Well… where do we even start?

History was made on the streets of London as Sabastian Sawe delivered the unthinkable – becoming the first man ever to break the two-hour barrier for a marathon in race conditions, sending shockwaves through sport and rewriting one of endurance athletics’ greatest limits.

Today’s special edition of The Daily Split dives deep into an unforgettable London Marathon: the record-breaking run, the splits, the atmosphere, the reaction, and what endurance feats could be the next to fall.

Here’s what we have lined up for you today…

🙌 SAVED: The Dragon’s Back Race and Northern Traverse have been saved in a deal which sees Ultra X take on the two popular runs. Read HERE.

👊 RECORD: Jonny Brownlee will aim to set a new record for the Weekend Warrior challenge when he competes at Supertri Blenheim. Read HERE.

🥇 WINNER: Hayden Wilde picked up from where he left off last season by completely dominating the opening men’s T100 race of 2026. Read HERE.

❌ ILLNESS: French superstar Cassandre Beaugrand missed the opening WTCS race of the season due to suffering from a fever. Read HERE.

🇹🇼 CHALLENGE: One of the world’s largest triathlons, Challenge Taiwan, was won by Kieran Storch (AUS) and Julie Derron (SUI). Read HERE.

Men: Vasco Vilaca bagged a richly deserved first World Triathlon Championship Series victory when his power-packed finish netted the gold medal in Samarkand.

The Portuguese star has finished on the WTCS podium no fewer than nine times but took full advantage here of the fact that the ‘big three’ of Matt Hauser, Hayden Wilde and Alex Yee were racing elsewhere this weekend.

Vilaca still had to dig deep to burn off fellow front-runners Henry Graf (GER) and Charles Paquet (CAN) in the closing stages after the trio had moved clear of the rest.

Women: Britain’s Beth Potter, the world champion in 2023, saw off France’s Leonie Periault and a stacked women’s field to win the opening race of the World Triathlon Championship Series season in Samarkand.

The double Olympic bronze medallist from Paris was bouncing back brilliantly after an injury-hit winter, and she made her move late on the run after an epic duel with Periault, eventually beating the Frenchwoman by nine seconds.

Georgia Taylor-Brown (GBR) had helped animate the race when breaking clear on the bike, but she was just denied third spot when Jeanne Lehair (LUX) overtook her in the closing stages.

Reigning IRONMAN 70.3 World Champion Lucy Charles-Barclay was back in triathlon action this weekend for the first time since her Marbella triumph – and she started her season with a win.

It came at the Olympic distance (a 1.5km swim, 40km bike and 10km run) Volcano Triathlon at Club La Santa, Lanzarote, which is a familiar training base for the Brit.

Against a small but select field, LCB was quickest – female or male – in the swim with an 18:47, and she followed that with 1:04:13 on the bike and 37:13 on the run. That gave her a combined time of 2:04:18 and first place in the women’s standings.

The now-retired Anne Haug (GER), a former IRONMAN World Champion like LCB, was the runner-up. She was just over four minutes back and showed she retains her impressive run speed with a 34:29 10km.

Lydia Dant (GBR), a two-time IRONMAN Lanzarote champion, rounded out the podium in third.

Reigning men’s UTMB champion Tom Evans won the iconic Yorkshire Three Peaks Race on Saturday.

Billed as the ‘marathon with mountains’, the 71st edition of the event attracted Britain’s greatest ultrarunner on the men’s side, with Evans in a super-select group of athletes to have won both Western States in the USA and the sport’s blue riband event, the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, France.

Evans reached the finish in Horton-in-Ribblesdale in three hours, two minutes and 17 seconds. That was more than 15 minutes clear of runner-up Jordan Clay.

Liège-Bastogne-Liège: Tadej Pogačar rode to a historic victory at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, holding off breakout star Paul Seixas, in a solo effort to draw ever closer to Eddy Merckx’s record of 19 wins in cycling’s Monuments.

