APRIL 2020 GQ.COM 73
this world,” Kipchoge explains. We’ve moved our chairs
to the corner of the garden, under the shade of a small
tree. “The way to enjoy life is to meet people like you, to
exchange ideas, to learn from each other.”
Those bonds make the ultimate chore—training—
feel a little less arduous. Kipchoge’s regimen is simple:
easy running on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; speed
workouts on Tuesday and Saturday; a long run of up to
25 miles on Thursday. On Sunday, rest. He approaches
these sessions with devotion, recording his times for
every workout in a notebook. “If you don’t have faith in
your training, then it’s nothing,” he says. “You don’t go to
a dictionary and find the meaning of the faith. You need
to define the faith in your own vocabulary.”
He leaves the camp only for brief weekend visits to see
his wife and three young children at their home in Eldoret,
15 miles to the west, and to tend his farm, where he grows
corn and raises cattle. “That’s one way of relaxing the
mind,” he explains. “A farm also helps you be busy, because
if you are busy, then life moves on in a smooth way.”
As I chat with him in the garden, Kipchoge radiates
tranquility. His face is fuller than I expected; his skin
glows brighter. And yet it must be said: He looks older
than his age. His passport says he’s 35, but rumors have
swirled that he’s in his early 40s. Conventional wisdom
suggests he has only a handful of marathons left, and
on April 26, he’ll run one of them: London, where his
competition is scheduled to include Kenenisa Bekele,
the Ethiopian world-record holder in the 5,000 and the
10,000 meters, the owner of the second-fastest marathon
time in history (a mere two seconds behind Kipchoge’s
o∞cial record), and Kipchoge’s sole rival as the greatest
male distance runner of all time.
The showdown, which is the marathon equivalent
of an Ali-Frazier prizefight, is likely to be reprised
this August on an even grander stage: the Olympics.
Kipchoge is preparing for Tokyo 2020 with his typical
focus. “When you see marathon people training and
you see the results, you don’t know what’s inside those
results,” he says. “Many things are going on behind the
scenes. Don’t miss the training in the morning and the
evening, because the body is counting.”FOR ALL THE SIMPLICITY of his isolated life in camp,
there’s a duality to Kipchoge’s existence that gets revealed
in competition. That’s when it’s most apparent that he’s
aided by tools and technologies a≠orded only to the plan-
et’s most talented athletes. Kipchoge is supported by a
hyper-sophisticated team of coaches, physiologists, nutri-
tionists, and shoe designers, all working
together to optimize every variable that
goes into distance running. Kipchoge’s mis-
sion to run a marathon in under two hours
was itself more than just a personal goal—
it was a complicated, months-long project
managed by Nike and initially dubbed
Breaking2. In May 2017, with cameras
rolling for what later became a National
Geographic documentary, Kipchoge and
two other runners set out to break the
mythic two-hour mark on the world’s fast-
est Formula 1 track, in Monza, Italy.
I was trackside on that drizzly morning,
and as I witnessed Kipchoge fly around
the course faster than any man had run amarathon before, I felt nervous—I didn’t know whether
he was going to do the thing or fall over and die.
He was paced by a triangle of the world’s best Nike-
sponsored runners, and he chased a laser beam pro-
jected o≠ the back of a Tesla. That day, Kipchoge ran
an agonizing 2 hours and 25 seconds. He missed the
goal, but his e≠ort was a quantum leap past the world
record at the time, Dennis Kimetto’s 2:02:57, and a mere
second per mile slower than the 4:34-mile pace needed
to break two hours.
When he crossed the finish line, I was overcome with
relief and joy. Watching his pacesetters chanting as
they hoisted him aloft, I kept my sunglasses on to hide
my tears. He may have fallen 26 seconds short, but he
had demonstrated that sub-2:00 was possible, that this
supposed barrier to human accomplishment was no
barrier at all.
In the months that followed, I ran 100 miles a week.
I meditated for 90 days straight. My Brooklyn-based club
team, Black Roses NYC, emulated the communal ethos of
Kipchoge’s camp, training together, eating together. His
influence was profound. The idea that you can do more
by working in harmony might be obvious to any middle
school basketball player, but in a world where the default
mindset is The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner,
it was a foreign concept. And with that shift in our men-
tality, we started to see results. That fall, we sent more
than 20 runners to the Berlin Marathon, which has the
fastest course of the world’s six major marathons. Half of
us ran personal bests, and I took more than three minutes
o≠ mine. The weather, as it was in Monza, was cool and
rainy. Kipchoge was racing too—he won by 14 seconds—
and the conditions must have reminded him of the forests
of Kenya. Kipchoge weather, we called it.
He looked so smooth in Monza and Berlin that when
he did finally break two hours, it felt like a fait accom-
pli. He did it last October, in Vienna’s Prater park, this
time with the backing of INEOS, the British petrochem-
ical company. Adjustments had been made: There were
throngs of fans, extra-springy Nikes, a more aerodynamic
formation of pacers. It worked. He shattered the barrier,
running 1:59:40. Coming into the homestretch, rather
than flagging, Kipchoge seemed to surge, pounding his
chest, pointing to the crowd, and sprinting into the open
embrace of his wife, Grace, who was watching him com-
pete overseas for the first time.
But before the sweat had even dried, there were
detractors. Purists pointed to the pace team, his squad of
41 interchanging runners, noting that, as at Monza, they
rendered the performance ineligible for a world record.
Others questioned Kipchoge’s racing shoe: a prototype of
Nike’s Alphafly Next%. The pair he wore in Monza was
itself a variation of the Vaporfly 4%, a shoe that prom-
ised 4 percent more e∞ciency than the next-fastest Nike
model at the time. This new, unreleased version o≠ered
benefits unknown. Talk of the shoe being banned grew
rampant. Afterward, World Athletics, the sport’s govern-
ing body, decreed that, going forward, in international
competitions athletes would have to compete in shoes
that had been available to the public for at least four
months, among other regulations.
Kipchoge’s Nikes were legal, but that became the
irony of sub-2:00: that the most modest of champions,
a man who sleeps in a twin bed, drives an Isuzu pickup,
and milks his own cows, became the focus of a debate←
suit $5,995
Ermenegildo
Zegna XXX
shirt $395
Ermenegildo
Zegna
shoes $980
Gucci
socks $29
Falke
bracelet,
stylist’s ownring (throughout),
his own