New Marathon World Record

This morning at the Berlin marathon, Ethiopian runner, Haile Gebrselassie, set a new world record in the marathon.

Well my last blog about Tergat's world record in the marathon is suddenly obsolete. This morning Haile Gebrselassie, age 34, ran the Berlin marathon in 2:04:26, which is 29 seconds faster that Tergat's old world record.

Within 10 minutes Tergat called from Kenya to congratulate Gebrselassie. Gebrselassie apologized to his friend for taking away his world record.

Gebrselassie has held 2 dozen world records for distances ranging from 3000 meters to the marathon. He has also won 2 Olympic gold medals.

The Berlin course is quite fast. This is the third men's world record set on the course and there have been two women's world records set on the course. The course is very flat with only about 30 meters of vertical climb. The weather was also nearly ideal this morning. The sky was overcast with temperatures in the upper 50s (F) (mid teens C).

This morning's race was a considerable improvement over Gebrselassie's first marathon. At age 15 he ran the Addis Abba marathon in 2 hours and 48 minutes wearing plastic soled street shoes.

Gebrselassie can now afford all the shoes he wants. Between a personal appearance fee, the winner's purse, and a bonus for setting the world record he will go home 350,000 Euros (almost a half million US dollars) richer. Ignoring the countless hours of training over the last 20 years, that's almost a quarter million dollars an hour. Not bad.

So all I need to do is drop about two and a half hours from my marathon time and I can retire. Until then, like most other runners who have no chance of setting a world record, I'll just aim for an occasional personal record.