• If you managed to read the news in the right place •
[>1½ MIN READ]
You’d be forgiven for not noticing that Jacob Kiplimo broke the 2:00:35 marathon world record that Kelvin Kiptum set in 2023 at the Chicago Marathon. Under normal circumstances, breaking that world record by 7 seconds would have generated some attention.
The 2026 London Marathon run on 04’26’Sun made for abnormal circumstances because that’s when Yomif Kejelcha surpassed the 2:00:00 marathon threshhold by 19 whole seconds. What? You didn’t know that, either? Abnormal circumstances, indeed.
Neither phenomenal accomplishment will come to mind the year and event when Sabastian Sawe ran his sub-2:00:00 marathon. Just before Kejelcha. By 11 seconds. His time: 1:59:30.
So, 3 marathoners beat the previous world record at the same event.
If you didn’t catch any of those details, it might have been because Sawe’s accomplishment came in 15th place among New York Times’ sports stories on Monday morning. After the NFL draft and NBA playoff news. I heard about if first on NPR in a casual reference that made me cheer in amazement. New York Times and other news outlets? Not so much. That NYT article about Sawe’s achievement wasn’t even available to me as a subscriber. It was under a secondary firewall to NYT’s sports news provider, The Athletic. I was only able to read it because my phone managed to skirt that firewall — due to some presumed digital sloppiness — that otherwise prohibited my desktop access.
By the time you read this, things might be different. At the time of this writing, though — 48 hours later — it didn’t seem so. If you want to read more and had as much trouble as I did, check out Elsewhere in the News (ShawmontRunningClub.com).
With search on ‘Sabastian Sawe’ that I did for this piece was one headline from Runner’s World at the bottom of the first screen on my desktop. It seems there was another world record broken in London. It featured nearly 60,000 finishers. Another record that you’d be forgiven for not noticing.
–CtCloser (Calvinthe) “Negative Split or Positive Splat” #dothedue (iCandybyWangC.com)
FINE PRINT ¶Text by Calvin Wang (Wäng), CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. ¶Cross-published: Facebook Shawmont Running Club (ZY Weekly Newsletter 4/25/26), Shawmont Running Club website, Ruminations by CtCloser. ¶This website posting: Rumination with added caption, duration, and enumeration.
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