Kamal Ghorui
Sunday will go down in history like May 6, 1954, when Roger Bannister broke the 4-minute-mile barrier, or July 13, 1985, when Sergey Bubka pole-vaulted over 6m. It’s one of those rare days when humans have shoved “impossible” so hard, it’s stumbled back. Sunday was the 2-hour-marathon barrier’s turn. Kenyan Sabastian Sawe finished the London Marathon with 30 seconds to spare, and Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha came in 11 seconds later. The result wasn’t merely unexpected, but unthinkable. Over the past 10 years, millions of dollars have been spent in pursuit of a sub-2-hour marathon. Nike famously worked with Eliud Kipchoge, designing special shoes, training, and diet plans for him. But his 1:59:40 finish at a 2019 exhibition run didn’t qualify as a record, because of all the help he had. Sawe and Kejelcha made their mark on Sunday simply, the regular way.
Sawe’s new record is only 65 seconds faster than Kelvin Kiptum’s previous marathon record, set in 2023. But over 130 years of the modern marathon – starting at the 1896 Olympics – runners have knocked off an hour. How fast might we be a century from now? Is a 1-hour marathon possible? Probably not. Per American physiologist Michael Joyner, a time of 1:57:58 would hit the human metabolic limit. But that’s still 92 seconds of improvement worth striving for. And the thing about barriers is that they’re often mental. Before Bannister’s 4-minute mile, experts theorised that running so fast could be fatal. Just six weeks after Bannister’s feat, Australian John Landy broke his record by 1.4 seconds. Don’t be surprised if more male marathoners finish in less than two hours this year.
Nor is Joyner’s limit cast in stone. Till the 1960s, everyone thought 2.25m was the highest a man could jump. Until Dick Fosbury, a 21-year-old engineering student, changed everything with his ‘Fosbury Flop’ technique. Who knows what new techniques and gear will do for human performance. It’s the age of specialists anyway. Bannister was a doctor, a respected neurologist, who had a bowl of porridge, worked the morning shift at his hospital, took a train to Oxford, and ran his record-breaking race in heavy spikes. Now, there’s science, and teams, behind everything. Sawe and Kejelcha ran in shoes weighing less than 100g each. We don’t know what advances lie ahead. But we do know that records are made to be broken, and they will be.
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