Dinsamo marathon WR stood for 10 years (1988-1998)

Yes. And enough time to make sure crooked officials had been put in place to “adjust things” for the desired outcomes.

I agree. People overlook the political aspects, the social conditioing involved. They don’t understand the thinking behind “demoralization campaigns”, etc.

Number of men's WRs in this period:

800m 3

1500m 3

3000m 4

5000m 6

10000m 9

Steeple 5

Ahmed Salah from Djibouti ran 2:07.07 in the same race.

After Steve Jones and Carlos Lopez (also Rotterdam) in the mid-80s the marathon times hardly improved until 1998.

Was it because of drug testing that Coe's WR stod so long? Or Bekele's WR's?

Clayton's 2:08:33 stood from 1969 to 1983. It seems like once people knew they could run under 2:08 they chipped away at the record as did Dinsamo whose time stood for ten years. It sure as anything looked to me like we'd pretty much run the marathon as fast as humans could run it. And then EPO came along. And yes, it did take time to develop a test for it and to expand the system for testing. I once thought a low 2:06 or MAYBE a high 2:05 was the fastest we'd ever see and it would be a very long time until we'd see it.

But marathoning has changed quite a bit since Dinsamo's time was bettered. There was not the emphasis on fast times as there is now. There was always some but not like now. Greg Meyer has said he could have run noticeably faster than 2:09:00 when he won Boston in 1983 but he knew he had the win sewn up with four miles to go and eased up a bit. Shorter used to talk about "coasting" in the last few miles of marathons he knew he'd won. If there had been big cash bonuses for course records or bettering specific times we probably would have seen faster times back then.

Money in the marathon got bigger, Performance bonuses came along which I think means that the best runners, ones who raced on the track in earlier years, move to the marathon at the start of their careers. Rabbiting has become professionalized. All of these things are different than how it was when I began running marathons in 1972 and beyond and all come from a deliberate effort to run marathons as fast as possible. Then the shoes came along.

Random memory - was at tiny road race in Brighton, MA like 20 years ago. Saw a small dude in what looked like a full, official adidas Ethiopian national team warmup kit doing drills like 5 minutes before the start. Mind you this was a race with like 250 or 300 people in it. I thought to myself "who is this guy?" Gun goes off and he goes immediately to the front and tucks in behind the leader. After finishing I looked at the results - in fact it was a 40 year old Belayah Bensamo. Pretty sure I was the only person at the race who knew who he was...

If memory serves didn't the money move from the track to the road around the late 90s

The timing for drug testing apparently being effective is really interesting to me. It coincides almost exactly with the onset of baseball's Steroid Era, and cycling was super dirty during this time as well, just to name a couple sports. Why would drug testing be effective in the marathon but not in other sports? Is it simply the fact that they were testing, and other sports weren't?

The half marathon world record didn't move a ton during that era either. It was 1:00:10 when Dinsamo set the marathon record. That came down just 4 seconds in 1993, then dropped to 59:47 10 weeks later, first time anyone ran under an hour. 5 years later, 1998, another 4 seconds was taken off the record. It was 13 years between the first sub 60 HM and the first sub 59 HM (14 years if you think Gebrselassie's 58:55 was set due to vehicle assistance).

For me, the HM record only dropping 27 seconds in 11 year goes along with the marathon record being stagnant over the same time.

You think you're the *only* person at a road race in the early 2000s who looked at an African (in an Ethiopian kit, no less) and thought... "He's probably fast?"

Clayton's record(s) stood longer. Possibly So or Nijboer took them before everyone else.

It doesn’t change your point much I think but Arturo Barrios did run a half marathon in under an hour during his hour run record attempt in 1991

I believe most of the speculation is that Clayton ran that on a short course, that it was more like a 2:09-something. No real proof either way.

I also remember thinking 2:05:xx was the human limit and it would take a special runner to do it. I believe one Ron Hill said the same thing.

Then came Epo in 1990ish and the rest is history. And whatever drugs followed. And of course the shoes allow faster training and racing and recovery. I believe they are worth about 2 min in the marathon, plus or minus depending on the runner.

So, yesterday’s 2:06 is today’s 2:04. Anything under 2:03 I find extremely suspicious.

Yes, Belayneh was living in the Boston area for a while and running for a club called the North East Athletic Club (NEAC). I saw him around and that club for a couple of years. They did not last.

Densamo

But you were absolutely right. Nice call. He was working at a McDonald's somewhere in Boston for a while. He still could be for all I know.

As time went on and no one ran faster than Clayton there was more and more speculation that the Antwerp course was short. Pretty sure in Ron Hill's autobiography he says something about beating Clayton who was the world record holder in the marathon. Many years later I read an interview where he said he, Ron, was probably the world record holder in the marathon at one time because Clayton's time came on a short course.

That would mean that the record before Clayton's 2:08 was his 2:09:37 from 1967, then Ron's 2:09:28, then Ian Thompson's 2:09:12 in 1974, then Gerard Nijboer's 2:09:01 in 1980. So we have a bit more than a minute and a half improvement over 22 years and then about three minutes over the next eight years, then as the OP says, nothing for the next ten years and the next improvement is well into the post EPO years.

So in the 27 years since DeCosta broke Densamo's record (thanks to whomever did the spelling correction) the record has come down about twice as much as in the 31 years between Clayton and Densamo. A lot is different in the marathon now than it was much before DeCoasta's record and all of those differences have pushed times faster. I would never put all the improvement down to PEDs but I think it would be incredibly naive to deny they are a big factor.

De Castella broke Clayton's record in 1981 at Fukuoka, so it stood for 13 years. While Clayton's record may have been done on a short course, I think the only reason for people believing that is that it managed to last for so long. His 2:09:36 at Fukuoka makes it at least plausible that he could run 2:08 on a faster course. Paced record attempts would have surely seen the record go earlier. I wonder what Steve Jones could have run with better pacing in 1985 when he ran 2:07:13 off a 1:01:47 first half. Most likely it would have been faster than Dinsamo's record.