Sabastian Sawe: The Spirit To Keep Going
Last week, Sabastian Sawe crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in one hour, fifty-nine minutes and thirty seconds. He had become the first person in history to run a marathon under two hours in legal race conditions, a barrier the sport had spent years debating and which much of the running world had come to treat as physiologically out of reach. He had taken a minute and five seconds off the previous world record, set by the late Kelvin Kiptum. Asked in the moments afterwards what his run might mean, he gave the answer below.
Sabastian Sawe: "I hope my achievement shows young people that nothing is impossible. Everything is possible if you have the spirit to keep going."
The Discipline Behind The Words
What Sawe describes as the spirit to keep going has, in his case, looked like two hundred kilometres a week through the winter, a ruptured tendon early in his career, a missed international debut after a failed Covid test, and an unprecedented twenty-five out-of-competition drug tests submitted to in the buildup to his Berlin win the previous autumn, in answer to a doping cloud he had no part in creating. Years of unspectacular work, supported by a grandmother he has credited with teaching him discipline and gratitude, and an uncle who ran the 800m for Uganda at the Olympics and provided his earliest running shoes.
Years At The Edge
Sawe's sub-two run came after a 2:02:05 in Valencia, a 2:02:27 in London the year before, and a 2:02:16 in Berlin the previous autumn. Read in sequence, the times describe a runner who had been working in close range of the two-hour barrier for years, finishing within seconds of it on courses where the conditions and the field would not quite carry him through. He arrived at London on the twenty-sixth of April having spent a long stretch of his career running on the conviction that the barrier could be broken by him, while the sport itself remained divided on whether it could be broken at all. He had run every one of those races on that belief, and on a Sunday in April he settled the question for everyone else.
Sawe's challenge speaks to the Laidlaw value of being #Ambitious and the Oxford Character Project virtue of #Courage, the willingness to take seriously the possibility that the limit is elsewhere, and to stay at the work through the long stretch before it gives way.
A Call To Reflect
We invite you to sit with Sabastian Sawe's challenge. Where in your research, your Leadership in Action project, or your studies might his spirit of staying with the work, even before the result is in view, take you next?