Bad news for anyone who secretly fancies themselves every time they lace up their trainers: the two-hour marathon record has gone. Sabastian Sawe’s astonishing effort at the London marathon on Sunday – cruising across the finish line in the Mall in 1hr 59m 30s like a man who has just jogged a parkrun – shattered a record long seen as beyond human capability.
“They said it couldn’t be done!” roared BBC commentator Steve Cram. And then, 11 seconds later, Yomif Kejelcha did it too – and he’d never even run a marathon before.
Even Jacob Kiplimo in third came close to breaking one of the most talismanic athletic barriers in history, beating the previous world record but missing the “sub two” by 28 seconds. The men’s two-hour marathon in race conditions has been comprehensively done. Find yourself a new challenge.
Happily, humans are not yet all-powerful and a few records and firsts – athletic and otherwise – remain to be achieved. Here are a few to inspire your next sponsored challenge.
The first Pacific swim
Yes, some people see this as an achieveable goal, and one person has even tried it, if one adopts an elastic definition that allows for taking the world’s biggest ocean in stages.
French swimmer Benoît Lecomte set off from Choshi in Japan in 2018 with a plan to swim 40 nautical miles (64km) a day until he hit San Francisco, resting at night on his support boat. However, he was forced to give up after a mere 1,500 miles when the boat suffered irreparable damage.
Lecomte already claims a world first on swimming the Atlantic, after he crossed from Massachusetts to Brittany in northern France in 1998 (with a week off in the Azores halfway through). Guinness World Records does not recognise the attempt, however, due to uncertainty over the distance he swam. The first circumnavigation of Great Britain, on the other hand, has officially happened. (“It was brutal,” said 33-year-old Ross Edgley on finally coming ashore in Margate in 2018.)
The 9-metre long jump
Another near miss, American Mike Powell’s world record long jump of 8.95 metres in 1991 has never been surpassed (though he jumped a wind-assisted 8.99 metres the following year at altitude).
His 35-year record is not the longest to stand in athletics, however. Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 100m in 10.49 seconds and 200m in 21.34 seconds, both set in 1988, are unsurpassed, as are the women’s 400m and 800m records, set in 1985 and 1983 by athletes from the former German Democratic Republic and Czechoslovakia respectively.
Even Jonathan Edwards’s 18.29-metre triple jump has stood for more than 30 years (it was set in 1995), which he believes is because athletics has “not kept pace with the professionalism of sport”.
The 30-minute breath hold
Croat Vitomir Maričić got to 29 minutes and 3 seconds in 2025, but the big 30, as probably no one calls it, has never been achieved.
Croatia, indeed, appears to be a centre of excellence for the sport, the record was held by his countryman Budimir Šobat, whose time of 24 minutes and 37.36 seconds, was, noted Guinness World Records, longer than an episode of the Simpsons.
Perhaps encouragingly for late starters, Šobat did not take up freediving until the age of 48, and said his age helped him stay calm at critical moments. “Of course, you have to be a little bit mad,” he added.
The first ascent of Gangkhar Puensum
At 7,570 metres (24,836 ft), Gangkhar Puensum is actually a tiddler – only the 40th highest mountain on Earth and more than a kilometre shorter than Everest. However, the highest mountain in Bhutan is also the highest unclimbed peak on earth, a status that would ordinarily send mountaineers clamouring for their crampons.
There were a number of unsuccessful attempts in the 1980s, but for now at least, we can be confident the mountain whose name means “White Peak of the Three Spiritual Brothers” will remain unconquered. In 1994, Bhutan banned the climbing of all peaks over 6,000m, citing respect for local spiritual beliefs.