That is, while impressive, pretty meaningless. The thing is, that sports are defined by their rules and to the best of my understanding the long distance running rules are written to prevent teamwork. (Unlike cycling, which is explicitly a team sport.) Basically, the two hour mark is important in the specific circumstances of Olympic marathon, and was broken in a different sport.

To broaden the discussion a bit, it seems reasonable to argue that the true limits of human endurance are reached running barefoot. Then we have Olympic marathon, where modern high performance shoes are used. And on the other hand of this spectrum, we have bicycles, after all it is not entirely clear why the engineering hours poured into modern running shoes should be categorically different from the engineering hours spend to construct a bike. And somewhere on this spectrum falls following an car and pacemakers, and my point is, it is a different point than Olympic marathon.

This is actually not an argument against bending the rules in general, but in this specific instance, it is bending the rules to archive something that is hard because of the rules. In particular, it is just a 2% improvement over the Olympic marathon world record.

The longer I write, the harder it gets to avoid the categorization Bullshit, however I just realized that in this instance I could quite easily cite Harry Frankfurt [0] and use the term in a technical sense. So, the bullshitters do not care about truth or beauty, they just care to produce something that vaguely looks like marathon, to those distracted by their TV dinner, while also being sub 2h. They succeeded, but they only succeeded in a game of their own invention.

[0] H. Frankfurt, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press. 2005.