Something quite remarkable happened at the weekend, a Kenyan runner nearly broke 2 hours to run a full marathon. That’s taking 4 minutes and 35 seconds to run one mile. Mile after mile. For 26 miles. It was only in 1954 that the 4 minute mile barrier was broken, and that was just for one single mile, not 26+ miles. That’s running at about 15 miles per hour, or about the same as running the 100 metres in 17 seconds, x422 times!
This amazing athletic feat saw Eliud Kipchoge clock 2 hours and 25 seconds for this marathon attempt. For much of the time he was on pace to attain the 2 hour target, but the later laps saw the strain take its toll. While missing the target, Eliud did break the current world record for the marathon, which is held by a fellow Kenyan, Dennis Kimetto, of 2 hours 2 minutes and 57 seconds, set at the Berlin Marathon back in 2014. The other runners, the Eritrean Zersenay Tadese, who is the current world-record holder for the half-marathon, and Lelisa Desisa, from Ethiopia, two-times winner of the Boston marathon, also both finished, in the finest tradition of athletes, with a true epic effort to continue, despite knowing they were well outside the record attempt, the older Tadese at 2:06 and younger Desira at 2.14.
The slightly controversial part was that this attempt was run by Nike, with its Breaking2 programme. For this they ran early morning with repeated laps of the Monza racing circuit. The three runners had a phalanx of other elite runners as their vanguard, sheltering them as well as acting as pacemakers, as well as car beaming a green line to show the target pace, and were re-fuelled by moped riders. Because of these factors this record attempt was not recognised for any official record by the sporting authorities. Nike was also promoting its restricted (up to now) new Zoom Vaporfly Elite shoes, which use a special carbon-fibre plate in the soles to make runners 4% more efficient than Nike’s previous fastest marathon shoe, boosting their running economy.
But regardless of the corporate PR spin the actual running feat is truly impressive. So maybe it was outside 2 hours, but you know what, they did just do it.
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