Marathon Performance Breakthrough
When I ran my first marathon, the world record was 2:08:34, set by Australian Derek Clayton at Antwerp, Belgium on May 30, 1969. Clayton was the first man to run the marathon in under 2:10. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s the top men in the marathon were from Europe, Australia, North America, Latin America and Japan.
Fast forward to the 1990s… Ethiopian Belayneh Dinsamo held the record from 1988 to 1998. His 2:06:50 on April 17, 1988 at Rotterdam, Netherlands, took the record under 2:07 for the first time.
Fast forward to the present... the world record is now 2:03:59, set by Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie at the Berlin Marathon on September 28, 2008. Last year there were 104 performances of 2:10 or under… that’s 104 marathons run faster than the world record of 40 years ago.
Even more astounding, as the graph (from The Science of Sport website) shows, in 2009 there were 25 performances by 20 individuals that were faster than the world record of only 12 years ago. And in only three years, the number of sub-2:07 runners went from 5 in 2007 to 20 in 2009.
Just as striking is who ran those fast marathons last year. Look at the 20 men who ran under 2:07: 13 are Kenyan, 4 are Ethiopian and 3 are Moroccan. That’s it… no runners from the traditional running powers of only a few decades ago… no Europeans or Russians, no one from North or South America, no Japanese or Koreans, no one from Australia or New Zealand. Open up the analysis to runners who ran 2:10 or faster and the pattern is the same: 64 Kenyans, 27 Ethiopians, 3 Moroccans, 3 Americans (Hall, Ritzenheim and Tegenkamp) and single runners from a handful of other countries.
Reasons for the East African dominance of the men’s marathon (and the longer track races) are discussed in some depth in a recent posting on The Science of Sports blog: http://www.sportsscientists.com/2009/12/top-9-of-2009-number-3-marathon.html
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