In late September, Wilson Kipsang traveled to Germany to try to run 26.2 miles faster than anyone had ever done before.
For his record attempt, he chose the Berlin Marathon, which is widely considered the world’s fastest course – “flat as a pancake,” as one runner put it. The weather was ideal for running: about 50 degrees, with negligible wind. Kipsang was not only pushed by a host of elite marathoners – including several countrymen from Kenya – but for much of the race he was pulled along by a group of pace-setters whom he had trained with for months.
Everything had been carefully orchestrated. Everything was lined up. And then Kipsang took care of his rather significant part of the equation, blazing the streets of Berlin in a time of 2 hours, 3 minutes, 23 seconds. It was 15 seconds faster than the official world standard established two years earlier, also by a Kenyan in Berlin.
The first modern marathon was won in just under three hours by a Greek postal worker in 1896 (alas, no time was recorded for the Greek soldier Pheidippides’ run from Marathon, Greece to Athens in 490 BC). Ever since, the distance has stood as a captivating measure of human endurance, and the ability to run it faster and faster has stretched our understanding of what athletes are capable of.
More specifically, the two-hour mark long has loomed in the collective imagination as some kind of mythic barrier, similar to the four-minute mile or the 10-second 100 meters. But whereas those milestones were surpassed decades ago – Englishman Roger Bannister, of course, famously ran his 3:59.4 in 1954, and American Jim Hines clocked a 9.95 in 1968 – the two-hour marathon remains stubbornly out of reach, even as new assaults are launched at the record seemingly every year.
Some people in the running community believe that the feat is simply a matter of natural progression, perhaps 10 to 20 years in the future. Others claim that it won’t happen in any of our lifetimes. Still others wonder whether it can even be done at all.
So close – 203 seconds – and yet so far away.
“It’s the same as people saying it’s impossible to break 4 minutes in the mile, but now the record is 17 seconds below that,” said Meb Keflezighi, a San Diegan who won the 2009 New York City Marathon and will run that storied race this morning for the ninth time in the last 12 years. “Is a two-hour marathon going to happen in the near future? It depends on who the athlete is. Is it going to happen? Eventually. When? Wait and see.”
To understand what it might take for a two-hour marathon to be accomplished, it helps to consider how we arrived at the modern era of endurance running. In the first half of the 20th century, there was widespread concern about the perils of overtraining. That dissipated by the 1950s as runners began to log 100-mile weeks and adopt hardcore interval workouts, and in that decade Jim Peters of England was personally responsible for lowering the world best by a whopping 8 minutes, to 2:17:39.
Distance running, however, was almost exclusively the province of athletes from Europe and the United States until the mid-to-late ’60s, when Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia and Kip Keino of Kenya raced onto the scene, enjoying success that would inspire legions of East Africans in future generations. Within 20 years, runners from those nations – especially Kenya – were dominating nearly every sector of the sport, including the marathon.
Endurance runners have since become the chief national export. It isn’t hard to discern why. Because Kenya is a poor country – some estimates put the per capita income at less than $1,000 a year – boys often run to and from school. Because it’s a mountainous region, they do so at high elevations. And because marathons have become big-money events, many Kenyans see running glory as their ticket to a better life, if not fame and (relative) fortune.
For his performance in Berlin, Kipsang won $54,000 in prize money and $68,000 in bonus money for the world record. Kenyan Dennis Kimetto’s victory in the Chicago Marathon on Oct. 13 was even more lucrative: $100,000 for winning, $75,000 more for a course record (2:03:45).
“That is life-changing for someone from a country like that,” said Mario Fraioli, a San Diego-based running coach and the senior editor of Competitor magazine. “This man (Kimetto) used to be a maize farmer. Now he’s the equivalent of a multimillionaire by Kenyan standards. That one race could revitalize an entire neighborhood in Kenya, and many of them do that.”
Largely because of the East African invasion, the marathon world record has been broken five times in the last 10 years – all by Kenyans or Ethiopians, all at Berlin. (That doesn’t include the all-time world best of 2:03:02 turned in by Kenya’s Geoffrey Mutai at the 2011 Boston Marathon; despite its historical status, Boston isn’t recognized as a record-eligible course by the International Association of Athletics Federations because the course has too much downhill slope and is point-to-point as opposed to looped, which could allow for excessive tailwind.)
But how much lower can the record go? And how long will it take to get there?