The UAE Team Emirates-XRG rider held his nerve over the 19-year-old Decathlon rider to storm ahead alone from 13km to go, in the fastest La Doyenne in history.

Seixas of Decathlon CMA CGM held on to take second 45 seconds later, while Remco Evenepoel (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), despite leading 140km of the race, closed out the podium with a sprint finish over the rest of the peloton.

Demi Vollering continued her winning ways at the 10th Liege-Bastogne-Liege Femme, claiming her third victory in the finale of the Spring Classics.

For a full report on the Liège-Bastogne-Liège, read Cycling Weekly, HERE.

There is always a temptation to look ahead once a task or goal has been completed, particularly one which has taken a fair bit of time to achieve.

As last weekend’s London Marathon set a new world record for the 59,830 runners who completed the 26.2m-trek around the UK’s capital, you can bet there were many among them already thinking about what’s next.

For the majority, priorities must surely focus on a couple of weeks’ rest and recovery – see our handy guide further down this edition of the Daily Split – but the hunger for taking on bigger and more extreme endurance challenges doesn’t remain sated for long.

Hands up all those who, upon finishing their first marathon, immediately started looking at the qualification processes for Boston, New York or Chicago? Or who even thought that signing up for an IRONMAN would be great fun? You know who you are. 🤭

For Sabastian Sawe, the first-ever man to run a marathon in under two hours, the answer to ‘what’s next?’ is likely going to be very different to what it would have been before he went out and set that new, incredible, world-record time on Sunday.

For years, the sub-2-hour marathon was the sport’s greatest obsession.

Only a matter of days earlier, after completing the Boston Marathon in a course-record time of 2:01:52, fellow Kenyan John Korir was asked about the prospect of him becoming the first man to achieve it.

“I am not thinking about that… it is not on my mind,” was his rather curt reply.

Whether constant media attention surrounding the quest had become something of an annoyance for some of the professional runners, we will likely never know, but as the focus now turns from ‘can it be done?’ to ‘how it was done’ and ‘who did it?’, those levels of interest are only going to increase – and with Sawe very much at its heart.

An achievement that sits right up there with Roger Bannister’s first-ever four-minute mile in 1954, Sawe will likely find himself at the centre of a never-before-seen marketing and promotional storm as he, quite rightly, makes the very most of this moment in athletics history.

And, in truth, this is something that he has been well-prepped for by both his agency and his sponsors, Adidas, who understood some time ago what he was capable of.

However, having seen the fate of fellow Kenyan Ruth Chepngetich, who set a new world record of 2:09:56, only to then have questions raised about its validity when she tested positive for using a banned substance, they were keen to avoid any such concerns.

When it became clear that Sawe could indeed be the man to run sub-2 hours, a special fund of $50,000 was included in his contract with Adidas to provide the sport’s anti-doping organisation with additional funding to test him on a more regular basis.

The Athletics Integrity Unit has thus placed him on a special protocol, which makes him one of the most-tested and therefore ‘judgement-free’ athletes in the world; indeed, he was tested 25 times in the two months before the Berlin Marathon last year.

As a result, Sawe will be able to enjoy his glorious moment without any such clouds of suspicion hanging over him, an approach which is understood to have already interested other athletes keen to clean up the sport’s image.

Sawe’s name will go down in history, and by rights, so should that of Yomif Kejelcha, the Ethiopian who also broke the magic two-hour mark while pushing his rival all the way as runner-up. Without him being there, it is unlikely there would have been a world record at all, and yet, Sawe will get all the headlines… such is the difference between winning and coming home as a runner-up.

He, too, could be forgiven for pondering what the future holds. Breaking the near-mythical two-hour mark on his marathon debut was certainly enough to announce the arrival of a new star onto the scene… We haven’t heard the last from him, that’s for sure.

Indeed, waking up on Monday morning, it is very possible that both he and Sawe shared the same thought process as many of those 59,828 runners who joined them on the streets of London as they set about wondering… ‘what’s next?’.

