THE 2-HOUR MARATHON: CAN SCIENCE MAKE IT HAPPEN?
Crossing the finish line in two hours would make history. But is it possible? RICHARD A. LOVETT investigates.
A SUCCESSION OF RUNNERS HAS PUSHED THE RECORD DOWN BY MORE THAN 55 MINUTES.
IN 490 BCE, the legend goes, a courier named Pheidippides ran 40 kilometres from the Fields of Marathon to the city of Athens to deliver some very good news: the Athenian army had won a decisive victory over the invading Persians. “Victory,” he gasped, before dying from exhaustion.
IT MAKES A GREAT STORY. But just how fast did Pheidippides run that day? More than 2,000 years later, in 1896, at the first Olympic marathon held in his honour, another Greek named Spyridon Louis covered the distance in 2:58:50. Though the official marathon distance was extended to 42.195 kilometres, a succession of runners has pushed the record down by more than 55 minutes. At the 2014 Berlin Marathon, Kenyan Dennis Kimetto clocked 2:02:57– a record that still holds.
Until recently, running that far that fast would have seemed fantastical—a sure prescription for suffering the same fate as Pheidippides. But today, people are seriously asking: is it possible for someone, someday, to cross the finish line in two hours?
As recently as 2012, Glenn Latimer, chief executive of World Marathon Majors, told The Daily Mail that a 2:00 marathon wouldn’t occur in his lifetime, and “perhaps never”. (Since then, however, the marathon record has dropped twice, by a total of 41 seconds.)
“I know without a doubt it’s possible,” counters America’s fastest marathoner, Ryan Hall (2:04:58, Boston, 2011). “And while I can’t say when it will happen I really believe I will see it in my lifetime.”
“Sub-2:00 sounds far-fetched,” adds another American, Ryan Vail, who holds a personal best of 2:10:57. “But I have been very surprised the last few years at how quickly the world record has dropped, so it would be crazy to rule it out.”
Two-hour marathon hopefuls point out that a few decades ago, experts scoffed at the idea of a four-minute mile – and were proven wrong. When medical student Roger Bannister crossed the mile finish line in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, 62 years ago, he immediately became the most famous distance runner in history. Incredibly, within weeks of Bannister’s accomplishment, Australian John Landy clipped another 1.4 seconds off the mark, and since then the record has fallen all the way to 3:43.13.
No elite racer is openly talking about running a 2:00 marathon. Announcing such a goal would tip off rivals who may try to get there first, and it would be considered a bold move, bordering on arrogance. But surely there are secret dreamers who look at today’s 2:02:57 world record and wonder what it would take to reach 2:00. Carving just 4.2 seconds off each kilometre would do it. It sounds like so little—that’s about as much time as it takes to enter your PIN into a bank machine. But those 4.2 seconds mean the difference between being great and going down in history with Roger Bannister.
For the right type of dreamer, it’s got to be an enormously tantalising vision. But what would it take to get there? And is the body even capable of such a punishing feat?
Most of the improvement on Spyridon Louis’s 1896 mark came in the early years, as runners and coaches learned the basics of training and competing in a race that long. But twice in recent history, runners have lopped substantial chunks off the marathon record.
Ned Frederick, a biomechanics expert at Exeter Research Inc in Brentwood, NH, describes these people as marathoning “geniuses”. The most recent was Australia’s Derek Clayton (the first to run sub-2:10) who, in a pair of races in the late 1960s, chopped nearly 3.5 minutes off the world record. But the greatest of all may have been British runner Jim Peters. In a series of four races between 1952 and 1954, he lowered the record by a spectacular 8 minutes (from 2:25:39 to 2:17.39.4).