Record-eligible road course criteria
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A world record can only be set on a road course that satisfies two geometric conditions in addition to being certified for distance. The straight-line separation between start and finish must not exceed 50 percent of the race distance — for a marathon, about 21.1 km. And the net decrease in elevation from start to finish must not exceed one metre per kilometre, about 42 m over a marathon. Neither rule is about difficulty. Both exist to stop a course borrowing speed from something other than the runner: a strong prevailing tailwind on a long straight point-to-point route, or gravity on a net downhill. The rules are the reason the oldest annual marathon in the world can never produce a world record, and the reason two flat city-centre loops have produced most of them.
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