Fast times: what will it take to run the
marathon in under two hours?
|
| The world’s best marathon runners are
just 177 seconds from breaking the two-hour barrier: what will
it take to get there (apart from drugs)? |
| |
| By Ed Caesar |
The
Guardian |
| |
 |
| Current
world record holder Dennis Kimetto (second from left) battles to
hold off eventual winner Eliud Kipchoge at the 2015 London
marathon. Photograph: Action Images/Reuters/Paul Childs Livepic |
| |
Shortly before nine on a bright autumn
morning in Berlin, Geoffrey Kiprono Mutai prepared to run a
marathon faster than any human being – even he – had run before.
It was a wild, audacious proposition, to propel one’s body to
such a ragged extreme, and he felt the walls of his quest
closing in on him.
Mutai is 170cm tall and weighs 57kg. He has a wide, expressive
face, with a high forehead, elfin ears and long, gleaming teeth.
Most often, you find him amiable, amused, desirous of news and
gossip, a flashy smile close by. But now he looked as vulnerable
as a foundling.
There were two dozen professional athletes on either side of him
on the start line, and around 41,000 runners behind. Penned
together, they bobbed and lilted like a gentle sea against a
harbour wall. Mutai said his habitual prayers – for clemency,
for strength and courage, for his stringy legs, veterans of tens
of thousands of miles of training, to carry him another 26 miles
and 385 yards.
The official marathon world record on that September morning in
2012 was two hours, three minutes, 38 seconds, set the previous
year in Berlin by Patrick Makau of Kenya. But Mutai was not
interested in 2:03:38. Although he made no announcement of his
intentions, he wished not only to break Makau’s world record,
but to annihilate it.
His grievance stretched back to eighteen months before, when he
had won the 2011 Boston marathon in an astonishing 2:03:02 – a
course record by nearly three minutes. But it wouldn’t stand as
an official world record: despite being the oldest continuously
contested marathon in the world, Boston does not count for world
record purposes. (A world record must be run on a looped course,
with the start and finish separated by no more than 50% of the
42.2km distance; the net downhill must be no greater than one
metre per kilometre.) Mutai believed something precious had been
stolen from him.
|
As he stood at the head of the vast herd,
high banks of loudspeakers began to play the kind of jangling
electronic string music you hear in game shows. Over these
shifting arpeggios came the sound of a stout man with a
microphone, counting down the final seconds before the gun.
“Ten!” he shouted, in English. “Nine! Eight! Seven…” Mutai stood
still, his chest pushed forward in anticipation of movement.
For the past two decades, athletes from Kenya and Ethiopia have
utterly dominated the professional marathon. In the Nandi Hills
of Kenya, or on the training trails of Addis Ababa, athletes
know each other not just by name but by personal best. That guy
is a two‑oh-eight. This one is a two‑oh-five.
Just how low will those numbers fall? Right now, the world
record for the marathon is 2:02:57, set by Dennis Kimetto of
Kenya in Berlin last year. Is a sub-two-hour marathon possible?
In 1986, a medical student called Mike Joyner began considering
this question. He’d been working on papers that investigated how
measures such as lactate threshold, running economy and lung
capacity (all of which have a limiting effect on running speed
and endurance) related to athletic performance. What would it be
possible for a human being to run, he wondered, if he had the
best possible physiological values? If his heart and lungs and
legs were the strongest and most efficient they could be? He
drew up a model and came to a surprisingly specific number.
Given ideal conditions, and the ideal runner, Joyner concluded
that the best time in which a marathon could be completed was
one hour, 57 minutes, 58 seconds.
He wrote up his findings and eventually his paper, peer-reviewed
and rubber-stamped, appeared in the Journal of Applied
Physiology in 1991. At the time, the world’s fastest marathon
was 2:06:50, and the two-hour mark existed only at the far
reaches of the imagination: the Narnia of distance running. But
Joyner’s paper became the seminal document in the debate. He is
now a professor of anaesthesiology and has been working at the
Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, since 1987, on a wide range
of topics, from gene studies to cardiovascular disease; but none
of his work has stuck to him as much as his famous 1991 paper.
