Sabastian Sawe just broke the 2-hour marathon barrier in $450 Adidas “supershoes”
Another Adidas athlete also beat the 120-minute mark in London yesterday.
According to running shoe review site RunRepeat, men who can complete a 5K in 17 minutes and 30 seconds are in the top 1% of runners. Yesterday at the London Marathon, Sabastian Sawe, a 31-year-old runner from Kenya, shaved 3 minutes and 20 seconds off that pace and then did it almost 7.5 more times to become the first marathon runner in history to break the two-hour barrier in an official race, clocking in at 1:59:30.
Eleven seconds later, and wearing exactly the same Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 shoes as Sawe, Yomif Kejelcha became the second person in history to cross the historic threshold, while Tigist Assefa set a women-only world record of 2:15:41 in the Pro Evo 3s as well. Adidas was, obviously, pretty buzzed about the trio’s results.
Some feet!
The new men’s world record marks a monumental milestone in running. It's also a decisive blow in the race between the world’s two biggest sportswear companies, with Nike having announced its “Breaking 2” ambitions 10 years ago, at the time revealing that it had been working on marathon sneakers with the 120-minute mark in mind even three years before that. Still, even with the legendary Eliud Kipchoge and the late Kelvin Kiptum in the brand’s shoes, there’s yet to be a Nike athlete to break the barrier in an officially recognized marathon.
Adidas made a “limited number” of the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3s, with their 97-gram weight and regulation-scraping 39-millimeter stack height, available for purchase on its website a day before the marathon, which auspiciously made the model eligible for the big race itself.
Of course, none of this is to take away from the magnitude of Sawe’s historic achievement itself.
The Kenyan’s staggering time was a full 1 minute and 5 seconds faster than the previous record, set by Kelvin Kiptum at the Chicago Marathon in October 2023 and ratified in February the next year, just five days before the 23-year-old’s tragic passing.
Though Tigist Assefa broke the record for a women-only race yesterday, the overall world record still belongs to Ruth Chepngetich, who ran 2:09:56 at the 2024 Chicago Marathon per World Athletics figures, but is now serving a three-year ban after admitting to violating anti-doping restrictions.
