If you watched the London Marathon two weeks ago (and even if you didn’t), you know the result. Sabastian Sawe, 1:59:30, the first man to break two hours in a legitimate, record-eligible marathon.
What you have not seen, until today, is the year of work behind it. Adidas released Chasing Sub 2 this morning, a 12-minute documentary that traces Sawe from his training camp in Kenya to the brand’s innovation lab in Herzogenaurach, Germany, and back to the start line in London.
We sat with the film. Here is what it actually tells you.
It is built A Lot like adidas’s “Chasing 100”
If the title sounds familiar, that is on purpose. Last August, adidas released Chasing 100, the documentary about five ultra runners trying to run 100 kilometers in under six hours at the Nardò Ring, a 12.5km circular Formula 1 test track in Italy. They ran it at night, in extreme heat, eight loops, with escort vehicles.
Chasing Sub 2 uses the same playbook. Athlete in their environment, then engineers in theirs, then race day. The difference is scale. This one is the London Marathon, on a public course, with the world watching live.
Haile narrates, and that’s Pretty Legendary
Now, one of the best parts (of the documentary, not the actual sub-2 marathon, of course) is the voice over is Haile Gebrselassie, the Ethiopian who broke 2:04 in Berlin in 2008.
There is a moment in the film where one of his old representatives talks about renegotiating Haile’s contract in 2004 and writing in time bonuses for sub-2:05, sub-2:04, and sub-2:03. The agent reportedly laughed at the sub-2:03 clause, figuring it was decades away. Haile broke 2:04 four years later. Sawe broke two hours less than two decades after that.
“2:03:59 is nothing compared to these days,” Haile says in the film. “And, well, that is now just their chance.” Putting him on the mic is most certainly a deliberate choice. He is the runner who made the previous unthinkable barrier real, handing off to the runner who just made the next one real.
The 99-gram shoe is, of course, the centerpiece
The product reveal is the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3. It is the shoe Sawe raced in, and it is the first adidas racer under 100 grams. The exact weight, per the film, is 99 grams, roughly a 30 percent drop from the previous Pro Evo, which sat closer to 140g.
To strip 40-plus grams off a carbon-plated super shoe, you cannot just shave foam. You rebuild the upper, rethink the outsole rubber coverage, and accept durability tradeoffs that do not matter when the shoe is built for one race. Adidas calls the design philosophy “reduce to zero,” and this is the most extreme version they have shipped.
The detail the doc lingers on is when Sawe started calling it “my shoe” in conversations with the Herzo team. That, according to the product lead, was the moment they knew it was working. “When everything else is in order,” Sawe says, “the shoes are really important to make sure I run my best.”
Sawe is more interesting than the headlines made him
Most of what has been written about Sawe so far is about his time. The film fills in the rest. He is a father of three sons. He farms when he is home. His coach is Claudio Berardelli, an Italian who has lived in Kenya for more than two decades, speaks Swahili, and runs the training group Sawe joined in 2020.
The Berardelli back story is worth knowing. He brought Sawe to the Seville Half Marathon as a pacemaker, hoping he might hold on for 8 to 10 kilometers. Sawe took off, dropped the field by 8K, and won the race outright in 59:02 with the course record. That was the moment Berardelli says he realized he was working with someone different.
“Sabastian came to me as a gift,” Berardelli says. “I’m pretty sure that Sabastian will write a bit of history in running. And I want to be next to him.”
Sawe himself is quiet on camera. He talks more about his coach than about himself. There is a section where Berardelli explains that the sub-two conversation started with him asking Sawe simply not to be afraid of it. “I asked him not to fear. To believe that he might be the one, the first one actually, to do the Sub2.”
