If you’re one of the many getting ready for a fall marathon, like New York City or Marine Corps, then good luck. Running a marathon is a huge accomplishment, be it your first or 40th. Besides worrying about just finishing, the thing most marathoners worry about, especially veteran ones, is their time. How fast they can run and how long it takes them to finish 26.2 miles. Marathoners tend to obsess over mile split times, energy drinks, gels, the weight of their shoes, the exact temperature at the 20-mile mark – pretty much anything that might take a few minutes, or even seconds off their time. Sometimes it’s to break a well-known barrier – like a four hour or three hour marathon. Sometimes it’s simply to get a personal best, say one minute better than last time. Or if you’re like me and on the back side of a running career, it’s simply not to go too much slower than last time. Whatever it is, pretty much every one that lines up for that fabled distance goes in with an aspirational finish time.
For elite marathoner Eliud Kipchoge, that duration is two hours. Not two hours and something, but two hours – or I supposed one hour, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds. That’s around 4 minutes and 35 seconds per mile. Which is beyond the comprehension of most runners, even those of you who may be pretty good. Comparing a three hour marathon – which is really good – to a two hour marathon is like comparing a house cat to a lion. And I mean no insult to either three hour marathoners or house cats, both of which I hold in high regard.
Kipchoge has edged closer to this seemingly impossible time barrier, recently in Berlin setting a new marathon world record of two hours, one minute and 39 seconds. That’s 1:18 faster than the old record. But it’s also one minute and 14 seconds slower than Kipchoge ran last year in a highly choreographed effort led by Nike to break the two hour barrier running laps on an Italian race car track. For a long list of reasons, that wouldn’t be recognized as a world record, but it does show how close humanity has come to the seemingly inhuman.
For the most part, since people have timed themselves running a distance, or swimming in a pool, or throwing a large object, we’ve started to think of how we could do it faster or longer. Sometimes that comes with a natural barrier – like the four minute mile, or the 10 second hundred. Or a 13 minute 5K. Others are fairly arbitrary. But they all seem to stretch what we assumed possible, particularly for those involved in the sport. See, if you’re a casual marathoner, or perhaps not a runner at all, it’s hard to fully comprehend the difference between a 2:05 marathon and a 2:02 marathon. But if you’ve ever run anything close to either of those, you fully understand the agonizing difference between 4:40 miles and 4:35 miles. Those five seconds might as well be a calendar year. Which is why breaking records in sports like track is so fascinating. It’s asking people who have performed the impossible to make that seem fairly ordinary.
Obviously, the quest for records is a genesis for all that can go wrong with a sport like track, most notably performance enhancing drugs. Which is why records seem to always be viewed with a healthy dose of skepticism. We’ve seen records stripped, like Ben Johnson’s 100-meter mark. And there’s also a bunch of records that very likely were set with the help of PED’s. For example, it’s hard not to question Flo Jo’s 100 and 200-meter world bests, which have stood for some 30 years without being challenged, much less broken. That is the inherent bad side of world records. They leave a remarkably long shadow.
I’m not certain Kipchoge is ready to break two hours, at least not yet. But I’m certain it will happen. I believe in a few things in life, and Darwinism is definitely one of them. What seems impossible today is simply a part of a regular tomorrow. Just look back at track meets of the early 1900’s to confirm that. And that is part of what makes sport so fascinating. Not simply an opportunity for competition, but rather the evolutionary pursuit of what’s possible. Perhaps a sub two hour marathon is like putting a man on the moon. It’s not something we’re all going to do, but it certainly can inspire us all.
Perhaps it might even be what gets you under a three hour, or four hour, or five hour marathon. Whatever your time, finishing a marathon is truly a big deal.
Keith Strudler is the director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him on twitter at @KeithStrudler
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