Haile Gebrselassie recently knocked 29 seconds off the four-year old marathon world record with a time of 2:04:26.
As tends to happen after these performances, everyone began questioning what the limits to human performance might be. Is it possible to break two hours? Geb himself spoke of his own feeling that he would run 2:03 at Berlin someday.
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Depending on what he meant by 2:03 (that is, 2:03:59 or 2:03:00), I’m sceptical of that ambition, since it requires some extraordinary performances to knock 86 seconds off a time that's becoming more and more difficult to crack. We wrote about this possibility in a post a few days ago.
But another way to approach this "limits-of-performance" issue is to consider whether women might ever outperform men.
We recently saw a debate around the men’s world record – well, when Paula Radcliffe ran 2:15:25 in London in 2003, the discussion was deafening. Suddenly, everyone was convinced that the marathon was the event where women would one day catch up to, and then pass, men.
So with that question in mind, and stimulated by an age-old question, we are running a series of posts looking at men vs. women in running. We look at this issue in three parts:
1. Women in running – a historical overview and the evolution of the marathon world record. Click here 2. Performance differences between men and women in all running events, and a physiological discussion of why this difference exists. Click here 3. Will women ever outperform men? And more interestingly, does it already happen? Click here
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