Rebecca Henderson walked her way into the history books in Japan by becoming the first Australian track and field athlete in a generation to set a senior world record in a championship event.
The 25-year-old from Dandenong set a new global mark for the race walk marathon, the sport's newest championship event, clocking three hours 14 minutes 52 seconds at the All Japan Race Walking meeting on Sunday. The Victorian achieved it in sodden conditions on a rainy day in Takahata, in northern Japan.
Henderson's walk was the first time in 20 years that a non-disabled athlete from Australia had set a global mark in an official championship event, since another Australian race walker, Nathan Deakes, set the 50km world record on the roads of Geelong in December 2006. Australian para athletes have broken global records in recent times, and the Olympic silver medallist Jess Hull set the world 2000m record a couple of years ago in Monaco in a non-championship discipline.
The event itself is new. The race walk marathon became, along with the half-marathon, an official World Athletics race walk distance in January, replacing the traditional 20km and 35km races.
Henderson's time, even in the atrocious conditions, sliced 19 seconds off the previous record, set by the Italian Sofia Fiorini when she won the European Championships in Birmingham in August.
The longer race over the official distance of 42.195km clearly suits the Australian, who was making her marathon debut. She had finished ninth in the 35km at last year's world athletics championships in Tokyo.
She race-walked solo for most of the race, eventually winning the women's race by 14 minutes while overtaking many of the men in the mixed field.
Henderson is a double Olympian who keeps improving, having recently won Commonwealth Games bronze at 10,000m on the track in Glasgow after last year taking World University Games team silver in Bochum.
There was more Australian success in the half-marathon at Takahata, where Elizabeth McMillen won in 1:31:31, the fifth-fastest time yet in the new women's event and an Australian record, slicing almost seven minutes off her best.
In a landmark double, the home athlete Masatora Kawano, two days after his 28th birthday, also set the inaugural men's world race walk marathon record at the same event, clocking 2:55:14. It was the same venue where Kawano set a world record of 2:21:47 over 35km two years ago.
The arithmetic of all this deserves attention. The record Henderson broke was two months old, in a discipline that has existed as an official distance since January. The women's world best has therefore moved twice in nine months, which makes the race walk marathon simultaneously the fastest-improving event in athletics and the slowest-walked.
Our analysts put the rate of improvement at 19 seconds per two months, or 114 seconds a year. Extended at that rate, the women's record passes three hours in 2034 and two hours in 2066.
The men's mark requires no extrapolation at all, being the inaugural one. Kawano's 2:55:14 is at present both the fastest and the slowest marathon walk in the official record, and will remain both until a second man finishes one.
This is the condition of a nine-month-old discipline. Every finisher is a record holder until contradicted, and the honours list is, for now, a register of attendance.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has no position on 2066, and notes only that the trend line is drawn through two points, one of which is in Birmingham.
A record broken two months after it was set is not evidence that the walking is improving. It is evidence that somebody walked again.