Why does it matter whether the sub-two-hour marathon is
possible? And, if it is possible, what will it mean when the
first 1:59:59 marathon is run? At one level, the achievement
will signify nothing. The marathon length is a scruffy figure,
fixed by the Olympic Committee only in 1921, to match the course
of the 1908 London Olympic marathon, which was itself designed
to accommodate the peculiar viewing demands of the British royal
family. (The royals wished to see the race start underneath a
terrace at Windsor Castle, so their children could watch; for
their benefit, the race was also stretched at the other end to
include a full lap of the old White City stadium.) Why should we
care if some extraordinary person can run this arbitrary
distance in just over, or just under, two hours?
 In
Kenya, athletes know each other not just by names but by
personal bests: 'He's a two-oh-eight. He's a two-oh-five'
Nobody finds the marathon easy – even professionals, especially
professionals. The distance is democratic. It has become an
event against which hordes of people – fat people, thin people,
people crooked by time and people sprightly as foals, rich
people and people in need – test themselves. There are now more
than 500 marathons all over the world, and more competitors than
at any time in the history of the sport.
The two-hour debate is irresistible. It arises every time a man
breaks the marathon world record. In 2003, the Kenyan Paul
Tergat crested the tape at the Berlin marathon in 2:04:55.
(Before that race, only “world bests” were recognised. Tergat’s
time, which crushed Khalid Khannouchi’s 17-month-old world best
by 43 seconds, was the first ratified marathon “world record”.)
At the post-race press conference, Tergat was asked the
question: could someone break the two-hour barrier? “I believe
records are set to be broken, and to fall lower is possible,” he
said. “But what remains impossible is running a marathon in
under two hours.” He smiled, and added: “Maybe time will chide
me.”
|
If Tergat was
sceptical, you could see why. He was reflecting on the abyss
into which he had just pushed his own body in order to run
2:04:55. The prospect of running a whole five minutes faster
than this was unfathomable, too much slack for the brain to
handle. But nobody was suggesting a 1:59:59 marathon would be
reached in one giant leap. Patrick Makau’s 2011 world record,
2:03:38, beat Haile Gebrselassie’s 2:03:59 from 2008 by 21
seconds, which in turn beat Gebrselassie’s previous best from
2007 by 27 seconds, which beat Tergat’s landmark of 2:04:55.
Tim Noakes, one of the world’s leading exercise physiologists,
and the author of the influential book Lore Of Running, believes
that these incremental advances are connected to how the brains
of top athletes communicate with their bodies. “When you start
running,” he says, “you know what the world record is, so you
don’t have to run 10 minutes faster than the world record. Your
whole focus is to run one second faster than the world record.
That’s what your brain is keyed in on. And that programming
occurs all the time in running and is terribly important.”
The brains of elite athletes are only as obstructive as they are
programmed to be – as one recent experiment showed. In 2011,
Professor Kevin Thompson of the University of Northumbria
assembled a group of enthusiastic bike riders for a laboratory
test. These cyclists were placed on stationary bikes in front of
screens, hooked up to oxygen monitors, and asked to race a
computer-generated cyclist avatar. Each rider had previously set
a personal best for a 4,000m time trial on the machine. The
avatar they were now racing represented that personal best.
Records
are set to be broken,' Tergat said, 'but what remains impossible
is running a marathon in under two hours'
Within 5km of the start line in Berlin in 2012, a disaster
occurred: the display on the pace car froze. It showed 2:50 per
kilometre – a two-hour marathon pace. In fact, the leading
runners were clocking nearly three-minute kilometres, which
would be good enough only for a 2.06 finish. It was a tiny
difference, and Mutai and his fellow runners soon understood the
problem, but the elite marathon is a sport of tiny margins. The
fastest times are achieved when races are run at an even pace
from start to finish, or with a “negative” split, with the
second half slightly faster than the first. Start the race too
fast and you’ll kill a record attempt stone dead. Start too slow
and you’ll have to make up too much ground.
