The Marathon That Bent Reality

To understand the significance of someone running a marathon in less than two hours, you also need to understand that, until recently, the notion of this actually happening was truly, utterly absurd. Sure, a physiologist named Michael Joyner had floated the idea that such a feat might be humanly possible in a journal paper way back in 1991. But his peers laughed off the idea, and not much changed over the succeeding decades. In Runner’s World in 2014, I predicted that it would happen in 2075. Frankly, even that forecast seemed overly optimistic to me, but I figured I’d be dead by then, so no one would be able to call me on it.Well, I was wrong. Yesterday morning, the two-hour marathon barrier finally went down. A relatively unheralded 31-year-old Kenyan named Sabastian Sawe won the London Marathon with a time of 1:59:30. That is, for reference, 26.2 miles run at an average of 4:34 a mile—or, put another way, a pace that most recreational runners would struggle to sustain for more than a few seconds, if they could hit it at all. Perhaps even more arresting was the fact that the man who took second place, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, also ran under two hours, finishing just 11 seconds behind Sawe.The feat was the culmination of a shift—or, perhaps more aptly, a total disruption—in marathoning over the past few years, in which the eventual breaking of the mythical two-hour mark went from an impossibility to a guarantee. When sports are young, they progress by leaps and bounds. The first marathon over the now-standard distance of 26 miles, 385 yards, contested at the 1908 London Olympics, was won in 2:55:19. Progress in the succeeding decades was rapid, but by 1991 the sport was mature, professionalized, and lucrative. When Joyner made his prediction, the world record had advanced by less than two minutes since the 1960s. Logic dictated that future decades would see even slower progress, as runners approached insurmountable limits in factors such as how much training they