Sabastian Sawe won the London Marathon in 1:59:30, became the first athlete to break the two-hour barrier in an official marathon and cut 1 minute and 5 seconds off the previous world record of Kelvin Kiptum, set at 2:00:35 in Chicago in 2023. The scale of the day was even greater because Yomif Kejelcha also ran under two hours with 1:59:41 and Jacob Kiplimo finished third in 2:00:28, also below the previous world record. In the women’s race, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa produced another landmark by winning in 2:15:41 and lowering the world record by 9 seconds.

What happened in London was big enough to open a much wider conversation about human limits, about what it means to run 42.195 kilometres at that pace and about the path that had taken Sawe there. Instead, much of the story shifted almost immediately towards two issues: the two-hour barrier and the shoe. The official sub-two performance was also read as another chapter in the battle between Adidas and Nike, in the debate around ‘super shoes’ and in the new technological era of the marathon. All of that is part of the context, but it has also pushed into the background both the athlete and the process behind the record.

The athlete behind the record: quiet, reserved and raised in a simple environment

Sabastian Kimaru Sawe was born on 16 March 1995 in Barsombe, in Kenya’s Uasin Gishu County, in the Rift Valley, one of the historic centres of world distance running. In 2022, he set the Kenyan one-hour track record with 21,250 metres, and in 2024 he won the Copenhagen Half Marathon in 58:05, one of the fastest times ever recorded over that distance.

The move to the marathon was immediate and emphatic. He debuted in Valencia 2024 with 2:02:05, won London 2025 in 2:02:27 and Berlin 2025 in 2:02:16, before breaking the world record in London. Before that race, his coach, Claudio Berardelli, had already spoken about him in exceptional terms. “I’ve been doing this job for 21 years. I’m not sure I’ve ever coached an athlete like him,” he said of Sawe.

Sawe grew up in a rural part of Kenya, in a house without electricity, and at his training camp in Kapsabet he is known as ‘the silent assassin’ because of his reserved personality and the way he competes without much display beforehand. As a child, he was so shy that he used to hide in the school kitchen before competing, until one of his teachers pushed him to run. That same understated tone appeared after the record. Sawe said he did not celebrate with alcohol, only with water, and that he ate rice with chicken for dinner. He said his legs were a little sore, but his head was clear. He also explained that he did not realise he was on pace to break two hours until very close to the finish, because his focus was more on racing Kejelcha than on looking at the clock. “What I did yesterday was also because of him,” he said afterwards, acknowledging that the competitive pressure between them was crucial in driving the pace to that level.

Claudio Berardelli, 200 kilometres a week and bread with honey

The central figure behind the process was Claudio Berardelli, the Italian coach linked to the 2Running group and a long-time expert in training in Kenya. As he explained after London, in the six weeks before the record Sawe averaged more than 200 kilometres a week, with a peak of 241 kilometres, around 150 miles. “I knew he was in very good shape for Berlin, but he couldn’t express it because of the conditions. But when I started to see him running the way he was running before London, I thought: something special could come out here,” the Italian coach said. Along the same lines, he added that Sawe had still not reached his ceiling: “Sabastian has not reached his maximum potential.”

That preparation also included very simple details that helped build another image of the record. Bread and honey for breakfast before the race, a routine built on enormous volume and an athlete who still projected an austere life even after making history. Berardelli himself stressed that not everything could be reduced to physiology or equipment: “He is an exceptional human being. He has very positive energy, but at the same time he is very humble.” That contrast — the simplicity around the runner and the sophistication of the performance — was part of what made the record more powerful. It was not an empty laboratory story, but that of an exceptional runner pushed to the limit by years of training and by meticulous preparation.

The two-hour barrier, the shoe and the narrative that took over

The official fall of the two-hour barrier carried enormous symbolic force because it made ratifiable what had previously existed only under controlled conditions with Eliud Kipchoge in Vienna in 2019. London made official a frontier that for decades had been treated as almost untouchable, comparable to the sub-four-minute mile. But at the same time, the debate swung strongly towards Adidas’s Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, the weight of the model, the foam, the carbon and the regulation of World Athletics, which chose to limit sole thickness and plates rather than ban the technology. Much of the media reaction centred on that point, and the exchange that followed between Adidas and Nike only confirmed how far the achievement was also read as a commercial episode.

That debate exists and it is legitimate, but it should not have taken up so much of the main story. Kipchoge put it better than anyone when congratulating Sawe: “We are just at the beginning of what is possible when talent, progress and an unwavering belief in human potential come together.” London did not only produce a world record or a new benchmark shoe. It also left the story of a reserved runner, shaped far from the noise, capable of taking the official marathon into territory that had seemed reserved for fiction. And that may have been the most powerful message of all.