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Notes -
Today I had the opportunity to watch history being made
[I live near the start of the London Marathon, though the bit we actually went to watch was the mass start with the charity runners in fancy dress, not the elite start]
or
Competition between near-peers is the best thing to drive us to the highest levels of achievement
or perhaps just
Humanity, Fuck Yeah
First, as a piece of dull but boring throat-clearing, congratulations to Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia who finished today's London Marathon in what would, under normal circumstances, be a world record time of one hour and (drowned out by cheering). The actual official time was 1:59:41. But his achievement is going to be forgotten because the winner of today's London Marathon was Sabastian Sawe of Kenya with an officially-recognised world record time of 1:59:30.
The two hour marathon has been the biggest round-number goal in athletics since Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile. But the interesting thing is the rapid improvement it took to get there. My preferred way to think about it to look at Sawe's splits. He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01. Looking at the half-marathon world record progression, in 1986 Sawe's performance would be two half-marathons, back-to-back, both in world record time. As late as 2005, Sawe's performance would be running a half-marathon at championship pace, and then running the second one in world record time.
What is going on? Well it starts with HBD - only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners, just as only west Africans (and their US/Caribbean descendants) can be elite sprinters. So the first part of what is going on is that east Africa, or at least the functional bits of it, has got rich enough that their best runners can be talent-scouted and fed into the international elite athletics machine. There is also the slow optimisation of training techniques, diet etc. over time that allows athletes to reach peak performance. And finally, there have been some spectacular recent improvements in running shoes. Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam (originally developed for insulating airliners) to give a similar power boost to having actual springs in the shoe (something that has always been illegal in competition as mechanical assistance). World Athletics intervened in 2021 to set limits on the thickness of foam allowed and to ban shoes with multiple rigid plates. Shoemakers have, of course, aggressively optimised within the rules.
Conditions matter. London is a fast course, but until today it was not considered one of the world's fastest (that would be Berlin and Chicago). The weather was good for distance running. (Cool and dry with light winds). But ultimately, two elite athletes pushed each other to the limit, and although there only was and only ever could be one winner, they both turned in world-historical performances.
And something similar (but without the big round number) happened half an hour earlier in the woman's race. Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa won in a world record time of 2:15:41. (Note that this is the record for women-only races - women run faster in co-ed marathons with a world record of 2:09:56, although the world record holder was later busted for doping so the record is tainted). The second and third-place times were 2:15:53 and 2:15:55.
It is interesting that Nike got most of the press and coverage for these sorts of shoes for quite a while when they came out (see the sub-2 project with Kipchoge), but both sub-two marathons in London appear to have been run in Adidas shoes.
This seems to be at least somewhat true at the absolute peak of the field: the Ethiopians and Kenyans are quite dominant, but there are rather elite runners from other continents that get fairly close and win occasionally: Ryan Hall and Conner Mantz are not examples of slow, even if they weren't/aren't really dominant in the sport. American women have done somewhat better than the men, too (probably thanks to Title IX increasing women's athletic scholarships and development opportunities): Molly Seidel placed third in the Tokyo Olympics Marathon, and Des Linden won Boston in 2018 (the men's winner that year was Japanese!).
It's also at least interesting that trail and ultra running is not (currently) dominated by Kenyans and Ethiopians, but that may be a function of smaller prize purses and career opportunities.
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