Sabastian Sawe Biography: Weight and Height, Shoe, Next Race, Training, Berlin 2025 and Coach

His entry into competitive road racing was completely unplanned. In 2022, he was brought in as a hired pacemaker for a half marathon in Sevilla, Spain, a role that required him to set the tempo for the leading runners before stepping aside. Instead, his natural speed took over. He ran through the entire field, won the race outright, and broke the course record by over a minute and a half, finishing in 59:02. He had never raced beyond 5,000 metres before that day. That single, accidental performance launched one of the most remarkable careers in modern distance running.

After Sevilla, Sawe built steadily and methodically. He collected wins across major half marathons in Europe and the Middle East, and in 2023 he claimed the gold medal at the inaugural World Athletics World Road Running Championships in the half marathon event. He also contributed to Kenya's team gold at the World Cross Country Championships that year, showing his versatility across different surfaces and distances.

His full marathon debut came in December 2024 at the Valencia Marathon in Spain, where he won in 2:02:05, one of the fastest debut marathon performances ever recorded. From that point, his marathon record became an unblemished sequence of victories. He won the 2025 London Marathon in 2:02:27, then the 2025 Berlin Marathon in 2:02:16, before delivering the performance that silenced all remaining debate on April 26, 2026, when he crossed the finish line at the London Marathon in 1:59:30, becoming the first man in history to officially complete a competitive marathon in under two hours. His uncle, Abraham Chepkirwok, a former 800m international athlete who represented Uganda at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, had offered early encouragement and connected him with the coaching network that would shape his career.

Sabastian Sawe Weight and Height

Sabastian Sawe's precise weight and height have not been formally disclosed by his management team or World Athletics, a practice that is fairly common among Kenyan elite distance runners who tend to keep personal metrics out of the public domain. Based on his athletic profile and visual assessments across major race appearances, Sawe carries the lean, lightweight build that is a defining physical trait of elite East African marathon runners.

Athletes competing at his level in the marathon typically maintain a body weight in the region of 52 to 58 kilograms, with a height falling between 165 and 175 centimetres. Sawe's frame appears consistent with these benchmarks, presenting a slim, wiry physique that minimises the energy cost of forward movement. In long-distance running, body composition plays a critical role in determining running economy, which is the measure of how efficiently the body converts oxygen into forward momentum at race pace.

His extraordinarily efficient stride, combined with what his coaching team describes as exceptional natural endurance, suggests a physical profile that is well suited to the demands of marathon racing. The fact that he ran the second half of the 2026 London Marathon in approximately 59 minutes, nearly matching his own standalone half marathon best, points to a level of physical efficiency that goes well beyond what his modest frame might suggest to the casual observer.

Sabastian Sawe Shoe

Footwear has become one of the most talked-about elements in modern marathon racing, and Sabastian Sawe has been closely associated with carbon-plated racing technology throughout his rise to the top of the sport. For his marathon debut and his subsequent major race appearances, Sawe has competed in the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo, one of the most advanced racing shoes currently available on the market, retailing at approximately £450.

The shoe features a full-length carbon fibre plate embedded within a highly responsive foam midsole, designed to store and return energy with each foot strike, reducing the metabolic cost of running over long distances. For athletes maintaining sub-three-minute-per-kilometre pace across 42 kilometres, even marginal gains in energy return translate into meaningful time savings by the final stages of a race.

In a touching moment following his world record run at the 2026 London Marathon, photographs captured Sawe's racing shoes bearing his historic finishing time of 1:59:30, a small but powerful symbol of what those shoes had carried him through. The Adidas Pro Evo line has been worn by several of the world's fastest marathon runners in recent seasons, and Sawe's back-to-back victories and world record in those shoes have further elevated its standing as one of the most performance-oriented racing flats in the sport.

Sabastian Sawe Next Race

As of April 26, 2026, no official confirmation has been made about Sabastian Sawe's next competitive race. The announcement came only hours after his historic sub-two-hour performance at the London Marathon, and his management team had understandably not yet spoken publicly about what comes next. However, based on the pattern of his career so far, informed speculation points toward a strong possibility of a return to the BMW Berlin Marathon in September 2026, a race he won in 2025 and one he has described as a course he genuinely enjoys.

Sawe has followed a consistent spring-autumn marathon schedule over the course of his career, using London in April and Berlin in September as his two primary targets in a given year. Whether that pattern continues or whether his team decides to seek new challenges, such as a debut at the Chicago Marathon or the Tokyo Marathon, remains to be announced.

What is clear is that his performances have made him the most sought-after name in world marathon racing. Every major race organiser globally will be working to secure his entry. The question for Sawe and his coach Claudio Berardelli will be how best to manage his schedule now that he carries the weight and the privilege of being the world record holder and the first man to have officially run sub-two hours in competition.

