When Ronaldo da Costa broke the finish-line tape at the 1998 Berlin Marathon, he began dancing a samba. He deserved to party: The marathon world record had been stuck at 2:06:50 since 1988, after creeping down an average of just five seconds a year since the late ’60s. The wafer-thin Brazilian had shattered the mark by 45 seconds. And that was just the beginning: Including da Costa’s run, the record has been broken nine times, by a total of three minutes, 53 seconds, leaving us just two minutes, 57 seconds away from the two-hour marathon. The current world record of 2:02:57, set by Kenyan Dennis Kimetto this year in Berlin, works out to 4:41.5 per mile; a sub-two would require less than 4:35 per mile. Will a human ever run that fast? To answer that question, we assembled a database of more than 10,000 top marathon performances going back half a century, using rankings compiled by the Association of Road Racing Statisticians. We crunched the numbers and plotted the trends to identify the factors that helped race times improve so dramatically since da Costa’s 1998 performance. Why? Because it’s those nine factors that will determine the likelihood of a sub-two-hour race—and they’ll all have to align to create the perfect race for the perfect runner.
More here – Runners World
Hey Chris,
Thanks for a great article.
I couldn’t help but think how this quote relates to trading and The Trading Game community;
Cheers
Bruce
Physiologists have shown that what you perceive as your physical limits depends on what you believe is possible—change your beliefs and you can push your limits. Unlike horses, for example, human racers can compare themselves to everyone who has come before them and convince themselves that it’s possible to go a little farther or faster. Such a (potentially) record-breaking state of mind requires athletes to enter what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a “flow state” of deep focus and full immersion in a task mediated by brain chemicals like dopamine and endorphins. And as Steven Kotler points out in The Rise of Superman, among the most powerful ways of triggering these brain chemicals is with group flow, when people are united in the pursuit of a difficult goal – See more at: http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/?utm_content=buffer3c9f2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#sthash.nlTcEcz4.dpuf