Mutai was now in the second category. He reached halfway in
62:12. By his own recollection, it was only then that he
seriously considered the scale of the challenge confronting him.
Having run the first half 42 seconds slower than he had hoped,
he understood dimly that the sub‑2:03 marathon was gone already.
But he still believed he had a shot at Makau’s world record of
2:03:38. In order to break it, he would need to run the second
half of the race in 61:26. Only two men in history had run that
fast in the second half of a marathon: the Brazilian Ronaldo da
Costa, in Berlin, in 2003, after a sluggish first half; and
Mutai himself, in Boston, in 2011. The question was: did Mutai
have the legs?
In the next 10km, just as the course rose slightly in gradient,
he caught fire. At 25km, as planned, two “rabbits” (athletes who
for reasons of schedule, finance or talent are paid a few
thousand dollars to run a limited section as pacemakers) dropped
out, leaving the lead group paced by only one man: Victor
Kipchirchir, a training partner of Mutai.
The pace quickened. Jonathan Maiyo felt tight and began to
weaken. He was soon dropped from the lead group. Geoffrey
Kamworor also failed to respond to the rising pace in his first
marathon and lost touch with the leaders shortly afterwards. At
30km, the final rabbit, Kipchirchir, made his scheduled exit.
Now it was only Mutai and his training partner Dennis Kimetto,
head to head for the final quarter of the race. As they had done
many times together, at an altitude of nearly 9,000ft (2,700m)
on the rough hills around their base in the forests of Kenya,
they drove each other on. From 30km to 35km, the pair ran a
14:18 split, which is absurdly fast. (A whole marathon run at
this pace would finish in two hours and 40 seconds.)
Mutai's
heart pistoned at over 160bpm. His lungs bellowed half a gallon
with each breath. He took three strides a second
As Mutai led the charge, he dipped his head in trademark fashion
and a hint of a snarl appeared at the corner of his mouth – a
look he refers to as, “Now, business.” Within his body, there
was a tumult of exertion. His heart pistoned at over 160 beats a
minute. His lungs bellowed half a gallon with every breath. He
took three strides a second. In his cells, the complex process
powering his heart and lungs and legs – the burning and
resynthesising of adenosine triphosphate – created three times
as much heat as energy. And so he was hot, too hot. His body,
losing around three litres of sweat an hour, grew slick with
moisture. Lactic acid began to singe his muscles. Everything but
his conscious mind screamed, “Stop!” And still he ran.
How does it feel to travel so fast, so late in a marathon? Mutai
described the sensation as “fighting inside”, as if your body is
at war with itself. Another former runner said it is like
putting your hand in a bowl of hot water: you have to keep your
hand in, while the water just keeps getting hotter and hotter –
take your hand out and you lose the race.
Mutai is, of course, accustomed to these sensations. He later
told me that he drew strength from the crowds that lined the
roads. He could feel that “people love me” and he was determined
to repay that affection with a Herculean effort, to consciously
override the signals his body was sending him. “I sacrificed
myself,” he remembered.
There are many observers who look at the times now being run in
the marathon with a raised eyebrow. Dope infects almost all
professional sports. For every athlete who wishes to ascend to
the highest plane of competition under his own steam, there will
always be athletes who desire a short cut. Marathon running is
no different. (Tom Hicks won the St Louis Olympic marathon
jacked up on strychnine and brandy, and it nearly killed him.
That was in 1904.)