In 1991, Michael Joyner, an anesthesiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., who specializes in exercise research, published the first scientific article to explore the idea of how fast a human being could possibly run a marathon. By plugging physiological data into a set of equations, the time he came up with was 1:57:58. Joyner and a colleague recently updated the paper, and they reached a similar conclusion: that the two-hour mark could be eclipsed sometime in the next decade or two.
“I expect people to either continue to take 10-, 15-second bites out of the record every couple years, or I expect somebody to take a big bite – maybe a minute – and run a 2:02,” Joyner said. “I’m relatively confident about getting into the medium-to-low 2:02s in fairly short order. After that is when the fun will begin.”
It won’t be very fun for the runners, of course, who will endure their bodies and minds being pushed to the breaking point. In Berlin, Kipsang averaged a staggering 4:42 per mile. As Fraioli pointed out, that would be like going to your local track and running a lap in about 70 seconds -- which would leave the average person doubled over and gasping for breath – then doing 104 more of them without stopping. Or it would be like climbing on a treadmill at the gym and cranking it up to 13 miles per hour – for more than two hours.
And to achieve a two-hour marathon, a runner would have to increase that lung-searing pace by 8 seconds per mile.
“When you look at it that way, you can realize how massive of a feat that would be,” Fraioli said. “I’ll never say never, but I’m 31 years old and I don’t think I’ll see a sub-two-hour marathon in my lifetime.”
Whenever it happens, experts have a pretty good handle on what that runner will look like. He’ll probably be short and light (Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie, regarded as the best overall distance runner in history, is 5 feet, 5 inches and less than 125 pounds). He’ll probably have long, lean legs and a small upper body.
That’s the chassis. Under the hood, he’ll certainly possess a high VO2max (the maximum amount of oxygen that the body can consume) and superb running economy (how fast you can go for a given amount of oxygen consumption). To extend the car analogy, VO2max is the horsepower and running economy is the fuel efficiency.
“The question is: Can you be a muscle car and still get good gas mileage?” Joyner said. “What you repeatedly find in these elite marathon runners is very, very good running economy.”
The Kenyans who rule the marathon could soon find themselves challenged by a Briton. Mo Farah, who moved to England as a child after being born in Somalia and who scored double victories in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters at both the 2012 Olympics and 2013 world championships, is scheduled to make his marathon debut at his home base of London next spring. As if his prominence as an athlete didn’t make the stakes high enough, now Nike is upping the ante. A sponsor of Farah, who trains part-time near the company’s Oregon headquarters, the sneaker giant is designing a special shoe for Farah that’s intended to maximize his marathon performance.
“It’s going to be a terrific shoe for Mo and could save a couple of minutes on his time,” Farah’s coach, former marathon great Alberto Salazar, told the British media in September. “If you can change the crank on a bike to help you, if you can change the car, why not shoes?”
Here’s the kicker, though: The name of the footwear, according to Farah himself, is the “Sub Two Hour.” Not that Farah, as confident as he is, wants any part of suggestions that he could pull off that outlandish time in his first attempt at the distance.
“For me to say I can run under two hours is ridiculous,” Farah said during a recent television interview. “… I don’t think (two hours) is going to be broken in the next 10 years or even beyond that – maybe even 100 years – because if you think about it, it’s really difficult.”
Even if Farah or some other runner closes in on the two-hour threshold, it won’t come without whispers of doping – such is the nature of a society that has earned its cynicism in that respect. In fact, five Kenyan marathoners (though none of them elite) were suspended early this year after testing positive for a banned substance, and around the same time the world’s major marathons banded together to enact stricter anti-doping policies.
“You just don’t know. People pass drug tests, but we know from years of history that those tests are generally beatable,” Joyner said. “That’s one of the tragedies of this whole thing is that any amazing performance is now suspect.”
In the end – doping suspicions or not – the two-hour marathon will require a whole lot of perfection. The perfect course. The perfect weather. The perfect field running at a perfect pace. Maybe even the perfect shoes.
And, most importantly, the perfect runner.
“History has shown that as talented as the top people are, every once in a while, someone comes along who can be significantly better,” said Bob Larsen, a Hall of Fame running coach who has mentored Keflezighi for 18 years. “That’s what I think it’s going to take to get under two.”
Added Larsen, alluding to the Jamaican sprinter who has taken human speed to the limit: “Maybe we haven’t seen the Usain Bolt of marathoning yet.”