Marathon in under two hours? It’s the last Everest of athletics

 

Now is probably not a great time to be making a new year’s resolution which promises to bend and break all the rules in the quest for those critical marginal gains. It’s hard enough trying to figure out the grey area without putting it all out there in black and white.

Such as trying to run the marathon in under two hours: it doesn’t matter how it’s measured – 26.2 miles, 42.1km, around 138,000 feet – no man has ever run the classic distance in under two hours. Only now, in which even by their own standards is a mostly brilliant publicity stunt, the people at Nike have announced plans to crack that two-hour barrier in the spring of 2017.

And it is the last great ‘barrier’ of athletics – if not sport itself. Along with the sub-four minute mile, and later the 10-second barrier for 100 metres, it represents a sort of Everest of human endeavour, only one that has yet to be conquered.

The current world record is two hours, two minutes, and 57 seconds, set by Kenya’s Dennis Kimetto in Berlin, 2014. That might seem tantalisingly close to that two-hour barrier – a mere 177 seconds over those 26 miles, 385 yards. Yet in some ways it also seems impenetrable.

Since 1998, that world record has been dropping almost four times faster than in the previous decades, and has been broken seven times since 2000. Still, it seems to be stuck in or around that 2:02:57 and some of those in the sports science business have predicted that the two-hour barrier will remain intact until in or around 2075.

Now the people at Nike – in a project titled Breaking2 – intend on fast-tracking that to 2017, although to do so, they’ve bypassed the grey area and gone straight for the black and white: they’ll be using every possible technological advantage, legal or otherwise, ignoring the IAAF’s criteria on where and how marathon world records can be broken, and possibly bending a few more rules along the way.