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editorial

Canada's Reid Coolsaet runs past St. Paul's Cathedral during the men's marathon event at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, England, Sunday August 12/2012. (Photo by Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail)Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail

Twenty seconds is nothing. It's the empty time between pitches in a fast-moving baseball game, a stroll across a city street, a bite or two of a juicy burger, one-sixth of a proper tooth-brushing, a few unnoticed heartbeats, or the elapsed period for reading this paragraph and half of the next one.

Last Sunday, Reid Coolsaet of Hamilton ran the second-fastest marathon in Canadian history, covering the 42.195 kilometres of Berlin's picturesque streets in two hours, 10 minutes and 28 seconds. Had he run a mere 20 seconds faster – if only he'd managed to shave an infinitesimal 0.48 seconds off each kilometre, which is just about the blink of an eye – he would finally have broken Jerome Drayton's Canadian marathon record, which has stood for an amazing 40 years.

In a tweet immediately following the race, Mr. Coolsaet acknowledged that he was "simultaneously very satisfied and frustrated." No athlete should feel frustration after running a personal best, but the 36-year-old Canadian runner's disappointment is understandable – if only in the fine, granular, after-the-fact calculation of what might have been.

Elite marathoners understand the gradations of time and the increments of improvement better than anyone. Their entire lives are built around finding tiny and repetitive efficiencies in stride, diet, training patterns, sleep and breathing, because the minutiae of the moment can accumulate into a meaningful gain over 26 miles and 385 yards. In their painfully elongated race against the clock, they monitor their pace with the athlete's heightened awareness of the body's capacities, recognizing that the only way to gain precious seconds by the end of the race is to steal them back over the preceding two hours.

Mr. Coolsaet aimed to break 2:10 in Berlin. Running with pacers who can feel the passage of time in each step, he reached the halfway point in 1:04:57. All he had to do was repeat this performance and the record was his.

Nothing is that easy, especially in a race once considered to be at the life-or-death limits of human endurance. Marathoners are exquisitely machined beings who run like clockwork – three of Mr. Coolsaet's five best times are within one second of each other – but the unpredictable, uncontrollable side of humanity keeps breaking through. His pacers slackened, the wind kicked up, he was forced to lead rather than follow (which is psychologically as well as physically demanding) and the advantage drifted away.

There's always next time – except that for an aging marathoner who runs the draining distance only twice a year, there aren't quite enough next times. Mr. Coolsaet's distant focus has now changed from the Canadian record to the Rio Olympics – where the race is against men, not the clock.

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