Berlin, while you read this. The gun goes at quarter past nine, and the corrals are already full, fifty thousand people watching the grey over Tiergarten for a break in the weather. This is the fastest course on earth, the one that has hosted more marathon world records than any other. The record fell in April, in London, where Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 to become the first man under two hours, and a debutant, Yomif Kejelcha, ran 1:59:41 behind him. Sawe is not here; a stress fracture took him out in August.
Berlin's morning belongs to the women. Tigst Assefa set the world record on this course in 2023, lost it to Chicago a year later, and has said she wants it back. She runs today.
Mid-thought
We got very good at measuring the body, and no better at the body. The number is a report, not the work. For ten years we have bought the report and rented the work, and the bill arrives monthly. The ring on a million wrists scores a night of sleep it cannot see. The concession is real: a number that gets you to the pool on a Tuesday is worth keeping, and I keep mine. But a number you cannot act on is not information. It is a subscription to your own worry. The people who look the way we want to look are not the ones with the most data. They are the ones who did the same boring thing for ten years and never asked the watch for permission.
Tabs left open
Oura. The ring is being sued, and the complaint is almost polite. Filed in California in August, it does not claim the Oura is a bad product. It claims the ring cannot measure the signals that separate one sleep stage from another, that the stages are inferred rather than read, and that an independent comparison puts the accuracy near a coin flip. Oura has advertised 79 percent, and more recently 95. The hardware is not on trial. The number is. Nothing about your morning changes, and the ring still gives you a score. It was always a guess. The suit just made it a documented one.
The fittest people in North America have never done a workout. In 2004, researchers put pedometers on 98 Old Order Amish adults in southern Ontario, most of them farmers, and let a week run. The men averaged 18,425 steps a day, the women 14,196. Their moderate-to-vigorous work ran to about 47 hours a week, against a government recommendation of two and a half. None of the men were obese. None of them owned a gym membership or a training plan. A follow-up asked what it would cost a modern adult to match them, and the answer was close to two hours of deliberate exercise every day. The Amish got there by living, which is the only way it has ever scaled.
See you next Sunday.