There was once an Elysian view of the sport of distance running
that wilfully exempted east Africans from the temptations of
others. Journalists saw the humble manner in which Kenyan and
Ethiopian runners lived, and concluded that cheating in such
circumstances simply wasn’t possible. This myth has now been
exploded. In the past two years, several east African distance
runners have tested positive for banned performance-enhancing
drugs, including steroids and the hormone erythropoietin, or
EPO, which stimulates red blood cell production and the
transport of oxygen into the bloodstream.
|
Some of the busted
athletes have been well-known figures, but most have been
nobodies. Three years ago, I sat in the twin room of a four-star
hotel in which two low-level Kenyan runners were preparing their
vests and bibs for the following day’s marathon. They wanted to
talk to me about drugs, and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Their personal bests were relatively modest in Kenyan terms, and
they barely covered their expenses to travel to a race in a
bleak European capital with only a few thousand euros in prize
money. They talked for a long time as they sat on their beds,
with the burble of the television and the sound of rain against
the windows in the background.
The
two Kenyan runners, whose personal bests were above 2:10, said
anything below 2:06 was 'suspicious'
The two runners said that, in Kenya, there were “so many bad
doctors, you can’t count them”. They described a system whereby
these “doctors”, who were mostly quack pharmacists based in the
town of Eldoret, would sell an athlete a course of
performance-enhancing drugs in exchange for either cash or a
share of their winnings. The drug in question, although they
didn’t name it explicitly, seemed to be EPO. (They referred
often to a drug for “the blood”.) And the relationship between
the athlete and the “doctor”, said the two runners, was “24/7”:
they were always on hand to provide masking agents, should the
testers come calling.
Most of this information was talked about openly enough,
especially among European agents and coaches (although before my
meeting with the two athletes, I had never heard such a detailed
description of the process). Some Kenyan stars also discussed
the problem in a roundabout way. In the narratives of many
high-profile athletes, doping was seen as something that “lazy”
runners did in lieu of training. This was a wilfully wrongheaded
view. As the Tour de France scandals showed, drugs are used for
precisely the opposite reason: to train and race harder.
The two athletes in the hotel named almost every star in Kenyan
marathon running and accused them of doping. The allegations
were shocking, though the basis for their specific charges
seemed thin. They simply didn’t believe it was possible to run
the spectacular times that had now become commonplace on the
marathon circuit without illegal assistance. These two runners,
who had personal bests above 2:10, said anything below 2:06 for
a marathon was “suspicious”.
One of the runners laughed when I expressed surprise. “You think
you can run two‑oh-three, only with blood?” he asked. Well, yes,
I did think that. I still do.
From a layman’s perspective, it’s not obvious what kind of edge
EPO would give a Kenyan who has already spent his whole life
running at altitude. The number of red blood cells in his system
is already likely to be high, and there is a limit to how many a
person can have before he or she is at risk of a heart attack or
stroke. (This dangerous abundance of red blood cells is known in
medicine as polycythaemia.)
But this apparent common sense is wrong: EPO does help
altitude-born-and-raised Kenyans. A recent study by the
University of Glasgow conducted tests on a group of Scottish
runners, and Kenyan athletes from running country, and found
that their performances benefited equally from a course of EPO.
If there were a wonder drug for distance runners, it would be
one that aided recovery. Marathoners have always logged
extraordinary mileage, and their biggest problem is staying
healthy for races. The “high volume, high intensity” philosophy
requires a mixture of speedwork sessions lasting an hour or more
in order to build resistance to a fast race pace, and long runs
at a high tempo. Being able to complete such punishing sessions
day after day is the key to staying competitive. So it is in the
field of recovery that the marathon is most vulnerable to
cheating. In theory, athletes could stop taking illicit
substances weeks before a race, and show up to a marathon clean
– with hundreds of high-quality, ill-gotten miles in their legs.
Some former runners believe the elite have been doping for
years. These views come from surprising places. In 1999, for
instance, Mo Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar – currently under
extreme pressure after the BBC and ProPublica linked his
athletes to banned substances – gave a presentation to the Duke
Conference on Doping in Sport in which he made several
fascinating remarks, not least this one: “I believe that it is
currently difficult to be among the top five in the world in any
of the distance events without using EPO or human growth
hormone. While some of the top athletes may be clean, so many
athletes are running so fast that their performances are
suspect. This is compounded for me by the fact that the times
these athletes are running just happen to coincide exactly with
what top exercise physiologists have calculated taking EPO would
produce.”
