Tag Archives: World Record

How fast can they run these marathon things?

Leave a reply

2 hours 3 minutes and 38 seconds is the current world record set last year in the Berlin Marathon by Patrick Makau Musyoki.  That’s an incredible time.  Average pace around 4 minutes 43 seconds per mile – for 26.2 of them.  And Roger did just one in just under 4 minutes a few years back (see last post).  That’s a long long sprint that Patrick did.  Nothing short of awesome running.  And in the morning of that world record run, he said his body wasn’t feeling good.  It’s clearly a perception thing…

Not only can he do the marathon in just over 2 hours but he can run a 1/2 marathon in 58 minutes and 52 seconds (but that’s only the 6th fastest 1/2 marathon time ever).  And about 5 miles ahead of me!

Can we (and I use “we” in the very wide human sense) ever break 2 hours?  Or is there some physiological limit built in to us?  Current consensus is that yes we can do it and we will – it might take another 20 years or so but it will be broken.  Which makes sense – we’re so close now and have come down by nearly 50 minutes in the last 100 years.  It will just require someone with the genes all right and perfect race conditions (and a little bit of hard training).

Here’s a great article on from the BBC on this – written in April 2011 before Patrick broke the record.

Running for charity – help needed

Leave a reply

A quick reminder what the London Marathon is all about – raising money for charity.  It is probably the biggest running event in the world, is definitely the biggest fund raising event in the world and has raised over £450 million for a range of great causes since 1981.  That’s an amazing amount of money raised for good causes.  Participants raise around £50 million in each event every year now and over 75% of the people running are doing it for charity.

These are some pretty amazing facts and really add to the experience on the day.  Running with over 36,000 other people (and this number grows every year), some in fancy dress, some out to break world records, with professional athletes and with the best crowd and city sights in the world to see, is nothing short of an awesome experience.

Whilst I’m not doing it in fancy dress, I’m still aiming to raise as much money as possible for Whizz-Kidz, through donations from friends, family and others who are kind enough to donate to this good cause, Christmas carol singing with the guys from Whizz-Kidz, a karate club kickathon (everyone doing as many kicks as they can in 2 hours with prizes for the ones doing the most and the best techniques) and more.

Some really important facts about what Whizz-Kidz do are below:

  • There are 70,000 disabled kids in the UK waiting for the right wheelchair.  In some cases kids as old as nine are still being pushed around in a toddler’s buggy simply because they do not have timely access to the equipment they need.
  • It costs on average 3 times as much to raise a disabled child as a non-disabled child and Whizz-Kidz will provide 1,200 wheelchairs and adapted trikes this year.
  • Disabled young people are over twice as likely as their non-disabled peers not to be in education, employment or training.  Whizz-Kidz will provide over 100 work placements this year.
  • Whizz-Kidz will deliver Wheelchair Skills Training to over 700 disabled kids this year.

The money we raise for them goes to helping all these children live much more active lives – something we all take for granted.

So how can you help?  One donation is all it takes.  A big big thank you to everyone who’s made a donation so far.  If you’d like to make a donation just go to http://www.justgiving.com/jasonnoble1 and follow the instructions.

You can also make a guess at how long it will take me to finish and be in with the chance of winning a bottle of bubbly.  To make a guess go to my Guessability page.

And of course if you’d prefer to donate with good old fashioned cash or a cheque, let me know and I’ll give you details on how to get it to me.

My fund raising target is an ambitious £3,000 and I need your help to get there!

Next post about running this week…

How fast?

Leave a reply

In one of the running blogs/newsletters I subscribe to, saw an interesting post today about the training blog for a professional athlete (runner) – which obviously I thought I’d look at.  It’s a guy I’d never heard of before – Scott Overall – but he’s fast.  28 years old, British and good at running distances from 1,500m upwards.  His marathon time is 2 hours 10 minutes ish – that’s a pace of under 5 minutes per mile for 26.2 of them in a row.  Impressive or what?  His best half marathon time is 63 minutes.  In my books he’s a long distance sprinter – I can’t do one mile at this pace.  Pretty awesome stuff though and definitely one to watch in the 2012 London Olympics.

Fast but not the fastest – that record (for marathons) goes to Patrick Makau of Kenya and stands at 2 hours 3 minutes and 38 seconds.  That’s a whole 7 minutes faster than lightning Scott!

When you do run the actual races, you do get to see the front runners, at least once, normally already 8 miles ahead (by about half way for me) and they really do look like they’re sprinting!

Totally awesome!