Sparta has its leaders, but they won’t have an easy month. The task for November is simple: cover 42 km in as many runs as you like. The standings are decided by average pace, and the eight runners who have already completed the distance have set the benchmarks at 4:36 for the men and 5:22 for the women. Behind them come runners with plenty of kilometres still to cover. A few are running faster than the leaders, and November will be decided by whether they can hold that pace over a full marathon.
By the morning of 4 November, 87 runners had logged nearly 1,500 km between them. Sparta opens the Legends series, and the marathon distance defines it: a fast start counts for nothing if the pace fades before kilometre forty.
Men: Matskevich finds another gear
Maxim Matskevich has run Sparta faster than anyone could have predicted. Over the past three months he averaged around 5:10 per kilometre. Here he put together a marathon in two days at 4:36. He broke the distance into five runs: two long efforts of about fifteen kilometres and three short, sharp sessions under 4:20. On the morning of 3 November his total passed 42 km. Matskevich races in the M50 category and has eight league races and one bronze to his name. Now he is closing in on his first major title.
Igor Shapar went the other way and ran the whole marathon in one go on opening day, at 4:41. His caption was brief: “Sochi marathon 2206”. He trails Matskevich by five seconds per kilometre.
Alexander Kriza completed the distance this morning. He split it into two half marathons three days apart and finished at 4:55, slightly quicker than his usual pace.
Next in the standings come Alexander Rakhmetov, Andrey Loginov, who also reached 42 km this morning, and Alexander A. Rakhmetov is the most experienced runner in the field, with fifty league races, more than 5,000 km and eight medals. At 5:30 he is running faster than usual, though still well short of what it takes to challenge the leaders.
The chase
The main threat also comes from the M50 category. On 3 November Alexander Okulov ran 15.5 km at 4:26 and captioned the run “Istanbul Marathon (15.5 km)”. This morning he added another eight and a half kilometres, bringing his average to 4:38, almost level with Matskevich. He has about eighteen kilometres left, and to take the lead he needs to run them faster than 4:33. Istanbul proved he has that speed.
Vyacheslav Grishin, another M50 runner, joined the league on 2 November and ran twenty-three kilometres at 4:51 that same day. To reach first place he would need to drop to about 4:18, which looks out of reach. A podium is more realistic: just under five minutes per kilometre for the rest of the distance would put him ahead of Kriza.
The fastest kilometres of the race so far belong to Dmitriy Kasatskiy, who clocked 3:57 and 4:10 over two 5 km runs. But he has only ten kilometres on the board, and the real question is how much of that speed survives the remaining thirty-two.
Several others are within touching distance of 42 km: Aleksey Yashenkov, Nikolay Lemyagov, Maxim Agafonov and Marat Kadyrov. They will finish in the coming days and fill out the standings, but their pace is well off the leaders’, so the top of the table will stay as it is.
Women: one leader, three chasers
Natalya Sokol completed the distance this morning with her best run of the race: fourteen kilometres at 5:13, which brought her average down to 5:22. She has two overall wins to her name, and she showed that experience by saving her strongest run for last.
Second place belongs to Elmira Khamidulina. She joined the league on the evening of 3 November and, five minutes later, uploaded a full marathon run at 5:40.
Sokol’s lead is the most fragile in the race. Three runners who have yet to reach 42 km are level with her or ahead on pace.
The biggest threat is Anna Egorova. On 1 November she ran almost fourteen kilometres at 4:49 and hasn’t logged a run since. She has a big cushion: to overtake Sokol she only needs 5:39 for the remaining twenty-eight kilometres, barely quicker than her usual pace. Egorova already has one overall win and three silvers.
Marina Oparina, in her first league race, is matching Sokol to the second at 5:22. She has about fourteen kilometres to go, and everything depends on whether she can hold that pace.
Tatiana Gudz has run only once so far: seventeen kilometres at 5:18. If she can stay close to that, she will be in the race for first place too.
From the run captions
Coach Denis Khlebnikov got things going: “Right then, Spartan men and women, let’s go!” Yana Dubrovskaya replied the same evening with “Long live Sparta!” and added that she was running to Mein Herz Brennt. Artur Timerbulatov ran a half marathon on a trail through an open-pit coal mine. Margarita Ukhlinova went out for her first run since late September and admitted she was in it for the medal. Regina Pashkova insists rain only makes a run better.
What comes next
There are twenty-six days left. The race window closes at 23:59 UTC on 30 November, and until then the standings are provisional.
Matskevich and Sokol have done their 42 km, but every kilometre until the end of the month counts, so the leaders can still raise the bar. Sokol showed how this morning. For the chasers the task is more straightforward: Okulov has to hold his Istanbul pace for another eighteen kilometres, and Egorova simply has to get back out there. If both pull it off, Sparta will have new leaders within a week.
