Before the marathon’s magic number, runners chased the clock.
On 17th October 1964, Jim Alder of Morpeth Harriers crossed the starting line of the ‘two hour race’ in Walton, Surrey. The gun went off and he started spinning on the piston track in a pair of Dunlop Red Flash trainers. A few hours later, he crossed the line with a world-best performance of 23 miles and 1,071 yards.
“Poetry in Motion” so AWs Correspondent Sam Ferris described it at the time.
Alder’s run of 23.608 miles (or 37.994 km) beat Fred Norris’ previous world best of 22 miles, 1,610 yards from 1958, and along the way he set a Commonwealth record for 30 km (1:34:01) and a world best of 1:34 (1:34:01). In those days, two hours meant distance, not destiny.
However, Alder wishes he was 6,000 miles away in Tokyo. The Olympic marathon came four days after Ethiopia’s Abebe Bikila successfully defended his crown in a world record time of 2:12:11, with British runners Basil Heatley, Brian Kilby and Ron Hill finishing second, fourth and 19th.
“I was in the shape of my life and would be in the mix,” Alder said AW: this week. “But it wasn’t to be.”
An orphan from the Gorbals of Glasgow who settled in Northumberland, Alder was one of Britain’s iconic distance runners in the 1960s. He could have missed Tokyo in 1964. a knee injury dashed his hopes at the trials and he was listed as a non-traveling reserve, but two years later he won gold for Scotland at the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica.
Known as “Geronimo Jim,” “Geronimo!” to shout. when he crossed the finish line in the lead, he was working as a bricklayer and is still going strong today, walking for an hour every day to stay in shape on the eve of his 86th birthday.
Before the marathon had a two-hour barrier, runners like Alder were already chasing the clock in a different way. The two-hour race used to be a legal record format, but has gradually become a forgotten event.
In the 60 years since Alder’s Commonwealth victory, the marathon has also changed massively. The Dunlop Red Flash trainers have been replaced by super boots such as adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 Soi wore it in London. Alder used to use fluids by squishing a sponge in his mouth mid-race because he didn’t like chugging water, but today’s runners push back on gels and drinks loaded with carbs, caffeine and electrolytes.
Alder didn’t have a pacemaker for his two-hour world best at Walton. He didn’t have a coach either.
Marathoners in the 1960s were constantly doing demanding and often physical work and squeezing in their workouts before and after work;
Alder was one of the best of his era, though, just like Soy is now #1. Different eras, same obsession: run as far as possible in two hours.
The heart of the matter
Jim Alder’s heart is so strong that it only beats 30-odd times a minute at rest and is so loud that he thinks he can hear it beating if he wakes up in the night. However, he is one of many former runners who have been diagnosed with heart problems, in his case a leaky valve.
Alder is far from alone, as former long-distance runners later dealing with heart problems is a well-documented phenomenon.
indeed AW: Over the years, Dr. James O’Keefe, a well-known cardiologist, has addressed this topic in depth, saying:
All this leads us to an interesting theory which AWs Long-time investor Martin Duff suggested after watching this year’s London Marathon. He says super shoes allow runners to train harder than ever before, but can their hearts handle the extra mileage and tough trails?
“Goodness knows what will happen to the two-hour marathoners when they get a little older,” says Duff.
Nick Samuels, a former international 800m and 1500m runner, saw his athletics career cut short due to serious heart problems. He says: “I am convinced that these problems mainly arise where individuals consistently exceed physical limits.
“My problems came after super shoes became mainstream. The confidence they gave me to do longer, longer workouts with better splits than ever pushed me to push harder and harder.
“I’ve also been doing a lot on the bike, which as a tool to push the limits of your endurance has a lot in common with super shoes; you can push hard and long and still come back the next day to do it again.
“The body eventually tells you when it’s had enough.”
Sawe is in the shadows.
As brilliant as Sebastian Soi’s 2-hour run was, for me the events of Vienna 2019 overshadowed his performance a bit. Eliud Kipchoge’s 1:59:41 may have been an uncertified exhibition time, but when it comes to simply running under two hours, Kipchoge was first.
It will be interesting to see how history remembers the two-hour marathon. In 20-30 years, will we remember Save or Kipchoge? I participated in both events AW: and I believe Kipchoge’s sub two was a bigger deal then and worked out slightly more coverage worldwide, although the methods used by INEOS definitely divided opinion at the time.
In 1954, Roger Bannister became the first man to run a four-minute mile in an official race with a time of 3:59.4, but his performance was also in jeopardy, as rival middle distance runner Ken Wood always claimed he had broken the barrier in the “athletic race” at Sheffield University, even at the Sheffield Speedway 3 Months.
Wood was a great runner and his striking shot gave him four wins in the Emsley Carr Mile. Still, his claims of a four-minute mile have always been met with skepticism.
Sheffield’s dilapidated buildings
Today’s athletes would struggle to run a four-minute mile in Sheffield for the simple reason that there is no usable outdoor synthetic track in the city.
Don Valley Stadium was demolished in 2013 and now The nearby Woodbourn Road is closed indefinitely as the surface is not considered safe for athletes to run on.
READ MORE. Interview by Jim Alder
Sheffield Hallam University, which owns the facility, says the earliest it will have funds to repair the track is the summer of 2027, and even then there is no guarantee the surface will be resurfaced.
All of which means that the UK’s sixth largest city has no outdoor athletics track for the foreseeable future, despite having produced the likes of Seb Coe, Jessica Ennis-Hill… and of course Ken Wood over the years.
