Michael Crawley discusses the race to break the two-hour barrier.
The marathon is a curious distance. Now twenty-six point two miles, it originates with the story of Philippedes, who ran from Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of the Persians. The accuracy of this legend has since been questioned. Herodotus writes that Philippedes actually ran from Athens to Sparta and back, a distance of one-hundred and fifty miles each way.
Modern marathon runners will be glad that it is the former legend that has taken off. Philippedes was presumably without GPS assistance, but Google Maps puts Marathon to Athens at a mere twenty-one miles. The marathon distance was only standardised in 1921. A race held on the original Marathon-Athens route would now be inconsistent with IAAF rules, which state that the start and finish must be separated by no more than half of the total race distance.
If the marathon distance is so arbitrary, so steeped in legend, where does the current obsession with running it in under two hours come from?
There are now three separate projects aiming to run a marathon in 1.59.59 or faster in the near future. The first, the Sub2 project, was launched by sports scientist Yannos Pitsiladis a couple of years ago, and he was swiftly followed by announcements from Nike and Adidas. Pitsiladis now portrays his project as the under-funded underdog, posting photos on Twitter of his team driving around Addis Ababa in an ancient VW Beetle.
Nike’s project, as you might expect, is more cutting-edge, both in terms of its science and its rhetoric. They are working, according to their website, on nothing less than ‘reaching the future faster, rewriting history and the possibilities of human potential in the process.’ They have – of course – a new shoe, as do Adidas. Nike’s is scythe-shaped and bulbous; for a project that claims to be equivalent to ‘putting man on the moon’ it certainly looks the part.
Countless young runners in Ethiopia told me that the keys to success were consistency, patience and gradual improvement. These are all, by definition, absent from the various two-hour projects.
Adidas posted a photo of their own shoe on their Instagram account following the Tokyo marathon. Wilson Kipsang stands at a busy intersection, an intense look in his eye, the shoes he wore in the race (‘energy blue’) held up in offering for the camera. A video piece on Wired magazine’s website shows Matthew Nurse, Nike’s Sports Research Lab Director, who tells us that he has shown their new shoe to their external partners and that ‘their best scientifical (sic) term was they’re just magical’. The emphasis, then, is firmly on the ‘product’; a special Swedish carbohydrate drink in the case of the Sub2 project, shoes and apparel for Nike and Adidas.
All of this puts the lab, and ‘technology’, before the athlete. My coach – very much an old-school, tried-and-tested hundred-miles-a-week sort of guy – likes to tell a story about one of his contemporaries. In the early days of sports physiology he underwent some lab testing in the hope of gleaning some useful information to fine-tune his training. They cut a small slice out of his thigh muscle to do a biopsy, causing him to hobble around for several days afterwards. When he finally got the eagerly-anticipated results of the test, he was told that the biopsy ‘indicated that he could sustain a fast pace for quite a long time.’ My coach laughs at this. His friend’s response, apparently, was ‘I bloody knew that already!’
This is the problem with all three projects; the ‘science’ seems merely to confirm what the athletes already know, but it is presented as an accumulation of variables and insights that can make the three minute difference between the current world record of 2.02.57 and 1.59.59. Whilst the Nike project’s website is all about using the latest technology to move the marathon world record forward, Kipchoge’s interview with a local Kenyan newspaper made his feelings clear. ‘This effort’ he said, ‘won’t require a robot or superman drilled to perfection by scientific faith and medicine, but a good, time-tested human heart, blood and sheer resolve.’ He added that his training would all take place at his rural Kaptagat camp, with the occasional ‘improvised’ gym session and a diet of rice and beans.
As far as I am concerned, the most important variable here is a man called Eliud Kipchoge. Special, aero-dynamic tape, which Nike plan to attach to the runners’ calves, might make a fraction of a percent difference. Swallowing a tiny thermometer so that scientists can monitor the athletes’ core temperatures likewise. The shoes, it seems, might be slightly more significant. But Nike carefully chose the three athletes for their attempt at the two-hour marathon on the basis of lab testing, which put Ethiopian Lelisa Desisa ‘consistently in the top three’ on numbers like VO2 max and running economy. They narrowed their contenders down ‘from 60, to 18, to 3’. And yet when they ran their test half marathon in March, on the race track at Monza that Nike have selected for their attempt, Desisa finished almost four minutes behind Kipchoge.
