Lowering the marathon mark: Researcher says sub 2-hour record could be reduced by 5 minutes
Only days after the first sub-2 hour marathon , an Australian university professor who has devoted much of his career to studying times over the 42. 195-kilometer (26. 2-mile) event says the mark could improve by more than five minutes.
On Sunday, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya won the London Marathon in 1 hour, 59 minutes and 30 seconds, bettering the previous men’s world record by 65 seconds. He held off Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, who was running his first official marathon and finished in 1:59. 41 — the first two men to complete a marathon in under 2 hours.
Sawe, who arrived home to a hero’s welcome in Kenya on Wednesday, broke the previous mark held by his countryman, Kelvin Kiptum, who died in a car accident in February 2024. Simon Angus of Melbourne's Monash University, who describes himself as a data scientist and economist, analyzes the historical progression of the men’s and women’s world marathon records. He first predicted in a 2019 research paper that the first sub 2-hour men's time wouldn't be achieved until 2032.
In 2023, he revised that prediction to March 2027. With the weekend times in London, Angus says with further modeling, a new benchmark could be 1 hour, 54 minutes – five minutes, 30 seconds faster than Sawe ran in London. That kind of time would set a whole new benchmark.
“I think that should stand a very long test of time, I wouldn't expect this in my children's lifetime,” Angus told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday. "We could be running a different kind of marathon, at the hypothecial, theoretical limit. “There could be rule changes .