A man ran a marathon in under two hours. Meanwhile, 59,830 people finished the same course, and the average one took four and a half hours.
26 April 2026 · Greenwich to The Mall
Somewhere around Canary Wharf, an eighty-eight-year-old man called Harry Newton was making his way toward the finish. Thirty-six other people over the age of eighty were out there with him. A man in a badger costume was raising money for wildlife conservation in memory of his father. Somebody else was running dressed as a giant testicle, which is a sentence I never expected to type, and which was, in its way, a public health campaign.
And at the very front, hours earlier, a Kenyan runner named Sebastian Sawe had done something no human being had ever done in a race that counts.
What actually happened
Sawe ran the 46th London Marathon in one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds. The first sub-two-hour marathon under record-eligible conditions. Then, a few strides behind, Yomif Kejelcha finished in 1:59:41 — on his marathon debut, having never run one before.
Tigst Assefa won the women’s race in 2:15:41, lowering her own women-only world record, in the closest top-three finish London has ever seen; all three women went under 2:16, which had never happened anywhere. Marcel Hug took his eighth London wheelchair title, and Catherine Debrunner her third in a row.
The conditions were close to perfect — ten degrees at the elite start, dry, a light easterly. And 59,830 people finished, setting a Guinness World Record for the largest marathon ever held, by an estimated 800,000 people on the pavements.
The barrier that was never physical
Now, the idea I want to give you is one of the most useful in the whole of human performance.
In 1954, the four-minute mile was considered a physiological wall. Doctors said the heart might not stand it. Then, on a windy May afternoon in Oxford, a junior doctor named Roger Bannister ran 3:59.4 — and forty-six days later, John Landy ran faster. Within a few years, dozens had done it. Nothing had changed about the human body in those forty-six days. What changed was that everybody now knew it could be done.
Read Sawe’s race again with that in mind. He breaks away at thirty-five kilometres. He runs the last seven at a pace most of us could not hold for four hundred metres. And then a man who had never run a marathon in his life finishes eleven seconds behind him, also under two hours, on the very same afternoon.
The wall came down twice in one morning. It was never made of muscle.
I would add the honest caveat that the barrier had helped. Carbon-plated super-shoes arrived in 2017, and the top fifty men’s times have improved by something like two to four per cent since. That is not cheating, and it is nothing. Progress rarely arrives pure.
The number that actually matters
Here is where I part company with most of the coverage, and where this becomes, I think, a piece about you rather than about Sebastian Sawe.
The average finisher in London this year took four hours, thirty-six minutes and twenty-eight seconds. The fastest age group was not the twenty-somethings; it was runners aged forty to forty-four. Sixty-eight per cent were British. Around one in eight was running for a charity. The ballot that let them in received 1,133,813 applications — the first marathon in history to clear a million — and fewer than five per cent were successful.
So the real story of the day is not the two hours. It is four and a half. It is the woman who trained through a wet January, in the dark before work. It is Harry Newton, at eighty-eight, on The Mall.
And it is an expensive lesson I have learned in a different arena. I spent years believing the point was to be exceptional, and it made me miserable and, briefly, quite poor. What actually compounds — in fitness, in money, in almost everything — is not the extraordinary effort but the ordinary one, repeated when nobody is watching and nothing is being recorded.
Nobody trains for a marathon by running a marathon. They train by going out on a Tuesday, in the rain, when they don’t want to. It is the least glamorous sentence in this article and the only one that will actually change anything.
What to take from it
Do not let an elite time recalibrate your sense of what is worthwhile. A three-hour marathon is now half the winner’s time, and it remains an astonishing thing for a human being to do. Four and a half hours is astonishing. Walking is astonishing. Deciding, at eighty-eight, to have a go is the most astonishing of the lot.
If you are tempted — and April’s chaos does tempt people — start absurdly small and be suspicious of anyone selling you intensity. Consistency is the whole technology. And should you enter the ballot and be among the ninety-five per cent turned away, do the thing anyway: the road outside your door does not check your ballot number.
I would rather you collected the morning than the medal, in truth. But if the medal helps you out the door in February, take the medal.
The barrier fell this year because a man believed it could. Rather a lot of walls turn out to be like that — and the ones in your own life, I suspect, are made of much the same material as the four-minute mile. Which is to say: mostly, they are made of what everyone agreed was impossible, right up until somebody went slowly and steadily anyway.
Educational commentary, not medical or professional advice. If you’re starting something strenuous, talk to a doctor first — I’m a writer, not a physician.
The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection
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