Eliud Kipchoge made history in October by becoming the first person to run a marathon in under two hours. Here's how he did it.
Olympic champion and winner of 11 of his 12 marathon races. And, more crucially, the man with experience of the incredible individual pressure that comes with running a specially organised marathon whose sole focus is to go where no-one has gone before.event saw Kipchoge take on the two-hour mark for the first time. Back then, to run under two hours he was looking at taking over three minutes off his personal best. A stratospheric leap. He ran 2:00:25.
With a date in mid-October non-negotiable, Ketchell - as he casually throws into conversation now -"wrote a quick computer script" to find the best location. London was briefly considered before the weather was judged too unpredictable. A return to a racing circuit was also toyed with, but Germany's Lausitzring was quickly ruled out after a car crash of a recce.
Yet even still, Ketchell was not satisfied. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of aerodynamics from a career in professional cycling, he set about finding a way to limit the wind's impact even further. He did this by devising a plan to arrange Kipchoge's 41 rotating pacemakers - a number that included Olympic 1500m champion Matthew Centrowitz and Norwegian wonderkid Jakob Ingebrigtsen.
The other way the issue was managed was more intuitive. Kipchoge moved slightly out of formation every time he felt he was starting to overheat. A human touch in sync with meticulous planning and so much technology. A few metres ahead of Kipchoge was a car that could adjust its speed to within 0.1 kmh. It had lasers to let him and the pacers know they were on target.
In fact, Trouw's methods were much more old school."So many people have asked me what I was doing with the laptop on my handlebars," he laughs."But in fact it was just a mount so that I could put a piece of paper on the handlebars with the split times Eliud needed to run on them. "New asphalt is nice and makes a huge difference of course but the crowd was also an energy that you can't measure," he says.
American Jake Riley also wore the shoes in Chicago and compared the experience to"running on a trampoline".The Kenyan is equally combative regarding the juxtaposition between his assertion that"no human is limited" and the matter of Nike's new trainers costing £240.For Kipchoge, the question of how he achieved his"moon-landing moment" boils down to hard work, not the carbon-fibre plate in his shoes.
"Going into that environment in the performance operation centre was like going into an Olympic final," he says.
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