My
name is Dave Urwin and I am the marathon champion of Nauru
Ok, so I can guess what a number of you may be thinking.
Of course there will always be a few clever folks around who know exactly what
and where Nauru is, but I’m guessing a lot of you are thinking something along
the lines of “Nauru?? Where’s that???”
That’s certainly what I thought when I learnt of a man
named Karl Hartman running a 3:48:06 marathon there on an unknown date way back
in 1968, some fourteen years before I was even born. Little did I know, when I
ran my first sub 4 marathon at the New Forest in 2012, I ran through sustained
moderate rain and dodged New Forest ponies that thought it was a game to finish
in 3:47:38, that I was conquering an island country in Micronesia in the South
Pacific. That’s right. Nobody from that nation has run a marathon in less than
3 hours and 48 minutes in over 40 years since the day Karl Hartman smashed it.
According to that source of all accurate and trustworthy information, Wikipedia,
the island is 21km squared (half a marathon squared) in size, and so I’m
guessing running a marathon there involves taking in a fair bit of the nation.
It is a small country, and how many people actually run marathons there? I don’t
know, but I do know that if I was to gain citizenship then my 3:36:02 at 2013’s
North Dorset Village Marathon would be the national record by a colossal twelve
minutes. What’s more, I know that performance doesn’t represent the best I am
capable of by some way. I have never trained specifically for a marathon; both
of my best efforts to date came at a time when I was either training for or
recovering from an ultra, and I didn’t go into either knowing I was aiming for
the best time I could possibly achieve having trained long and hard to do just
that. If I was to really go for it could I set an unassailable Nauru marathon
record? Quite possibly not; it’s entirely likely that if somebody was to turn
up there and brag about being the new Nauru marathon champion then many of the
locals would feel indignation and try and take his crown. Would they? Or would
they think “We are from Nauru, we have the threat of potential catastrophes
from a rising sea level, the threat of a major unemployment crisis ahead of us
and all kinds of things that give us no time for trivialities like marathon
running”? Well actually, looking at nations that have levels of national strife
almost incomprehensible to us in ‘broken’ Britain, Waheed Karim of Afghanistan
managed a 2:28:46 in the USA in 1990, and Sadoun Nasir of Iraq ran a hugely
respectable 2:21:54 in Baghdad back in 1982. Couldn’t somebody from Nauru have
popped over to London one year to post a sub 3? Surely the London Marathon
organisers would have been in favour of giving financial backing to help
somebody set a new marathon record for this nation?
So why is it that nobody from Nauru has beaten Karl Hartman’s time?
Surely people from there must have run marathons since. It has to be down to
the population, right? Well Nauru has a population of around
11-and-a-half-thousand. Ok, so that explains it…..or does it? Russia has a
population of around 143 milllion, and yet the fastest time recorded from
anyone of Russian origin is Aleksey Sokolov’s 2:09:07 at 2007’s Dublin
Marathon, whilst people from the relatively tiny European nations of Belgium,
Italy and even Moldova have run faster marathons than that! Yes, Moldova, with
its population of 3.6 million, has produced a 2:08 marathoner - Jaroslav Mushinschi did
that at Dusseldorf in 2010. I could go on, and I will – China has a population
of comfortably over 1 billion, and yet the fastest marathon anyone from there
has produced was 2:08:15. This may be 16 seconds faster than the Moldovan
effort, but lowly Bahrain, with its population of 1.3 million, has produced an
athlete capable of a 2:06:43. Yes, Shumi Dechasa produced that stunning effort in
Hamburg, Germany this very year.
So population has nothing to do with it. It must simply
be because Nauru doesn’t produce good athletes. Right??.....NONSENSE!!!! Who
has run the fastest over 100 metres and 200 metres since records began? Jamaica’s
Usain Bolt. Which nation always wins the 4x100 metre relay? Jamaica. That
Caribbean island produces sprinters who dominate the world stage…..and yet the
fastest marathon run by anyone from that nation is Derrick Adamson’s pedestrian
effort of 2:16:39 way back in 1984 over in Philadelphia, USA. If Jamaica
produces such incredible athletes then Adamson, with a time like that, must
have had time to get in one little fight during the race, after which his mum
got scared and told him he was moving with his Auntie and Uncle in Bel Air once
he’d finished….well at least that would explain it if the marathon took place
in West Philadelphia. 2:16:39??? For that to happen surely he’d have had to do
some chilling out, relaxing and maxing all cool and shooting some b-ball upside
of the school around mile 24? Or could it just be because a nation producing
great athletes doesn’t necessarily equate to there being brilliant marathoners?
Well let me ask you, can anyone name me a world-beating Kazakhstani athlete?
No? Then how did Nikolay Penzin, from that very nation, run a 2:11:59 in Prague
back in 1978? A time that would still be a Jamaican national record by nearly 5
minutes today if anyone from Jamaica was to run it?
So there you have it. The level of national strife, size
of the population and athletic pedigree of a nation have absolutely no bearing
on the potential for that place to produce excellent marathon runners. What
does this prove?
My national marathon record for Nauru, if I was to gain
citizenship, would be pretty solid! ; )
The moment I broke the national marathon record of Nauru!
If
you wish to order a signed copy of my book ‘Everything Will Work Out in the
Long Run’ , which sadly contains no other fascinating facts about national
marathon records from around the world, but contains the story of how I battled
addictions and their horrific aftermath to become the marathon champion of
Nauru, then you can order one from this link……
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