Back in Kenya, Kipchoge was beginning a journal of his own – a training log for the biggest challenge of his life. In it was absolutely nothing new.
The 34-year-old’s methods are notoriously simple – and humble. Despite his multi-millionaire status, for nearly 300 days a year he lives and trains away from his wife and three children at a training centre in Kaptagat, a tiny village in the Kenyan highlands.
He is known as the “boss man” by his running partners but that doesn’t stop him cleaning the toilets or doing his share of the daily chores. He lives by the mantra: “Living simply sets you free.”
As Kipchoge told me in April: “You run, eat, sleep, walk around – that’s how life is. You don’t get complicated. The moment you get complicated it distracts your mind.”
For the 1:59 Challenge team, the biggest question was: Which athlete could produce a modern-day Roger Bannister moment?
The answer was a total no-brainer. Only one: Eliud Kipchoge. The undisputed GOAT of marathon running. The world record holder, 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.
In May 2017, the Nike-organised Breaking2 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.
Kipchoge is also a fan of the phrase ‘no human is limited’. But in the build-up to Breaking2 – held at Monza’s historic race track in Italy – he now admits he was struggling to practise what he preached.
“Eliud was training physically but he also had to spend seven months convincing his mind that it was possible,” long-time manager Valentijn Trouw says. “Before Vienna he didn’t need to do that. That mental change was the biggest win from two years ago.”
Kipchoge agrees: “Monza opened many doors. It gave me the confidence to run a world record.”
The real question for Brailsford, Ketchell and many others was: How could they help? First of all, they set out to find the perfect venue.
It had to be within three time zones of Kenya (to limit the effects of jetlag on Kipchoge) and atmospheric conditions had to be ideal. Temperature: between 7C and 14C. Humidity: below 80%. Wind: less than 2m/s. Precipitation: none.
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.
“When we got there, they made us put a sticker over the cameras on our phone which obviously didn’t help,” Ketchell says. “But more of an issue was how wide it was. You were so far away from the stands it didn’t feel natural to run there. Because there was nothing around you it didn’t feel like you were running fast even when you were.”
One of Kipchoge’s biggest complaints about the Breaking2 attempt was the lack of crowds. The search continued, and in early June the planning team arrived in Vienna – specifically a tree-lined road called the Hauptallee that runs through Prater Park. It was love at first sight.
Vienna offered the right temperature, humidity and rainfall (or lack thereof) in October. That local authorities did not baulk at a complex list of demands was another huge boost. The Hauptallee and its surrounding area would be closed off for two whole weeks, so the attempt could be made on the optimum day to run.
But for Ketchell, the wind was the biggest battleground.
Within days of finalising Vienna as their choice, the team installed sensors along the Hauptallee – a 4.4 km long avenue – to monitor conditions. What they consistently found was incredibly exciting to Ketchell – a wind speed of less than 1m/s. Excellent conditions.
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.
Ketchell used another computer programme to explore the benefits of more than 100 possible formations in which they could run. Eventually they came up with the optimal shape. Even for the combined cycling brainpower of Brailsford and Ketchell it was something new – an inverted V. Think Mighty Ducks only the other way around.
“It is actually the inverse of how birds fly,” Ketchell says. “From the best of my knowledge it is not used in any other sport, industry or animal world.”
