2:09
He's run the marathon many times, and never run faster on a non aided course.
2:09
He's run the marathon many times, and never run faster on a non aided course.
mmm.. wrote:
about the weather:
51F on a cloudy day is different from a sunny day, with no shade.
And 51F on a December sunny day is different from on a April sunny day (solar zenith angles are different).
So would you say this was on the warmer side vs ideal conditions?
Sagarin wrote:
He ran his own race, not going out too fast, in almost perfect conditions. At best, I would say Meb is worth a 2:08:36 on a pancake flat, non point-to-point course.
So you think expending the same energy at each moment on a flat course would get the exact same time?
That defies the laws of physics.
What about a downhill course?
Nobody expends the same energy at each moment on any course. Boston is a downhill course. It is harder than most marathons when conditions are unfavorable, but that wasn't the case with this year's version. Meb PRd for a reason. He said himself, as I did, that maybe he was good for a 2:06 in his prime prior to 2005.
might be rcs wrote:
Sagarin wrote:He ran his own race, not going out too fast, in almost perfect conditions. At best, I would say Meb is worth a 2:08:36 on a pancake flat, non point-to-point course.
So you think expending the same energy at each moment on a flat course would get the exact same time?
That defies the laws of physics.
What about a downhill course?
Lol. How can you people spend so much time on Letsrun acting like you know things and have such little knowledge of the Boston course?
xenonscreams wrote:
I'm sure the temperature on the black roads was hotter.
Oh, it's twue, it's twue!
The Guru Matt James wrote:
might be rcs wrote:That defies the laws of physics.
Lol. How can you people spend so much time on Letsrun acting like you know things and have such little knowledge of the Boston course?
Well, I've run it three times and did a lot of my training on the course for over five years. What's your experience with the course?
There is no question that if you lined up the same runner and his equally-trained clone on the Boston and Berlin start lines with perfect weather, the runner in Berlin would be faster. The question is how much faster. The sign of the answer is the obvious part.
Under two hours if he would have trained for and raced the marathon earlier in his career and ran it at Dubai.
might be rcs wrote:
Well, I've run it three times and did a lot of my training on the course for over five years. What's your experience with the course?
There is no question that if you lined up the same runner and his equally-trained clone on the Boston and Berlin start lines with perfect weather, the runner in Berlin would be faster. The question is how much faster. The sign of the answer is the obvious part.
Yes, I'm sure Geoffrey Mutai would've covered the 2011 Berlin course in 2:03:02 and Ryan Hall would've a sub-2:05 there. We're all familiar with Boston. If you were ever a semi-serious marathon runner, how could you not be? As I said earlier, in bad conditions, Boston will crush you, but in good (not perfect, just good) conditions like this year, it's a PR course.
This extrapolating to a flat course is a fruitless endeavor. All runners are built differently with different strengths and weaknesses. Meb admits probably being capable of a 2:06 a decade ago but not anymore in an earlier link on this thread. As for this year:
"In a race that seemed tailor-made for him, Keflezighi led virtually wire-to-wire against a loaded field of athletes that either underestimated him or underperformed, crossing the Boylston Street finish line in 2:08:37, a 31-second PR just two weeks shy of his 39th birthday."
“I didn’t think I’d be all alone at that point, but I always enjoy running by myself,” Keflezighi said. “You can follow the tangents and get to the aid stations without worrying about anyone else, and use the press truck to pull you along.”
"Keflezighi rolled down the hills into Newton Lower Falls, continuing to click off sub-5-minute miles, and maintaining that pace as he began the ascent of the series of climbs leading up to Boston College.
I’ve always said Meb runs hills, especially downhills, as well as anyone,” said Bob Larsen, who’s guided Keflezighi’s career since the two began working together at UCLA two decades ago."
http://running.competitor.com/2014/04/news/keflezighi-earns-historic-boston-marathon-victory_100564I would venture another fruitless guess that if Meb had been caught earlier, he would've been emotionally and physically crushed and would've faded to a 2:09+. As it was, he was pushed to a PR.
"Splits showed his lead had stretched to more than a minute by 20 miles, but finally, at least one person, Chebet, was stirring behind him, in solo pursuit, stringing together miles in the low 4:30s and slicing the margin down to 20 and then 12 seconds. That dropped as low as 6 seconds as they passed Fenway Park, where the Red Sox were playing their traditional Patriots’ Day morning game, which might have given Keflezighi a bit of additional motivation."
Either way, great win, great career. Probably the most accomplished American marathoner in recent history.
J.R. wrote:
2:09
He's run the marathon many times, and never run faster on a non aided course.
let's listen to the science denying troll!
I see two of us like the statistics of the ARRS.If you go to the "Race Histories" and click on "Marathon" then "Boston", you can see individual annual biases for all of the Boston marathons (and similarly Houston and New York and London). They don't yet show the 2014 bias.A longer analysis shows, according to ARRS calculations, that Meb's best performances were in 2004 and 2005, and compare to 2:07:50 +/-. The next best is New York 2009, with 2:08:07, and New York 2011 with a 2:08:22. We could imagine that comparable performances on a "fast" course like London and Berlin, producing "real" times of 2:06:20 - 2:06:50.BTW: Cheruiyot's Boston course record "normalizes" to 2:05:35.
HardLoper wrote:
ARRS estimates an average of 2:18 difference between Boston and London. That's just an average year, they evaluate it year-by-year but don't update it often. The year Cheriyot ran 2:05:50 had a slight tailwind I think. Meb also seems to be a very good hill runner so maybe he wouldn't do great on a flat course but I think at some point he could have run in the 2:06:xx range...
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