Flashes of Panic

Before I fly off into speculation, let’s start with the bare facts. This morning, in Berlin, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia ran 26.2 miles (a standard marathon) faster than anyone before in recorded history. His time of 2:04:26 was 29 seconds faster than the previous best, 2:04:55, run by the Kenyan Paul Tergat in 2003 over the same course. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a Haile fan for a dozen years or more, and he’s the one on the right in that remarkably young-looking photo of me from 2001.)

From here, notes. First, there’s the obvious continuation of a long-term pattern: Haile breaks Tergat’s world record. In the wake of the Atlanta Olympics, where Haile won the 10,000m gold medal, Salah Hissou, the bronze medalist, took down the WR in that event; Haile reclaimed it the next spring. In ‘97, Tergat, the silver medalist, broke Haile’s record; Haile took it back the next spring. Most of Gebrselassie’s track records are gone to Kenenisa Bekele now (have I mentioned that?) but this marathon record is like a coda (or a rim-shot, if you look at it from one point of view) to that long-standing rivalry.

Another point: Haile has been trying to do this for years. In 2002, the organizers of the London marathon set up what was supposed to be a great duel between Tergat and Gebrselassie; Khalid Khannouchi won instead, in what was then the world record of 2:05:38. It’s taken Haile a long time to re-make himself into a marathoner, and at the longer distance he’s certainly not the sort of dominant athlete he once was on the track.

Which leads me to what I was speculating about this morning on my own run. In the 1960s, the marathon, which had for sixty years been a race of attrition won by athletes who were able to survive the distance, was revolutionized by an Englishman named Jim Peters. Peters was the first man to run under 2:20 for the marathon, and he did it by training himself to run harder than anyone else for the length of the race. Before Peters, the world record stood at 2:25:39; after him, 2:17:39. Peters opened the door to the 10,000m men, like Segey Popov, Buddy Edelen, and (most memorably) Abebe Bikila.

Since the early ’90s, though, the 10,000m itself has changed, and I think that the belated relocation of the Tergat/Gebrselassie rivalry to the marathon distance signals a change in the way that race is run. Certainly many races will still be won the “old way” just as some smaller marathons are still won by the runner best able to survive the distance, the marathon’s own manifestation of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (heard that from me before?) But I think in the coming decades we’ll see increasing numbers of marathons won by athletes who can cover the entire distance at a terrifyingly fast pace, very close to their anaerobic threshold. The 5,000m in some European meets has already become a long sprint, with the athletes running close to flat out all the way. The 10,000m is headed that way. It will take a long time for that approach to transfer to the marathon, but Haile has now done it, and he won’t be the last.

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