These attempts are not about the shoes, or the ingestible thermometers. They are about the transcendent talents who can take something like the two-hour marathon and make it look even remotely possible.
Kipchoge is, and has been for almost a generation, a class apart from anyone except perhaps the mercurial Kenenisa Bekele, poster-boy for the Sub2 project. An old YouTube video makes this point better than I can. The 2003 World Championships 5,000m, billed by the commentators as a clash between Hicham El Guerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele that would decide the year’s athlete of the year award. Not until the last lap do they mention Kipchoge. ‘El Guerrouj’ the commentator intones breathlessly, ‘has Chebii back in fourth place and he’s got Bekele in third and another Kenyan right there, that’s…’ That was an 18-year-old Eliud Kipchoge, ready to blow past everyone with a 53 second last lap. ‘You hear about child prodigies that can play the piano,’ the commentator says in the aftermath, ‘but how can you do that at eighteen? You should be in high school’.
Kipchoge has been at the top of his sport for 14 years. He is spoken of in reverential tones by athletes from all over East Africa. I watched his commanding performance in London marathon last year from the race hotel of the Istanbul half marathon with a young Ugandan named Somikwo. ‘Kipchoge is like a ghost,’ he told me. ‘You run two minutes thirty for one kilometer and you cannot hear him, but he is there. You run two minutes, he is there’. His style is perfectly suited to the marathon. He flows, and he flows very fast.
So when the Footwear Innovation VP of Nike, Tony Bignell, does an interview in which he says he is ‘super confident in the product, but I also know that’s got to translate to the human beings’ actually running the race, before adding that ‘we’re doing everything we can to put them on the start line to be able to achieve their goal’ it makes me feel uncomfortable. Kipchoge has already done mind-blowing things in running, and projects like this threaten to devalue his achievements. When Bignell says that Nike have ‘done all they can,’ he implies that Kipchoge is to blame if the project fails.
What happens when the idea of a two-hour marathon – out of the reach, almost certainly, of even the majestic Kipchoge – becomes normal? That is what these projects are doing, and from my experience working as an anthropologist with Ethiopian runners, it seems that this is having knock-on effects further down the running hierarchy. This is how the coach I knew put it;
When a record is broken, everyone becomes happy, don’t they? I am not happy. Why? Because as a coach the bar has been raised. It can make you lose hope.
In the lower echelons of the sport, where journeymen runners try to make a living, put a roof over their heads and maybe send their siblings to school with the proceeds of their running careers, this raising of the bar can be the difference between a promising career and a career-threatening injury. As the bar is raised, so too are the risks involved in a running career. Countless young runners in Ethiopia told me that the keys to success were consistency, patience and gradual improvement. These are all, by definition, absent from the various two-hour projects.
They explained to me the hierarchy of short-cuts available to Ethiopian runners. Overtraining came first on this list, and I saw enough people trying to run crazy 200-mile weeks to know how risky that is. Second came witchcraft, which could bring short-term success at a heavy price. And the third, and perhaps the most obvious, was doping. Jos Hermens, the manager of both Kenenisa Bekele and Eluid Kipchoge, the most likely pair to come close to two hours has said ‘we don’t care if the first sub-two hour marathon is IAAF record eligible. First, we achieve it, then we do it record eligible.’ With this logic it almost seems strange not to use performance-enhancing drugs, which we can assume have been used for at least some of the fastest marathon times to date and have been proven to bring major improvements.
I am as intrigued as any other athletics fan to see how fast Kipchoge can run at the Autodromo di Monza later in the year. But for me, these attempts are not about the shoes, or the ingestible thermometers. They are about the transcendent talents who can take something like the two-hour marathon and make it look even remotely possible.
Whilst Nike, Adidas and the Sub2 project look for improvements in performance by investing in science and medicine, or by offering financial incentives, it may well be that this approach does the opposite of what they intend. As geographer John Bale has pointed out, the standards in the ‘work like’ athletic events of distance running tend to fall with increased economic development. Many of the Ethiopians I met were sceptical about whether we will see another athlete as driven as Bekele. The up-and-coming athletes of today are too distracted by technology, too tempted by living life in the city. And why shouldn’t they enjoy themselves?
I would be surprised if we saw a marathon run under two hours in an official race within the next quarter of a century.
Michael Crawley is a Professor in Anthropology at Durham University.
