Canada´s Cam Levins runs unofficial Canadian record with 1:01:04 half-marathon time trial

The result won't count, but Levins's new lifetime best is 24 seconds faster than the national record.

Levins smashed the Canadian half-marathon record on Sunday, running an incredible 1:01:04 time trial near Portland, Ore. Since he didn’t run it in a certified event or on a real course, his time won’t count as an official record, but he still deserves a lot of credit for posting such an amazing time. Levins’s new unofficial PB is 24 seconds faster than the Canadian half-marathon record of 1:01:28, a time that Jeff Schiebler ran in 1999, and it adds to his official national marathon record of 2:09:25. 

Levins seems to be as surprised as everyone else is by his new lifetime best, which he recorded on Strava. He posted on Instagram after his run, writing, “Accidentally ran an (unofficial) Canadian record in the half marathon this morning. 61:04 per Strava. Didn’t expect that, but pleasantly surprised.” Levins of course meant to go out quickly in the time trial, but it’s unlikely he thought he would come anywhere close to Schiebler’s 22-year-old record. 

His official half-marathon PB is more than a minute slower than the time he ran on Sunday, sitting at 1:02:14. Levins ran this time at the Houston Half-Marathon in 2020, and it’s the fourth-best half-marathon ever run by a Canadian. He also owned an unofficial PB of 1:02:12, a result that he posted in a time trial last August. He managed to shatter both of those times on Sunday with his new unofficial best, which works out to a blistering average pace of 2:54 per kilometer.

Back on Instagram, he wrote that he hopes to “get the chance to set [the record] in stone in the future” at a certified race. Regardless of the record books and his official or unofficial PBs, this run is a great chance for Levins to bounce back after a couple of disappointing results in the past year.

He kicked 2020 off with a great run in Houston, but he fell short of Olympic standard in his next two races (both of which were marathons). Sunday’s result is proof that he’s in the best shape of his life, though, and he might be able to use its momentum to carry him toward another big (and official) result in the coming months. 

posted Monday April 26th
by Ben Snider-McGrath