Gebrselassie speaks on fast Boston Marathon times

Snoop Dogg of Science wrote:

One thing I can't figure out is why runners benefit from a downhill course. That's obvius they would if there were only downhills and flat. But Boston has uphill and downhill sections, and that is much more challenging to runners.

Ryan hall is that you?

When Salazar ran, the IAAF didn't recognize a WR on the marathon for the exact reason that it wouldn't be a fair comparison. Later on they decided to sanction an official WR given certain boundaries for what is considered a fair comparison. Boston was outside the boundary then, it was outside on Monday morning and it's still outside today. Every single runner in Boston on Monday should have known that. It wasn't a secret and it's not "bizarro". Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to not be able to wrap your tiny brain around a simple 1/1000 net drop and 50% distance apart rule?

This topic is dead. Morons will continue to complain with the same fervor they defend other false arguments like Obama's foreign birth or Creationism.

No it shouldn't be an "official" world record. BUT... It IS the fastest marathon ever run. This point alone is going to irk the crap out of the organizers of say Chicago, London, Rotterdam, etc to no end... who hope and pray for a WR every time they run their races.

This record won't be touched for a while. 2:03:02 will remain the fastest ever run for a LONG time IMO. Yes, there is an asterisk, but who cares? How friggin' awesome was that run on THAT day! Congrats to everyone who took advantage of such a great day to run!

the answer my friend wrote:

Why don't we include parachute times for the 1 mile record? Drop someone out of a plane and let him "run" a 59 second mile. It's a world record!

This argument has been made 900 times since Monday, and its still as stupid this time as it was the 1st time. That isn't running.

Didn't accept bill Rogers 1975 "wind blown" time of 2:09:55 and did you know about 49 people broke 2:20 and not too many Kenyans and Ethiopians in the race.

actually 22 runners broke 2:20 that fine day, none of them Aficans. 15 were American. 113 runners broke 2:30, 887 broke 3 hours.Weather was described as "56 degrees, n'west quartering tailwind".

hypnotoad wrote:

What is NOT a valid argument is that Monday's times should be recognized as WR or AR because it would violate the rules as they existed on Monday.

No argument at all on that point.

What I have an issue is with the IAAF listing Boston's results from all prior year's on their World Bests Lists, which would seem to indicate those performances would be eligible for IAAF recognition as the best time in the world that year, but then not listing 2011's results. I don't see anything in the IAAF "courses eligible for world record" criteria that addresses wind for road races. They do address elevation drop, and separation between start and finish, of which the Boston course clearly does not meet the 2nd criteria. But why list Boston's results every year except this one on IAAF's list? Performances on this course should either count or they shouldn't, it shouldn't be a year to year consideration, unless IAAF wants to ad a wind provision.

Yes that is strange. So let's argue about the IAAF website, not the record.

The wind is obviously the point of the start-finish separation rule. You can't have a simple +2.0 m/s rule like in sprints and long jump, it ought to be pretty easy to understand why.

We have at least four sports in our sport of running. We can list them in order of decreasing standardization:

1. Track racing where we try to make all performances as comparable to all others as possible by specifying track size, curbs, etc. So we get as close as we can to having performances on different tracks be comparable so we can have world records to the nearest 100th of a second.

2. Road races on road course with accurate measurement over whatever hills and around corners or turns as the geography presents, but always on roads that you can drive a car on.

3.. Cross-country with hills and turns and varying surfaces that you might be able to drive a car on but might not. The courses are accurately measured but the surface can change from hard to soft by rain, snow, or the lack.

4. Trail running. You can't drive a car. And maybe you can't measure accurately or force the runners to stay on exactly the loosely marked course in the wilderness.

We can live without world records for cross-country and trails and we can't live WITHOUT world records in track, but why do we need them for the roads?

Tom

d2xccoach wrote:

No argument at all on that point.

What I have an issue is with the IAAF listing Boston's results from all prior year's on their World Bests Lists, which would seem to indicate those performances would be eligible for IAAF recognition as the best time in the world that year, but then not listing 2011's results.

It is a clerical mistake. The IAAF lists assisted courses separately, someone didn't get the word.

