Music Meets Running

What you will watch in the video-clip below is — physically and tactically — absolutely and purely majestic. From a general point of view, the 1500 m is probably the most spectacular, intense, and suspense-filled middle-distance race of athletics — furthermore, in the case of this website, let’s highlight that the duration of a 1500 m (3–4 min) matches perfectly the average duration of a rock-pop song. In the Women’s 1500 m of the 2015 Wanda Diamond League stage in Monaco, there are on the starting line: a favourite (Genzebe Dibaba, Ethiopia, who was consecrated world champion on the distance a few weeks before), a pacesetter (Chanelle Price, USA), and an outsider (Sifan Hassan, Netherlands), the three of them belonging to the Nike Team. What’s really here at stake is a new 1500 m world record, the wall to go through being the stratospheric — and at that time suspicious — mark (3 min 50 s 46) realized by Qu Yunxia (China), twenty-two years before, in 1993.

Because of the above-mentioned goal, the race starts very fast and Price — who will as a pacesetter abandon after two laps — immediately ‘works’ for Dibaba in order to put the latter into orbit towards the world record. Hassan runs prudently the first 150 m before taking the third position behind Price and Dibaba. The second half of the race is magnificently dramatic. What’s quite remarkable during the run is the difference between the respective strides of Dibaba, Hassan, and Price. Price is an 800 m-specialist and her stride is heavily strong; on another side, Dibaba, who is a relatively powerful athlete, runs with a high stride angle while Hassan, who is thinner, runs with a low stride angle. More than any of the participants of the race, Dibaba constantly clicks her heels up to her buttocks and strikingly strikes the track with only the forefoot, the heel never touching the surface — which may be called ‘maximum stride efficiency’. And yes, she really seems to just be like dancing-surfing above the tartan.

This is one of my preferred running movies ever. Just enjoy and adore.

Soundtrack: “Stevie”, by Kasabian (2014).