Nov. 6, 2011: Geoffrey Mutai Shatters the New York City Marathon Course Record Across Five Boroughs

On Nov. 6, 2011, roughly 47,000 runners poured across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge for the 41st New York City Marathon. Most were chasing personal goals. At the front, Kenya's Geoffrey Mutai was chasing something larger: a race that had never been run as fast as he was about to run it.

The Fastest Mile

The New York course is no one's idea of a speed trap. It crosses five boroughs and five bridges, with long climbs and tight turns that tend to reward patience over pace. For years, the course record had stood at 2 hours, 7 minutes, 43 seconds, set by Ethiopia's Tesfaye Jifar in 2001. Mutai ran the race as though that number were a suggestion. He and his countryman Emmanuel Mutai, who is no relation, broke away from the field and traded the lead deep into the race, pushing each other through Manhattan and into Central Park. Geoffrey Mutai broke the tape in 2:05:06, taking more than two and a half minutes off the old mark. Emmanuel Mutai followed in 2:06:28, which would also have beaten Jifar's record. The pair had turned a duel into a demolition of the record book, and the old mark was left behind by two men instead of one.

The same day, Ethiopia's Firehiwot Dado won the women's race in 2:23:15, adding a second victory to the day's results. Mutai's time carried an asterisk of sorts: because New York's point-to-point course drops in elevation between start and finish, the sport's governing body does not ratify such times as world records. That did not blunt the achievement in the city itself. Mutai had run faster than anyone ever had on those streets, and he did it on a course whose hills are famous for slowing people down. The record that mattered to New Yorkers was the one that belonged to their own race, and by the end of the afternoon it belonged to him. Rarely has an unofficial mark felt so definitive.