Sunday’s race will mark the first leg of an ambitious fall double by Bekele he will race the New York City Marathon just six weeks later on November 7. We just hope the chassis is holding together.” It’s Kenenisa Bekele, there’s only one Kenenisa. “His preparation was a little short, but he’s very, very serious. “We have to be fair, his last good was two years ago,” he said. Yet Hermens also knows this sport and the odds Bekele is facing. Hermens said that’s the goal that has rekindled Bekele’s fire in recent years, making his motivation “the best ever” at the age of 39. If he could get the world record, it would all but end the debate over the greatest distance runner in history. “It could also be 2:03, it could also be something else.”īekele’s career stands alone for its success across various surfaces: Bekele has 11 world titles in cross country, five on the track, three Olympic golds, and is just two seconds behind Kipchoge on the marathon all-time list. “We estimate he’s around the shape of two years ago,” Jos Hermens, Bekele’s longtime manager, told Runner’s World earlier this week. Yet no one can get fit quick quite like Bekele, who was in that same position in the summer of 2019 before he changed his diet, trained hard, and produced that astonishing run in Berlin. “It’s a good age for marathon.”Ī fellow athlete said Bekele was unfit and several kilos over his usual weight when arriving in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, for a training camp in the summer. Yet the 39-year-old feels he has plenty of miles left in his legs. He’s been racing at a world-class level for 20 years now, the latter part of his career pockmarked by multiple dropouts. At the press conference in Berlin on Friday, Bekele said he contracted COVID-19 “nine months ago,” and “it was a really tough time.”

If that’s true, it would mark an astonishing turnaround for the second-fastest marathoner in history, whose 2:01:41 at the 2019 Berlin Marathon was just two seconds shy of Eliud Kipchoge’s world record, set in Berlin in 2018. A month ago, a source close to Bekele said “something special is coming” in Berlin, given the way he was training in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.

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