Haile in Japan

Halie’s win in Fukuoka was remarkable in that he proved that he can produce a sub 2:07 marathon consistently. In fact, he has had only one race that was not sub-2:07. He also happens to be the second person ever to run four career sub-2:07 races. To put things in perspective our own Belayneh Dinsamo ran 2:06:50 on Apr 17, 1988 and for more than ten years no one included Belayneh Dinsamo could run faster than 2:06:50. A sub-2:07 was a rare achivement just eight years ago.

Haile's Marathon Times
Position	Date	Race	Time
1	03-DEC-2006	Fukuoka	2:06:52
1	25-SEP-2006	Berlin	2:05:56
9	21-APR-2006	London	2:09:05
1	16-OCT-2005	Amsterdam	2:06:20
3	14-APR-2002	London	2:06:35

What do we have to look forward to? Haile thinks he can set the World Record sometime next year. The fact that he ran negative splits (1:04:19 for the first half and 1:02:33 for the second half) indicates that he probably could have run faster on Sunday. I put Haile's half-marathon time and his 10K times into a race time predictor at Runners World and the predictions are that - based on his half marathon time of 58:55 Haile is capable of running a 2:02:50 and based on his 10K time of 26:22.75 he is capable of running a 2:00:31 marathon. These are impressive times but I won’t bet on these predicted times. However, I would bet that if Haile can stay healthy he would break the world record sometime next year.