78 seconds is not a very long time. That is one quarter of the time given for class changes and roughly half the time it takes for Your 2018-19 student body President Mason Wasik to give the afternoon announcements. It is not a very long time, unless you’re in the business of world class marathon running.

  On September 16, 2018 at the Berlin Marathon, Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge smashed the former marathon record by more than a minute. His official time was 2:01:39. The old record set in the 2014 edition of the Berlin race was 2:02:57 by Dennis Kimetto.

  The improvement does not seem very large, but it is huge over the course of a marathon. Kipchoge averaged 4 minutes and 38 seconds each mile, which is three seconds faster per mile than the pace run by Dennis Kimetto in the former record setting race. Only seven members of the Broughton track team last year ran 4:38 or faster in the one mile event. Kipchoge did it 26 times in a row.

  “I lack words to describe this day,” Kipchoge said after the race.

  Kipchoge now officially holds the world record in the marathon, but his time from Berlin is not his fastest marathon. He has clocked in at 2:00:25 over the distance.

  This time was run as a part of Nike’s “Breaking 2” project where they attempted to prove that it was possible for a human being to run a marathon in less than two hours.

  The ”Breaking 2” race was not run under the conditions for a legal world record attempt according to IAAF requirements because of rotating pacers and mobile water bottle handoffs among other reasons. This meant that at the completion of the race the fastest marathon ever run was not the world record.

  The two hour barrier similar to the four minute mile has been a goal of professional runners for years. Many had speculated that Kipchoge would be the man to break the barrier. While he has come painfully close at 33 years old, his time as an elite runner may be coming to a close.