Four minutes and thirty-four seconds per mile. That’s the pace it will take to run a marathon in less than two hours. With the current world record at 2hrs 2mins 57secs, it means running more than six seconds per mile faster than any man has run in history. Many of those at the top of the sport – those who know firsthand what it feels like to push at the limits of human endurance – say it is unfathomable.
And yet history suggests that it really is just a matter of time before it happens. So who and what will it take to do it? For Ed Caesar, author of Two Hours: The Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon, it is less a question of who than of how.
“I think you’re talking about a project whose singular aim it is to run sub-two hours. At the moment, you have this system whereby the best athletes run twice a year in the major marathons. It’s always a race, no matter what happens. But the fact is that the really fast times are going to be run when people worry about their time and nothing else.”
No stranger to investigative reporting – he has won six major journalism awards – Caesar’s book is the product of some eight two-week trips to training camps in Kenya and Ethiopia, hundreds of interviews and hours spent in the pace truck at big races watching what he describes as “one of the most amazing aesthetics in sport”. That the book centres on athletes from Africa’s Rift Valley should come as no surprise. All 15 major marathons raced between the spring of 2011 and the autumn of 2013 were won either by Kenyans (12) or Ethiopians (three), and Kenyans have dominated all of the fastest times in the world over the past five years. These champions almost all come from one tribe, the Kalenjin, who moved from the lowlands of the Nile Valley to the highlands of the Rift Valley centuries ago. Being “sea-level dwellers living high, compared to living there for millennia”, Caesar explains, appears to be why they respond better than anyone to living and training at altitude.
Meeting Mutai
Ed Caesar with Geoffrey Mutai
Geoffrey Mutai – the book’s chief protagonist and at one stage the fastest man in history, having set a “world best” of 2hrs 3mins 2secs in Boston in 2011 – is a Kipsigis, a subtribe of the Kalenjin. Genes are only ever going to be part of the answer, though, Caesar says. “To me, it’s a virtuous circle: Kenyans win marathons, therefore more Kenyans run marathons. They have this huge belief that anyone from that part of the world can run. That goes a long way.”
Then there is their feet. In the book, Caesar describes how bulging foot muscles and strong, elastic arches, developed through years spent barefoot as children on rough roads make for super-strength feet that return more energy to the runner when they hit the ground. This training continues even when they put on shoes. “Mutai’s group do no work on the track at all. To me, that was amazing: these world-class athletes were training on bumpy roads all the time. I just thought there must be something in that.”
A more sinister answer to the riddle has been suggested in recent years: doping. Caesar doesn’t shy away from it. “My short description of the doping scene in Kenya is that it’s there, but it’s not everywhere. The truth is, you hear rumours in Kenya at some point or another about everyone. I just tried to remain sceptical without being cynical, because some of the things that Kenyans have done in the last few years have been absolutely astonishing and I don’t think doping is the full story. However, I do think doping might have something to do with the sheer volume of people running, say, sub-2:08 times.”
Reading Two Hours, much of which digs deep into Geoffrey Mutai’s story, you get the sense that the author suspects the main reason why it is likely to be a Kenyan that breaks the two-hour mark is much simpler: guts. Take this passage from the book: ‘The professional marathon is a savage, enthralling sport. Many of its greatest protagonists – who seem possessed of an enviable lightness – carry with them the heavy reckoning of wretched childhoods. It is no exaggeration to say that the man who runs the first sub-two-hour marathon will have overcome not only a sporting challenge but an existential one.’
Moonshot marathon
Caesar is prepared to believe that the athlete capable of running two hours is already among us, but to do it will take more than a flat course: it will take what he calls a “moonshot marathon”. “If you’re really interested in finding out how quickly someone can run 26 miles and 385 yards, you’d get them off the tarmac,” he says. He suggests creating a tune track – “something that’s going to return a bit more energy to their legs” – of maybe 6–8 kilometres, built at sea level, somewhere flat and out of the wind. But the major issue, he says, is getting it paced from start to the finish. That, and money. A wind tunnel study has shown that you can save roughly a hundred seconds off a marathon runner’s time, while running at two-hour pace, by having someone shielding them from the wind. But to persuade the top athletes – and their promoters – to take a punt at the moonshot, let alone be one of the pacers, it would have be structured so that everyone gets paid if just one person does it. “I think this idea that a team would be working together to get to two hours is quite a powerful one. These guys all train
in groups. It’s not a solitary sport in Kenya.”
A number of these ideas contravene existing International Association of Athletic Federation rules, not least that all marathon world-records have to be set on “made up roads”. But the moonshot is being talked about in certain circles. “Kimetto did it in 2:02:57 having run a pretty astonishing race, and to take two minutes and 57 seconds out of that performance right now is impossible,” says Caesar. “What I actually think might happen is that we spend another 10 years taking little bites out of it and get down to 2:02 low. Then I think people will take the idea of the moonshot a bit more seriously, because it might plateau at that point, and people are interested in seeing what’s possible.”
