Sabastian Sawe’s record marathon time gives hope to everyday runners | Canada Voices

Of all the athletic feats we romanticize – from the four-minute mile to the mounting of Everest – few felt less attainable than running a marathon in under two hours. Until now.

On a calm, sunny Sunday morning in London, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya ran past Buckingham Palace at his fastest pace of the race, 23 kilometres per hour, striding amid thousands of fans and toward history. He crossed the finish line of the London Marathon, arms raised in triumph and legs swinging like perfect pendulums, under a time clock that read something unbelievable to running fans everywhere: 1:59:30.

We had 10 seconds to digest what had just happened before Yomif Kejelcha, a 28-year-old Ethiopian runner competing in his first marathon, finished in second place in 1:59:41. There it was: on April 26, 130 years after the marathon was first contested at the Olympics, two humans officially covered the 42.2-km distance in under two hours.

Sawe, 31, and Kejelcha did the running equivalent of setting foot on Mars – accomplishing a feat that, so far, had only been achievable in theory. When I asked Kejelcha before the race if he thought 1:59 was doable, he chuckled and called it impossible.

That’s what it felt like. In 2019, Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya ran a marathon in 1:59:40, but the performance didn’t count because he was aided by rotating pace makers, cyclists handing him nutrition on the run and a near-perfectly flat course. He was never able to replicate it in real races.

In the fall of 2023, Kelvin Kiptum of Kenya came close to the elusive mark by running two hours and 35 seconds, a new world record, at the Chicago Marathon. He planned to chase 1:59 the next year, but died in a car accident before having the chance to race again. His tragic death, and Kipchoge’s advancing age, made it feel like our likelihood of witnessing a sub-two-hour marathon was slipping away.

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But on Sunday, with little warning, Sawe and Kejelcha propelled humanity into a new echelon. Along with four other runners, the pair crossed the halfway mark in one hour and 29 seconds. Then Sawe sped up, eventually reaching a pace of 4:12 per mile before sprinting into the history books and pulling Kejelcha along with him. He won approximately US$350,000 and an eternal place in running lore.

Sawe is from a farming family in Kenya’s Rift Valley, a high-altitude area that produces many of the world’s best runners. And while he is possibly the most talented of all of them, he is also a product of his time. Running is undergoing massive technological leaps that are making everyone faster.

In London, Sawe wore the Adidas Adios Pro Evo 3, a new groundbreaking racing shoe that’s by far the lightest in the world.

He also benefited from adding running mileage to his training plan, and a tailored nutrition strategy that had him consuming up to 100 grams of carbohydrates an hour through a proprietary blend of glucose and fructose made by the company Maurten. These tech advancements, coupled with the untamable scourge of performance enhancing drugs, have created an era of ultra-fast running – it’s no accident that the London Marathon’s top three finishers, including bronze medalist Jacob Kiplimo, all ran faster than Kiptum’s previous world record.

It would be catastrophic if Sawe was found to be doping, but there is reason to believe that he is clean. In the fall, he partnered with Adidas to fund an extra-rigorous doping testing regimen beyond what’s already required, which had him testing 25 extra times in the two months of training leading up to the Berlin Marathon, which he won last September in 2:02:16.

Assuming he and Kejelcha are clean, the pair has redefined running not only for the elites, but for all of us.

At the top end of sport, even faster times are imminent: shoe brands will aim to catch up to Adidas’ new gold standard, races will pay big money to have fast athletes line up and challenge each other to new records and athletes themselves may redefine what they think is possible. After all, breaking the four-minute mile suddenly became commonplace after Roger Bannister did it first in 1954. The same trend could apply here.

And better shoes, nutrition and training is good news for all of us, whether we are trying to break two, three or four hours.

For decades, the two-hour barrier felt almost untouchable. If we choose to believe the breakthrough is clean, it offers a rare jolt of optimism in a sport shadowed by doping scandals. It suggests that progress at the very edge is still possible – and if the fastest runner in the world can keep improving, maybe the rest of us can, too.