No Aesop's fable

Consider Sebastian Sawe's breakthrough

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”—Old cliché

OK, then; how exactly to characterize what Kenya’s Sebastian Sawe did in London last week? Sawe (it’s pronounced SAH-way) is a 31-year-old professional distance runner who officially navigated a 26-mile, 385-yard footrace in fewer than two hours—one hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds. That’s pretty close to a mad dash, a velocity that the running community long had speculated might or might not be humanly possible.

Sawe’s absurdly hasty completion of the London Marathon—all foot traffic; no Ubers or E-bikes, no trains or buses—could not possibly be described as “pedestrian.” He was averaging four minutes and 33 seconds per mile. For 26-plus miles! He was moving at roughly 13 miles per hour.

Furthermore, right on his heels, Ethiopian Yomif Kejelcha became the second person to cover that distance in under two hours—1:59:41. So another banality wouldn’t work in describing Sawe’s feat: “Slow and steady wins the race.”

Go back to 1986. Then, my friend Jay Weiner published an advance to the Twin Cities Marathon in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune quoting experts, scientists and coaches mostly dismissing the chances of somehow lowering the world marathon record—it was 2:07:12 at the time—under the two-hour mark for years to come. If ever.

The best result that any of them could envision was Oxford University physiologist B.B. Lloyd’s prediction that 2:02 was the absolute limit—and estimating that even that shouldn’t be expected until the year 2000. In fact, after Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie ran 2:03:59 in Berlin in 2008, he had said he didn’t expect to see a sub-two-hour marathon for still another 25 years. It wasn’t until September 2014, 28 years after Lloyd’s educated guess, that Kenyan Dennis Kimmeto, at the Berlin Marathon, got down to 2:02:57.

On the eve of the 2014 New York City Marathon, visions of slipping under two hours—fantasies, really—were raised again. But barely.

George Hirsch, co-founder of the NYC Marathon who was chairman of the sponsoring New York Road Runners Club, related the story then of how Fred Lebow, the sport’s imaginative impresario, had told him “ages ago” that Lebow was going to put up a million-dollar bonus for anyone who was able to run under two hours in that event.

Hirsch, himself a veteran marathoner who once ran 2:38, responded, “that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. No one is ever going to break two hours in New York. Too many hills and tight turns. It’s just not possible.”

“Fred said, ‘You know that and I know that, but let’s see what happens with the story.’ The next day, there was his offer of a million-dollar prize. Not everyone knew the sport. A million dollars is what they knew. And Fred got some ink out of that.”

The generic term “marathon” was becoming more widely familiar. But an overwhelming percentage of the public still thought of it simply as a long race, unaware that an official distance of 26 miles, 385 yards had been settled upon after the 1908 Olympics in London, when organizers calculated the distance from the start at Windsor Castle to a finishing point in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box at the Olympic stadium in West London.

It wasn’t until the early ‘70s that the so-called running boom, with ordinary folks beginning to join the challenge of a 26-mile run, was set off in part by American Frank Shorter winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon in Munich under the watchful eye of ABC television. (He ran 2:12.98.)

Until then, the only race at that distance outside the Olympics that was getting any public attention was the annual Boston Marathon. Studies of oxygen intake capacity and training methods designed to build tolerance to cramps and muscle tightness came into play, better equipment (lighter shoes, especially), as well as organizers’ efforts to provide ideal race conditions—40- to 50-degree weather, low humidity, cloud cover, consistent running surfaces of asphalt, mostly flat. Increasingly, there were deeper race fields, fueled by big money in the major marathons; Sawe earned 740,000 British pounds for his London victory, roughly $1 million U.S.

But it still was a marathon, demanding long-term endurance, persistence, pacing as opposed to a short-term burst of energy. Still more of a Tortoise thing than a Hare endeavor. At least until Sawe ran London with such alacrity.

And maybe Sawe shouldn’t look over his shoulder. Women have been officially accepted in marathons only since 1967 yet, in London, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa brought the women’s world-record time down to 2:15:41.

To the typical human, that’s a sprint.

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