things that push me more toward annoyance is first that Nike was not completely honest about it. They admit to using human pacers in a manner not allowed in competition, but they pretend that the gigantic clock was simply a clock, not designed as a wind break for drafting. And second, it was an advertisement for their new shoe, not an honest attempt at pushing the boundaries of human performance. The blatant commercialism takes away a lot of the cool factor.