Numbers game

1:59:40.2.

Remember those numbers, on this chill October morning. Imprint them on your brainpan. Balance them on your tongue. Swaddle them in bubble wrap and stuff them in a wall safe somewhere, because as of this morning they are not just numbers but the hieroglyphics of history, a mile marker along the human journey.

1:59:40.2.

That was the number flashing yesterday when Eliud Kipchoge, a Kenyan from Kapsisiywa in the Nandi Distict, crossed the finish line in Vienna after 26 miles, 385 yards of running. It was the first marathon ever run by a human being in less than two hours -- a number as iconic for marathoners as  four minutes was for milers, and because of which 3:59.4 are the hieroglyphics of history, too.

That was the length of time it took a lanky English medical student named Roger Bannister to cover a mile on a breezy May afternoon 65 years ago, and it is almost impossible, in 2019, to conceive what a a jaw-dropping moment that was. There were serious people who seriously believed humans simply were not capable of running a mile in four minutes, that the heart would literally burst in the chest in attempting to do so.

But Bannister did, and lived, paced around a cinder track off Iffley Road in Oxford by fellow milers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway. Kipchoge, too, had his rabbits, looping a six-mile course in an event specifically designed to attempt the two-hour marathon. Like Brasher and Chataway, they peeled off at the end to let Kipchoge wrestle posterity to the ground alone.

In doing so, he breached a barrier once thought to be every bit as impervious as the four-minute mile. I have, for instance, a dim memory of one of those movies-of-the-week from years ago, its title lost in the haze. Most of the plot I don't recall, except for the part about a maniacal distance coach who took a callow young Brit under his wing and drove him to attempt a two-hour marathon.

The young man failed, of course. Set a suicidal pace and then simply couldn't maintain it, finishing a physical wreck as his lunatic coach limped alongside taunting him. The moral was that some limits are simply too far beyond us, and that even to reach for them is the province of madmen.

Well. No more. Invoking Roger Bannister, Kipchoge set the record straight: "No human is limited."

Like 3:59.4, 1:59:40.2 proves it yet again.