As for the difficulty of the course, I ran it in '78 and '79 in cool conditions, but windless, as I recall. I scared my PR both times, at a time before chips, when it took me a minute and a half to cross the starting line, and the finish area was jammed to a standstill. Even with a slow start, my 5-mile split was over a minute and a half faster than customary because the first seven miles are downhill. The Newton hills failed to live up to the Heartbreak reputation, and the final five or so miles were precipitously downhill. Wheelchairs we had caught in Newton whizzed by at something like 35 mph.

I was contacted by one of my old cross-country runners from the nineties who ran his PR Monday in Boston. He said that in more than one aid station, he couldn't keep pace with the discarded paper cups as they were blowing down the course.

As for replicating the original route of Phiddipedes, that would have been done more accurately by running from Boston to Hopkinton, rather than vice-versa.

In short, under neutral weather conditions, Boston is definitely a fair PR course; with ideal temps and a tailwind, it would be wicked fast.

Gebrselassie really didn't say anything in that story. His agent did. Agents' job isn't to give honest and clear answers to questions posed to the people they represent. Their job is to answer sticky, no-win questions without ruffling too many feathers.

michael t. smith wrote:

He said that in more than one aid station, he couldn't keep pace with the discarded paper cups as they were blowing down the course.

This is absolute BS. I almost spit my coffee all over the screen as I read it. Complete BS. And, yes, I ran the same course on Monday (7 minutes slower than 2010 despite better preparation).

Next year we will require all runners to wear hats with wireless anemometers so we can collect the data for each runner and list it with the start offset in the results. The wind offset.

Of course entry fee would have to double.

Tom

You know what I say about this whole debate?? I cannot wait for London 2012. But that's what I was thinking about ING NYC 2010. Unfortunately, if he cannot win, Geb will probably drop out of the olympic marathon as well.

michael t. smith - thanks for writing that, I thought it was funny! At least it gives us the idea of how the winds were blowing for those of us who weren't there. I can't remember what your original post said, did it say that kid ran one of his best races? How did the wind affect his race?

Well, in past years of having 20 mph head winds producing times which were a few minutes slower than usual, we can only imagine that having 20 mph winds at your back could have an almost opposite effect. Is that BS too? Plus, I think if we surveyed everyone who ran, there would be a few who ran slower than their PR despite "better preparation". However, what happened to you had no effect to the fact that thousands of other runners may have run the race of their lives.

Arizona Runner wrote:

Well, in past years of having 20 mph head winds producing times which were a few minutes slower than usual, we can only imagine that having 20 mph winds at your back could have an almost opposite effect. Is that BS too? Plus, I think if we surveyed everyone who ran, there would be a few who ran slower than their PR despite "better preparation". However, what happened to you had no effect to the fact that thousands of other runners may have run the race of their lives.

Yes, that is BS. If you are running at 10mph, a wind coming the other direction at 20mph is going to affect you differently than a wind in the same direction at 20mph. An equivalent headwind hinders a time more than a tailwind helps a time.

Nobody is saying the tailwind didn't help, it did. However, 20-30mph consistent wind figures are highly exaggerated. I would say it was consistently around 15mph, many stretches you couldn't even feel it, and some times it felt like a cross wind or even partial headwind. WR or not, I am more impressed with a 2:03:02 in Boston on that day than a 2:03:59 in Berlin. Look at the women's times, they were way off WR pace and not even equal to London times.

thanks for the laugh wrote:

michael t. smith wrote:

He said that in more than one aid station, he couldn't keep pace with the discarded paper cups as they were blowing down the course.

This is absolute BS. I almost spit my coffee all over the screen as I read it. Complete BS. And, yes, I ran the same course on Monday (7 minutes slower than 2010 despite better preparation).

I'm just reporting what he said. He also said he was keeping the PR, as he should. You get pot luck for conditions, and usually that means something negative. When nature gives you something take it.

A tip: I find it a good idea not to have liquid in my mouth when reading Letsrun posts. Computers are expensive.

Fact: Fastest marathon ever ru wrote:

And yeah, wind, whatever. Until the other day, Boston was a slow course ...

Boston still IS a slow course. But you a put a strong enough wind on a point-to-point course, even if it's a slow course, and it's possible that something like this will happen. It just did happen.

If we put Monday's wind on a pancake-flat record-eligible course, (1) the wind-assisted portions would have been ridiculous, even faster than comparable Boston sections, (2) but then at some point everyone would have had to turn around and come back into the wind, so it evens things out (or evens it enough to satisfy the IAAF). How is this so hard to see? This is why the point-to-point rule exists. What is so effing difficult to understand about this?