How B.C.’S Levins keeps getting faster
Canadian record-holder runs about 290 kilometres per week in pursuit of world’s best runners
Cameron Levins is running the Tokyo Marathon this weekend and he isn’t being shy about what he hopes to achieve there.
“My coach and I both know we’re ready for something special,” Levins said. “No matter what, I’m going for a personal best time — I’m just kind of deciding how much faster I want to go.”
In his final days of training, Levins is thinking two hours and six minutes, or maybe five minutes, which would be one to two minutes faster than he or any other Canadian has run the marathon.
For most people, one to two minutes doesn’t amount to much; it’s getting off the couch to grab a drink or a snack during a commercial break. But, for a marathoner who is already running an average of three-minute kilometres, 42.2 times in a row, it’s quite a lot of time.
It wasn’t so long ago that mentioning such times would have seemed ridiculous for a Canadian marathoner.
Jerome Drayton set the Canadian men’s marathon mark at 2:10:09 in 1975. And no one was able to topple that in more than four decades of trying.
But Levins smashed that record with a 2:09:25 run in Toronto in 2018, his first time racing the distance. He slashed another two minutes off the mark at last summer’s world athletics championships, crossing the finish line in 2:07:09 in Eugene, Ore., while just missing the medals. And he crushed the Canadian half-marathon record last month, coming in at 60 minutes and 18 seconds on a challenging course in lousy Vancouver weather. So, when the 33-year-old from Black Creek, B.C., says he’s ready to run “something special,” there’s no reason not to believe him.
But nothing is certain in sports, and in the marathon in particular. “To get a personal best, you’re always going into uncertain territory,” Levins said. “It’s always inherently a bit of a risk to run faster than you ever have.”
Levins isn’t frightened by that risk or the possibility of trying and failing. He’s been there, done that.
“I would say the worst part about it in the marathon is, when you fail, it’s a very, very painful and long time to fail the rest of that marathon,” he said with a chuckle.
He remembers his Olympic marathon at the Tokyo Summer Games in 2021 where he went out with the leaders in hot, humid conditions and faded 20 minutes behind the winner, Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge. Levins was one of the last finishers on the streets of Sapporo and that was particularly devastating given how strong he thought he was going into that race.
That experience led Levins, long known for a gruelling training regime, to ramp it up even more. But it didn’t make him second-guess his approach to bold racing, coach Jim Finlayson said.
“I love that he is willing to just see what is possible and that’s something that I don’t ever want to dampen,” Finlayson said. “But in a marathon it gets tricky. In the shorter races … you’re not going to blow up that much, whereas in a marathon you really can.”
In preparing for Sunday’s race in Tokyo, Finlayson and Levins talked about finding a balance between an initial race pace that seems realistic and still optimistic given his big goals. The times Levins has run and his near podium finish at the world championships have changed the definition of what’s realistic for a Canadian marathoner.
“He’s the first Canadian really to open people’s eyes on what’s possible and how you can race a marathon,” Finlayson said. “This is going to be good for Canadian running; it just changes our framework of what we see as possible and how fast is fast.”
As Levins puts it: “I expect to be in the top few athletes or winning the big marathons that I’m coming into now. I think that’s what the standard needs to be and has become.”
Getting there wasn’t quick or easy. Levins left the last Olympics feeling dejected. He went unsponsored until he signed with ASICS last year.
But he has had plenty of experience in keeping himself in the game when things didn’t look good.
When Levins was 23 years old, he made an impressive Olympic debut, running the 5,000 and 10,000 metres at the 2012 London Games. The next few years were so difficult that Levins said he often considered quitting. Instead, he decided to do something else entirely.
“I’m going to take back my career and be back to the athlete I know I can be,” Levins said in 2018 after he set the Canadian marathon record for the first time.
He followed that thinking after his disappointing Tokyo Olympics. He went home to Portland where he lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and with the help of Finlayson (who coaches him remotely from Victoria) turned up the volume on every aspect of his training: more mileage, more speed training, more weight training.
Levins runs about 290 kilometres a week, the equivalent of almost seven marathons. He doubles and triples up on his daily runs and his evening run is on a treadmill in an altitude tent set up in the spare bedroom.
My coach and I both know we’re ready for something special.
CAMERON LEVINS CANADIAN MARATHON RUNNER