In 1999, you could have an argument about who the top five
distance runners were, but there was no doubt about the top two:
Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia and Paul Tergat of Kenya. Was
Salazar saying he believed they were dopers? (Salazar told me
last year that he no longer stands by the comments he made in
1999, and that he “did not reference the athletes you call
out”.)
|
Salazar has long been
the subject of scrutiny about his methods. In 2013, a Wall
Street Journal investigation into his (and his sponsor Nike’s)
relationship with a doctor named Jeffrey Brown found that many
of Salazar’s athletes had been treated by Brown for a syndrome
called “hypothyroidism”. Galen Rupp, Mo Farah’s training partner
and 10,000m Olympic silver medallist in 2012, was one such
patient. Treating athletes for hypothyroidism is not illegal,
and it’s also not clear what kind of benefit it would give an
elite runner. (The treatment is a synthetic hormone called
levothyroxine – not a banned substance, though it has been
suggested it helps with swift weight loss.) But the very fact
that so many of Salazar’s charges have been diagnosed with the
condition has caused suspicion. After Jos Hermens, who manages
many of the best east African runners, watched his athletes
being trounced at the 2012 Olympics by Salazar’s, he told a
Dutch journalist, “Science has triumphed over nature.”
But what of the supposedly widespread nature of doping in east
Africa? Should we consider every fast marathon as suspicious?
What counts as suspicious? 2:06? 2:04? 2:02? In 1991, Joyner
estimated a physiological ceiling for running a marathon:
1:57:58. So what extra time on top of that should we allow
today’s best runners?
For
Kenyan runners, most of whom grew up poor, the prize money for
one win can change a life
The fastest men fall under the most suspicion, which may not be
fair. There is as much motivation for a middling talent to dope
as there would be for a supreme one. This is true particularly
for Kenyan runners, almost all of whom grew up dirt poor. The
prize money for one win, even in a low-grade marathon, can
change a life.
Geoffrey Mutai has fallen under more suspicion than most,
because he has run fantastic times in an aggressive manner. But
in the three years I spent following Mutai, staying in his
training camp and watching him at home and at races, he was
tested many times for blood and urine. He has never given a
positive test, and I had no reason to suspect him of doping.
Troubled by the reputation his country’s runners were
attracting, Mutai said he wanted more testing, more often, to
prove his innocence. “I am clean,” he told me. “I want all
athletes in Kenya to remain clean. Any time, anywhere, I am
ready for testing. It gives me pain when people see me run fast
and say I have used drugs. If I have used them, then God take
everything from me – I cannot enjoy it.”
You can be sure that if and when a man breaks two hours for the
marathon, the whiff of disbelief will hang around him every day
of his life.
At the 35km mark in Berlin, Mutai’s sacrifice appeared to have
paid off. Despite the botched beginning, both he and Kimetto
were now inside world record pace. All they had to do was hold
on. If they ran a 2:56/km pace for the final 7.2km of the race –
which seemed, given their earlier pace, possible – the world
record would fall to one or the other.
The path that had led Mutai to this position would have broken
lesser men. The eldest of 11 children, he had suffered not only
deep poverty, but a fractious relationship with his father,
periods of insecurity about shelter and food, and a hair-raising
brush with the tribal violence that scarred Kenya after the
disputed 2007 elections. Before he had become a professional
runner, he had worked in back-breaking jobs: smashing rocks in a
quarry and cutting down trees. As a pro, he had run 125 miles a
week, up and down hills, at altitude.
Now, here he was, at the quickest marathon in the world, with a
chance to break the world record. The opportunity might not come
around again. The elite marathon is a brutal sport. The best
runners compete only twice a year at the full marathon. There
are only a handful of courses, and a handful of days, upon which
to run fast. This was one of them. He and his training partner,
Kimetto, were half an hour from glory.
|
Perhaps inevitably,
they couldn’t do it. The prodigious acceleration just after
halfway took its toll, and by 40km, slowing markedly, both
athletes were eight seconds outside world record pace, and
spent. Mutai’s right hamstring began to tighten. The pain moved
to his hip and back. Kimetto – high-shouldered, and seemingly in
better shape – ran at his back.
