Sabastian Sawe Announces December Race… In South Korea

Sabastian Sawe, the first man to run an official marathon inside two hours, will spend a December weekend running 14K with 30,000 amateur runners in a rural South Korean county. The distance is not a standard road event. There is no record to chase, no ranking on offer and no elite field.

The event, reported Thursday by News1, runs Dec. 5 and 6 in Geumsan-gun, South Chungcheong Province, capped at 15,000 runners per day. Entries open Sept. 1 on a first come, first served basis. Sawe will run the course among the participants rather than in a separate elite race. Course details, start times and format have not been published, and the organizer says it will settle them with Sawe’s management next month.

That organizer is the National Marathon Association, a private mass-running body. It is not the Korea Association of Athletics Federations, the country’s World Athletics member federation, a distinction that has blurred in some English coverage of the announcement. The association’s chairman, Jang Young-gi, traveled to Sawe’s adidas training camp in Kapsabet, Nandi County, on July 28 to settle the schedule.

Sawe earned the invitation following a historic April 26, when he ran 1:59:30 at the London Marathon, the first sub-two-hour marathon in a record-eligible race and a world record by 65 seconds. Yomif Kejelcha finished behind him in 1:59:41, the fastest marathon debut in history. World Athletics has since ratified the mark.

The Korean announcement describes Geumsan as Sawe’s first outing since the record. Berlin comes first. He is due to defend his Berlin Marathon title on Sept. 27, roughly 10 weeks before the Korean weekend. Geumsan would be his first mass-participation appearance, not his first race.

Neither the association nor Sawe’s management has disclosed the terms. An appearance of this kind is almost certainly paid, though no figure has been made public. Sawe collected $355,000 in prize and bonus money for the London run alone.

The scale is unusual for the setting. Geumsan-gun had 48,975 residents at the end of May, according to county figures. Thirty thousand places across two days is roughly 60 percent of the county’s population. Geumsan handles about 80 percent of Korea’s ginseng trade and already stages an annual ginseng festival, and the race fits the same tourism logic.