Duncan Mackay
After years of steady improvement, women’s distance running has finally come of age. When Japan’s Naoko Takahashi set the world marathon record of 2hr 19min 46sec in Berlin on Sunday she achieved a landmark that had long been the holy grail for every female runner.
A sub-2hr 20min time had been a target for generations of women runners from Ingrid Kristiansen and Grete Waitz to Tegla Loroupe. It had defied them all, with each passing failure enshrining it with a more and more mythic status. “There are always barriers out there beyond which people aren’t supposed to go,” said Kristiansen, citing the four-minute mile. “With women I think it had been compounded because there was a sexist barrier that said women only go to a certain point and don’t go beyond that.”
To put the performance of Takahashi (29) into perspective, it would have won every men’s Olympic marathon up to and including 1956. Her time in Berlin was more than three minutes faster than the legendary Emil Zatopek’s winning time in the 1952 Helsinki games.
“I knew she was going for a sub-2:20,” said Waitz. “But saying it and doing it are two different things. It is another breakthrough for women’s marathon running, and I’m sure other women will follow her.”
Kristiansen held the world record of 2:21:06 for 13 years after setting it in the 1985 London marathon and had always predicted a Kenyan or Ethiopian runner would be likely to take the 2:20 honour because they find “running a form of freedom”.
Yet Takahashi had been training towards this momentous achievement since her Olympic gold medal in Sydney last year by following a highly regimented regime which sometimes had her running as many as 400km a week.
She wanted a shot at the 2:20 landmark and Berlin had the most favourable course with its flat roads and enthusiastic crowds. The 2:20:43 record that she broke had been set there two years earlier by Loroupe.
The progress in women’s running has been so great that Takahashi may take equal opportunities for granted, forgetting that as recently as 21 years ago women could not run farther than 1500m in the Olympics, and that 10 years before that they were barred from many races on the road.