Athletics Thread

[kinboshi]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/26968962

Farah's first race over the marathon distance. Wonder how he'll get on, and if he can get close to fellow 5k and 10k legend Bekele's debut time of 2:05:04?  I'm not convinced myself, but hoping tobbe pleasantly surprised.

[Tal]

Yeah I can't see him being close. Top five would be a superb result.

[kinboshi]

Yeah I can't see him being close. Top five would be a superb result.

Top 5 would mean he'd be close to that time, and it would be an incredible run.  2:07:17 is the first time he's aiming to beat - the British record set back in 1985 by Steve Jones!

[Tal]

Yeah I can't see him being close. Top five would be a superb result.

Top 5 would mean he'd be close to that time, and it would be an incredible run.  2:07:17 is the first time he's aiming to beat - the British record set back in 1985 by Steve Jones!

What price he doesn't finish?

[kinboshi]

Yeah I can't see him being close. Top five would be a superb result.

Top 5 would mean he'd be close to that time, and it would be an incredible run.  2:07:17 is the first time he's aiming to beat - the British record set back in 1985 by Steve Jones!

What price he doesn't finish?

He'll finish.

[kinboshi]

Just not near the front.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/26963298

and his coach doesn't want him near the lead group http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/athletics/london-marathon/10756131/Mo-Farah-to-run-in-slower-group-in-London-Marathon.html

[MintTrav]

I'm a bit torn on this. The fall undoubtedly put him under pressure for the rest of the race And his team points out that New York was run in freezing, windy conditions and he had just arrived from Kenya. And he is Mo Farah after all, tough as old boots. The collapse doesn't necessarily mean much - these guys have got extraordinary recovery ability. John Treacy collapsed from heat exhaustion in a qualifying position with 200m to go in the Moscow 10,000, yet he still ran three rounds of the 5,000m within the following week and finished 7th in the final, and I'm damn sure Farah is fitter than Treacy was.

On the other hand, the opposition is the toughest ever. It's going to be a very fast race and Mo has never run fast times for 5/10,000. Seems almost impossible to be elite at 1,500m and Marathon. It has been done before, by the likes of Quax and Gebrselassie, but not at the same time.

Quax and Gebrselassie lost their first Marathons, though they were both the fastest debuts in history at the time, which would suggest that it'll be tough for Farah. On the other hand, there has been a succession of amazing debuts in the last couple of years (http://www.jonmulkeen.com/blog/athletics/fastest-marathon-debuts/), so maybe athletes have now developed to the point where they can jump straight into the Marathon elite.

[kinboshi]

One year. Meh, Gay.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/27264866

[kinboshi]

This is sad news, Bannister has Parkinson's.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-27246599

[kinboshi]

Kenyan, Dennis Kimetto broke the marathon world record running the Berlin course in 2:02:57.

That's bloody quick.

That's 4:41 minute/mile pace, 2:55 minute/km pace. I reckon I might be able to manage that for about half a mile. Put another way, that's running over a hundred sub-70 seconds 400m back-to-back.

Wonder if we'll see a sub two-hour marathon in my life time? When I was born, the world record was 2:08:33, so that's more than five minutes knocked off the time. I'm sure the next three minutes might take another forty years though...

[arbboy]

Kenyan, Dennis Kimetto broke the marathon world record running the Berlin course in 2:02:57.

That's bloody quick.

That's 4:41 minute/mile pace, 2:55 minute/km pace. I reckon I might be able to manage that for about half a mile. Put another way, that's running over a hundred sub-70 seconds 400m back-to-back.

Wonder if we'll see a sub two-hour marathon in my life time? When I was born, the world record was 2:08:33, so that's more than five minutes knocked off the time. I'm sure the next three minutes might take another forty years though...

I was just talking to a cyclist about this and he thinks the marathon will go under 2 hours in twenty years.  Pretty sure it will happen in our lifetime.

[kinboshi]

It'd mean knocking more than 4 seconds off every kilometre. That's not insignificant. In fact, it's even easier to see how much needs to be done to break two hours when you have to think that that if someone ran the marathon in under two hours, they'd finish over a kilometre ahead of Kimetto! Hope we do see it.

[arbboy]

It'd mean knocking more than 4 seconds off every kilometre. That's not insignificant. In fact, it's even easier to see how much needs to be done to break two hours when you have to think that that if someone ran the marathon in under two hours, they'd finish over a kilometre ahead of Kimetto! Hope we do see it.

I don't really follow distance running records so i must admit i was surprised what the world record was before it had been broken. I thought, at a guess, it would be around the 2.05 mark.

[kinboshi]

Tergat was the first to go sub 2:05, and he did that in 2003. So it's taken over a decade to get to the current record that is two minutes faster.

If the record can be reduced by the same margin in the same period, we'd be looking at the two-hour mark being broken within 20 years. But surely it's going to get harder and harder to knock minutes off the record? Although it's arguably easier to knock a few minutes off a record of 123 minutes than it is to knock another 0.2 seconds off the 100m world record (which is a similar percentage of the total time).

So which comes first, the sub two-hour marathon, or the sub 9.5 second 100m?

[kinboshi]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/athletics/31769107

Katarina Johnson-Thompson - incredible athlete, and loved her attitude to missing out on the world record by one second in the last event (800m).  Even though she'd won the gold and beaten Jessica Ennis' British record, she wasn't happy that she'd missed out on the opportunity to get the WR.

Going to be good when Ennis is back and the two are going head-to-head in the Heptathlon.