Kiplimo trusts his watch
Ugandan marathoner Jacob Kiplimo says he uses Samsung Health metrics from a Galaxy Watch8 to fine‑tune training for big races like the London Marathon, a snapshot of how elite athletes now lean on wearable data. (samsungmobilepress.com).
Jacob Kiplimo says one of the hardest parts of training is knowing when to stop, not when to push, and he now uses a Samsung Galaxy Watch8 to help make that call before races like the 2026 London Marathon. Samsung’s interview says he checks Samsung Health data for recovery, pace, heart rate, and running form instead of relying only on feel. (samsungmobilepress.com) That is a sharp change from the old image of distance running as just miles, grit, and a coach with a stopwatch. Modern wearables turn a wristwatch into a small lab that tracks how hard the body is working while an athlete is still in motion. (samsungmobilepress.com) Kiplimo is not a fringe athlete testing gadgets for fun. World Athletics says the Ugandan star ran 56 minutes 42 seconds for the half marathon in Barcelona on February 16, 2025, taking 48 seconds off the previous world record and becoming the first man under 57 minutes. (worldathletics.org) Samsung says he carried that data-first approach into a 100 kilometer training week and uses the watch partly because his coach cannot always be beside him. In that setup, the device works like a remote dashboard, sending back clues about whether a session built fitness or just added fatigue. (news.samsung.com) The specific metric Kiplimo highlights is running analysis, which Samsung says includes asymmetry alongside pace and heart rate. Asymmetry is basically whether the left and right sides of your stride are doing the same job, like checking whether a car is pulling evenly instead of drifting to one side. (samsungmobilepress.com) That matters more in the marathon than in shorter races because tiny inefficiencies repeat for 42.195 kilometers. A stride that is slightly off can feel harmless at 5 kilometers and become expensive by 35 kilometers, when elite races are often decided by seconds. (worldathletics.org) The timing is not random. Samsung published the interview on April 10, 2026, as Kiplimo prepares for the 2026 London Marathon, and independent race previews list him in a men’s field that also includes Sabastian Sawe, Tamirat Tola, Joshua Cheptegei, and Yomif Kejelcha. (samsungmobilepress.com) (marathons.com) So the story is not really that a famous runner wore a watch. It is that one of the fastest road racers alive is treating biometric data the way earlier generations treated lap splits: as something basic enough to shape daily decisions, recovery days, and the final build toward a major marathon. (news.samsung.com)