🚨 STORIES FROM AN HISTORIC LONDON MARATHON…

Sawe and Kejelcha may have rewritten the terms of possibility when it comes to marathon running, but they weren’t the only ‘superstars’ to receive wide acclaim as a result of their performance on Sunday.

As the two athletes celebrated their record-breaking feat, the marketing machine behind their shoe manufacturer, Adidas, had already switched on the overdrive.

Both athletes were wearing the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 shoes, trainers so new they weren’t even available for the public to buy until this week. And with the winner of the women’s race, Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia, also wearing them, you can understand the sudden spike in interest.

It was rival Nike who did much to raise awareness of the push for a first sub-two-hour marathon, launching the Breaking 2 project almost a decade ago, and heavily marketing the push and innovations that followed.

Such interest undoubtedly led to the advent of carbon fibre running shoes and ultimately resulted in the historic events witnessed on The Mall at the weekend.

For Adidas, it was clearly too good an opportunity to miss, and they were immediately into full marketing swing, with the Evo 3 heralded as the supershoe that made it all possible.

Weighing only 97 grams, it is made with Lightstrike Pro Evo foam – 30% lighter than standard racing foam – built to deliver an 11% increase in energy return at the forefoot, and designed purely for speed, lasting for one marathon only.

Priced at £450 (€530, $590 USD or $910 AUD), this is clearly not a cheap shoe… but on the other hand, it is a world record-breaking shoe… and that fact alone will be enough to ensure the Evo 3 is very much the ‘must-have’ runner for 2026.

As for Nike, they responded with a simple post on Instagram, which simply said ‘The clock has been reset. There is no finish line’, before then congratulating Sawe.

A classy move, but there is little doubt execs at the swoosh brand will be smarting this week, and we can’t wait to see what they now come up with in response as the battle to enable our athletes to run even faster enters a new phase.

We are guessing there may be a few sore legs out there among our Daily Split regulars, so here are a few key tips to ensure you recover properly from any marathon exploits.

Lingering fatigue and muscle soreness can lead to frustration at having to skip training sessions, or even injury if you keep trying to push through. Recovery is just as important as your training sessions.

This guide from Netherlands-based physio, running coach, athlete and Asics Frontrunner, Zi Yan, walks you through the marathon recovery timeline.

He says: “You finished the marathon. Now comes the part most runners get wrong: the recovery. You don’t bounce back in a few days. Even if your legs feel fine, your body’s still repairing deep fatigue you can’t see. You don’t lose fitness by resting, you rebuild it. Recovery isn’t a setback, it’s part of the process.”

Finishing a marathon is one thing, but to do so with a 25kg fridge strapped to your back? Well, that is an entirely different level of endurance.

Jordan Adams completed the 26.2 miles in London on Sunday in honour of his late mum, Geraldine, who was diagnosed with familial frontotemporal dementia at the age of just 47, and who died aged 52.

Both Jordan and his brother, Cian, have also been told they carry the same genes, which means they, too, will suffer from the terminal condition at some point in their lives.

Having formed the FTD Brothers foundation to ‘Make Dementia Visible’, the pair are attempting to raise £1m for Dementia research before the disease takes their lives.

Both ran the marathon on Sunday – only Jordan carried a fridge – and now they are setting off to complete another 32 marathons in as many days on a tour around Ireland. Their fundraising target for completing the marathons was initially set at £550,000, but they have already raised an incredible £471,739.

“If running a marathon with a fridge on my back is what it takes, then I will do it, for every family devastated by dementia that was for you,” he wrote. “But it was also for 15-year-old me, who used to lie in bed crying his eyes out because the world was taking my mom. She was smiling down today 🕊️🌞”

You can find out more about the FTD Brothers on their website HERE.

Together, we go the distance. — @247_endurance 🏃‍♂️🚴‍♀️🏊‍♂️