Boston Marathon: Dashing through the woe

BOSTON -- For more than a century, the Boston Marathon has spurned professional pacesetters while encouraging tactics that favor strategy over speed. But Kenyan Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot upended that mind-set last year, dashing from Hopkinton to Copley Square in 2 hours, 5 minutes, 52 seconds to shatter the course record by 1:22.

"I always knew it was possible to run fast times here. He showed us that it is," said Ryan Hall, who finished third in 2009 and last year ran the fastest time for an American in Boston.

Despite the aptly named Heartbreak Hill, which is really a series of climbs around Mile 21 in Newton, the Boston course starts at an elevation of 475 feet and finishes just 16 feet above sea level.

"It's a net downhill course. People are going to run it fast in good weather," 1968 winner Amby Burfoot said this week. "Cool weather, a tailwind and a whole bunch of Ethiopians and Kenyans. Somebody's going to run it really fast."

Before Cheruiyot, who is back for Monday's 115th edition, lopped nearly a minute and a half off the course record of 2:07:14 set in 2006, it had hovered above 2:07 since 1986, even as most of the marathoning marks moved into the 2:04 range. Ethiopian Haile Gebrselassie holds the world record at 2:03:59 in Berlin in 2008.-- AP