What is the single greatest distance running performance of all time?

You're overlooking the line, "Because much of the second half was in fact run at a pattern more resembling fartlek training than championship racing!" Geb was varying the pace and surging to burn off the Kenyans. Perhaps you need a better understanding of how difficult it is to shift gears during a distance race.

I would add that this isn't quite as earth shattering as everyone may think. The previous WR by Kejelcha was 4:23 per mile pace and Kiplimo's current one is right at 4:20 per mile pace. Yes, it's incredible that he literally dropped 3 sec per mile off of the previous record, but I would still argue that seeing 48 total sec taken off the previous record is a little bit deceptive in leading people to think it's a bigger jump than it really is.

Everyone was shocked when Kibiwott Kandie and Kiplimo first broke 57:40 a few years back. Everyone thought that made those two the greatest distance runners on the planet. But then, others like Sawe, Kejelcha, and Berega ran 58 minutes or under and it didn't seem out of the realm of possibility for any of the top guys to run mid 57s.

Now its just a similar situation and if we see even a couple more guys run under 57min, it's going to make Kiplimo's current record appear less mind boggling. For instance I wouldnt doubt for a second that Grant Fisher or even that Swedish dude could handle low 4:20s per mile for the half. Maybe Blanks as well, because I think he is really at least a 26:30 10k guy in the right race.

Using Ron Clark’s % of breaking 28:15 down to 27:39 (x .979), that would be the equivalent of someone breaking 57:30 down to 56:18.

Fair enough. I should reconsider my overall take. Varying acceleration averaging 62 seconds per lap is something to consider.

I'd like you to read my new Kiplimo 56:42 post from just a few minutes ago and respond with your thoughts.

I would say Athing Mu 2024 Olympic Trials

Sorry, I just think the 800 should be included

This is my pick!

Sorry, I thought that the previous message would be included...Zatopek, three golds in 1952!

3:59:04. May 6, 1954. Iffley Road Track, Oxford University, England. In less than four minutes, Bannister broke through a supposed human performance barrier and electrified the global human population. The first ascent of Mt. Everest (May 29, 1953), and the first moonwalk (July 20, 1969) are among the only achievements that compare in modern times.

This argument doesn't make any sense. If someone broke the world record in the mile by three seconds, would you say "Well, three seconds off the world record in the mile sounds like a lot, but really it's only .75 seconds per lap, so it's not really all that impressive"?

I'm amazed that no one's mentioned Henry Rono's four world records in 81 days in 1978:

--5,000 meters: 13:08.4 in Berkeley, California 8 April

--3,000-meter steeplechase: 8:05.4 in Seattle 13 May
--10,000 meters: 27:22.47 in Vienna, Austria 11 June (this was a week after the NCAA championships in Eugene, where he set meet records in the semis and finals {8:18.63 and 8:12.39} of the steeple, and set a meet record in the 5000 of 13:21.79 in the semis)

--3,000 meters: 7:32.1 in Oslo, Norway 27 June

trackandfieldnews.com

T&FN Reboot — Henry Rono’s Incredible ’78 Season - Track & Field News

Sieg Lindstrom

FEBRUARY HAS DELIVERED tragedy and emotional trial for the sport and distance power nation Kenya. A second painful blow landed... Read More

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Bernard Lagat got caught with EPO in his system.he was/is a drug cheat. With what ever technicality, he got away with (B sample was stored improperly, etc...) is irrelevant. EPO was found in his A sample. How did it get there? He put it there.

Apples and oranges and you are making all kinds of assumptions and are expressing some logical fallacies.

Email Zatopek and Sifan Hassan are the answers if you consider "performance" beyond the scope of a single race. If I had to pick one single performance without being able to verify doping allegations with 100% certainty (nobody on this message board can do anything but speculate anyway), it has to be Ruth Chepng'etich's sub 2:10.

I'm curious what people would say if you had to answer for performances that you strongly believe were 100% clean. Maybe Kipchoge or Bekele? I feel like they have both had incredibly long careers that reflect persistent growth without any serious accusations of doping ever holding much weight behind them. Neither of them rose out of nowhere or disappeared rapidly after some incredible performance. Maybe that just means they were better at getting away with it than anyone else. Of course, we can never know.

Thanks. Happy to share my thoughts on Kiplimo's HM. In general, I've been struggling to make sense of the times we've been seeing on the roads since the proliferation of super shoes. I'm particularly troubled by the notion of "super responders." I don't know what to do with that from an analytical perspective. The person who said, "I think the shoes make some of us just roll our eyes at these times" captured the sentiment well.

I think you make a good point about the benefit of passing time in being able to give us a better perspective on whether a new record is a historical outlier or part of a new wave of fast times wrought by the latest tech upgrades. You're right when you talk about Kandie & Kiplimo's 57:3x and the number of runners running 58 and below in the following years making their marks seem more approachable. In Kandie & Kiplimo's Valencia 2020 race alone, four guys including them ran under Geoffrey Kamworor's 58:01 world record, and a fifth ran faster than Zersenay Tadese's previous 58:23 world record which had stood for nearly a decade. So it was pretty clear that super shoes were changing the game.

I think one big difference with Kiplimo's 56:42 compared to Kandie's 57:32 is Kandie had several people within 30 seconds of him in that very race. Kiplimo is now 48 seconds faster than Kejelcha's world record set just four months beforehand. The standard for the world's best half-marathoners (including Kiplimo himself) the past few years in the super shoe era has been pretty well-established at 57:30-58:00, and Kiplimo blew that out of the water. Is that attributed to him reaching a new level that nobody else can match, or is Nike's newest product line that much better? I guess we'll see.

It takes a real twisting of logic to argue that breaking a half marathon world record by 48 seconds isn't that big of a jump.

Yeah, and it’s particularly vexing considering that Membrane’s pick for men is 1:40.91, which is .1 faster than Rudisha’s previous WR and .2 faster than Kipketer ran in ‘97.

His picks for women are 8:06 and 2:09:56, so he seems inclined to go with a crazy WR. Among men’s distance records, 56:42 seems like a viable choice…

1972 Munich Olympic 10,000. Lasse Viren gets knocked down, gets up, and wins in World Record time.

No, I posed a hypothetical scenario in which a different world record got broken, and asked in that scenario whether you would downplay that record in a similar way.