Sabastian Sawe Training

Sabastian Sawe is based primarily at a high-altitude training camp in Kapsabet, a town in western Kenya. Kapsabet sits at an elevation that allows athletes to train in lower-oxygen conditions, which stimulates the body to produce a higher concentration of red blood cells. When those athletes then compete at sea level, the increased oxygen-carrying capacity of their blood gives them a measurable endurance advantage. It is a training environment shared by many of Kenya's greatest distance runners, and it has become central to Sawe's development.

His daily training routine is built on discipline, consistency, and recovery. Colleagues and fellow camp members describe him as someone who takes the non-running aspects of performance just as seriously as the sessions themselves, paying close attention to sleep, nutrition, and rest between workouts. He is not known for flashy training methods or viral workout clips. His approach is quiet and methodical.

One of the clearest markers of his training quality is his ability to run negative splits in competition, meaning that he consistently runs the second half of his marathons faster than the first. This pattern was evident at Valencia, London 2025, and Berlin 2025, and it reflects a runner who has developed an acute understanding of his own limits and how to push them without overreaching. His coach has also noted that Sawe initially held back during his debut marathon when a competitor surged, unsure of how much he had left. Having discovered that he had considerably more in reserve than he thought, his confidence and tactical aggression in subsequent races have grown significantly.

Despite the demands of his schedule, Sawe maintains a modest and disciplined personal life. He lives in shared accommodation at the training camp and sees his wife and young son only a couple of times each month during heavy training blocks, a sacrifice that speaks to the level of commitment his career requires.

Sabastian Sawe Berlin 2025

The 2025 BMW Berlin Marathon, held on September 21, 2025, served as a powerful demonstration of just how dominant Sabastian Sawe had become over the marathon distance. Entering the race as the clear favourite and the reigning London Marathon champion, he went out with genuine ambition to challenge the Berlin course record of 2:01:09, set by Eliud Kipchoge in 2022. To that end, he requested an unusually large pacing team to help him hold the aggressive early tempo required.

The race started at a scorching pace. Sawe passed through the 10km mark in 28:26, a split comparable to those of some of the fastest marathon performances in history on that course. Through 15km in 42:51, he was moving faster than Kelvin Kiptum had during his world record run in Chicago. At the halfway point, he passed through in 60:16, still on course for a potential record.

However, the afternoon temperatures rose sharply as the race progressed, eventually climbing to around 25 degrees Celsius in the closing stages. That kind of heat is deeply punishing for athletes running at world-class marathon intensity, as the body's cooling demands compete directly with the muscles for blood flow and oxygen. One by one, his rivals fell away. The defending champion dropped out before reaching the 30km mark. Sawe was left entirely alone at the front for the final 17 kilometres of the race, battling both the heat and the distance without any competitive or pacing support.

He still won by an extraordinary margin, finishing in 2:02:16 and crossing the line nearly five minutes ahead of the second-place finisher. His response after the race was characteristically measured. He acknowledged that the conditions had prevented a faster time but expressed satisfaction with his effort and his affection for the Berlin course. The performance was subsequently noted by race analysts as an informal warm-weather world record, meaning no man had ever run as fast under such high-temperature conditions.

Sabastian Sawe Coach

The man behind Sabastian Sawe's rise is Claudio Berardelli, an Italian athletics coach who has spent over two decades working in Kenya and who has built a remarkable record of producing world-class marathon runners. Berardelli operates a high-altitude training camp in Kapsabet as part of an Italian athlete management structure, and the camp has become one of the most productive environments for road running talent in the world.

Sawe's connection to Berardelli came through family. His uncle Abraham Chepkirwok, a former elite middle-distance runner, introduced Sawe to the camp network. The assistant coach at Berardelli's camp is Abel Mutai, the 2012 Olympic bronze medallist in the 3,000m steeplechase, who is a neighbour of Chepkirwok and was instrumental in bringing Sawe into the setup. Berardelli recalls initially placing Sawe among the track distance runners before recognising that his true gifts lay on the road and over the marathon distance.

Among the athletes Berardelli has coached over the years are three-time London Marathon champion Martin Lel, two-time Boston Marathon champion Evans Chebet, and Benson Kipruto, winner of the Boston, Chicago, and Tokyo Marathons. By his own admission, none of them has impressed him quite the way Sawe has. Speaking ahead of the 2026 London Marathon, Berardelli said that after more than two decades in coaching, he had not yet fully understood the upper limit of Sawe's potential, which he described as a rare and exciting position to be in with any athlete.

His assessment of Sawe goes beyond physical talent. He has described him as mentally strong, exceptionally trainable, and genuinely humble, qualities that he believes are just as responsible for the world record as any physiological gift. For Berardelli, Sawe is not simply the fastest marathon runner he has ever coached. He is, by his own measure, a once-in-a-generation athlete whose ceiling remains unknown.