THE CURSE OF 2 HOURS HOW DO YOU SET A MARATHON RECORD?

The limit seems as firm as a concrete wall: No athlete has ever run a marathon in under two hours. But the world’s biggest sporting-goods companies are sparing no expense in their efforts to overcome that hurdle. Here’s the story of attempts involving the finest sports scientists, engineers, and runners…

The stopwatch is displaying 1 minute, 57 seconds as Dennis Kimetto heads into the home stretch. His feet are touching down more than three times per second. Now the runners are only meters from the finish line at Berlin’s Tiergarten. Kimetto is breathing hard, and his muscles are starting to cramp. He’s more than 20,000 paces into the race at this point. Kimetto glances at the clock. And now he knows for sure: He is going to set a new world record for the fastest marathon-running time on this Sunday, September 28, 2014—yet the effort is a failure all the same. Despite great conditions, the real goal will elude him once more as it so often has in the past—beating the two-hour mark for running a marathon… No one has yet…

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iD (Ideas & Discoveries) (Digital) - 1 Issue, May 2018

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