Tigst Assefa's 2:11:53 in Berlin is both incredible and not at all shocking

Letesenbet Gidey's 1:02:52 half-marathon made this result not only possible but inevitable

At yesterday morning’s Berlin Marathon, Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia cleaved an ostensibly and arithmetically absurd 2 minutes and 11 seconds from Brigid Kosgei’s four-year-old world record of 2:14:04. Assefa, who was widely known as “Tigist Assefa” until just moments ago, split 1:06:20 for the first half (5:03.6 pace) before dropping a second half of 1:05:33 (5:00 pace on the nose) to notch the first sub-2:14:00, sub-2:13:00, and sub-2:12:00 in the history of women’s marathon running with a 2:11:53 (top finisher results).

The Guardian is Great Britain’s answer to the corporatist and raucously degraded New York Times, and its story on the event is an advertisement for the adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1s disguised as revulsion at the cost of the shoes (£400, or roughly $488.55). The subhead of the story refers to these as “trainers,” which could be Brit-speak for “racing flats” but is more likely an editorial miscue.

In reality, Assefa—a 1:59.24 800-meter runner at age 20 in 2014 who became history’s third-fastest woman in winning last year’s Berlin race in 2:15:37—did not need any more help from her shoes than Letesenbet Gidey got from the Nike Vaporfly Next% flats Gidey wore during her 1:02:52 half-marathon world record in October 2021 at the Valencia Half-Marathon.

Multiplying Gidey's 1:02:52 half-marathon by the 2.1 equivalent-performance factor that was reliable even before EPO and all of these funked-up racing shoes perhaps shrunk this factor slightly for some world-class runners predicts a 2:12:01 marathon—if not for Gidey, then for some female human. Before Gidey made her marathon debut in Berlin last December in Valencia—among the world’s largest cities somehow unable to conduct athlete drug-testing—I wrote that it wouldn't be shocking to see Gidey run 2:11:59. 

Gidey wound up running 2:16:49 for second place. But if 2:11:59 wouldn’t have been insane in this context last year, then 2:11:53 can’t be insane now, no matter who ran it. It’s just women being women and paying attention to the requisite math—or “maths,” as the weirdos across the pond who have utterly butchered English like to put it.

Assefa’s first and second halves yesterday were eerily reminiscent of her splits in Berlin last year, just faster. In 2022, she went out in 1:08:17 and came back in 1:07:24, a difference of 53 seconds. Yesterday, her splits of 1:06:20 and 1:05:33 translated to a 47-second difference in a race Assefa ran in a time about 2.8 percent faster than her 2022 performance.

Right now, with the Chicago Marathon and the New York City Marathon still to come domestically, only 17 American men have run faster than Assefa this year, and only 12 have done so on what World Athletics considers legal courses (five sub-2:11:00 performances at the Boston Marathon are discounted using the latter criteria). Which reminds me, there was also a men’s race in Berlin yesterday. Eliud Kipchoge took the win in 2:02:42, the fifth-fastest time of the approximately 38-year-old up-and-comer’s already noteworthy career.

(6:32 p.m. MDT note: This post has been updated to reflect the recent subtraction of a vowel from Assefa’s first name on her World Athletics profile.)

(Social share photo: Andreas Gora/picture-alliance/dpa/AP.)