Facing the final 2km, the pair ran into the breeze, rather
slowly. They seemed headed for a very fast time, but not a world
record. As Mutai and Kimetto ran through the Brandenburg Gate
shoulder to shoulder, 400m from the end, the spectators raised
their voices in anticipation of a sprint finish.
But the kick never came. In a finale in which a burst from
either man would have sealed the race decisively, Kimetto
finished the race as he had run most of it: just behind his
colleague. Mutai raised his arms weakly as he crossed the line
in a time of 2:04:15. Seconds later, the two men shared a limp,
exhausted hug.
Why no sprint? There were half a million reasons why. If Kimetto
had beaten his training partner, Mutai might have lost the
$500,000 World Marathon Majors jackpot he was in line to win
after his runs in Boston and New York the previous year.
(Kimetto had no chance of winning that money himself, this being
his first marathon.) Meanwhile, Kimetto was not just Mutai’s
training partner. For the previous few years, like many in the
village where he trained, he had been fed and housed by Mutai.
If he had sprinted past his boss under the Brandenburg Gate,
everyone in that village would have lost. Marathon runners are
not just athletes; they are economies.
Any kind of arrangement between the two was vehemently denied by
the athletes themselves, while their manager, Gerard Van de
Veen, told journalists, “There was no deal.” Mutai told me that
he and Kimetto were dog tired: neither man could have done
anything more.
Mutai’s finishing time of 2:04:15 was the fastest that anybody
ran in 2012. For the second year in a row, he was the quickest
marathoner on the planet. These statistics brought him little
comfort. He signed autographs and smiled for photographs, but
left Berlin with the sense of an opportunity lost, of a tide
untaken.
In September 2014, Kimetto returned to Berlin and achieved what
Mutai had failed to do: he ran the first 2:02 marathon. Kimetto
does not have Mutai’s grace – his stiff-backed style makes him
look haughty and a trifle uncomfortable – but his effort was
extraordinary, and his finishing time would have been science
fiction to runners of the 1990s.
The world record is still two minutes and 57 seconds away from
the two-hour mark. What’s 177 seconds? It’s a pop song, a long
commercial break. In marathon terms, however, those 177 seconds
are a lifetime. A marathon run in two hours dead requires an
average of 4:35 per mile, or 2:50 per kilometre – nearly a 3%
improvement. In the abstract, this difference seems trifling. In
reality, it’s a chasm.
The chasm can be bridged, but it may take a reimagining of the
sport to do so. What may need to change is not the shape of the
athletes’ bodies, but the shape of races. If you really wanted
to see how fast a man could run 26.2 miles, you would take them
off the roads and on to a more forgiving surface. You’d allow
pacemakers to come in and out of the race, right until the
finishing line. You’d make sure the temperature was very cold,
to combat the extreme heat that elite marathoners generate, and
that the course was flat and entirely sheltered from the wind.
Several deep thinkers – including Mutai – have already
considered what such a race could achieve. It might take a rich
man with a flair for publicity (Richard Branson, perhaps) or a
shoe company with a motive (Adidas, Nike) to see it happen. But
that’s the way to break two hours. “Organise it like that,”
Mutai told me, “and people can run crazy times.”
As a species, we are interested in outlandish feats, and our
brains cleave to landmarks. The two-hour quest has become the
sport’s Everest. Those final 177 seconds will not fall easily.
But somewhere there is a runner alive, right now, who has
glimpsed the mountain top, and who will set his mind upon its
conquest.
This is an edited extract from Two Hours: The Quest To Run
The Impossible Marathon, by Ed Caesar, published next month by
Viking at £16.99. To order a copy for £12.99, go to
bookshop.theguardian.com, or call 0330 333 6846. (Free UK p&p
over £10, online orders only; phone orders £1.99 minimum p&p.) |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
|
|
|
