Date: Wednesday, 20 September 2017
How three athletes set out to break the 2-hour marathon and redefine "impossible."
Lelisa got his first pair of shoes when he made the Ethiopian national team. He ran a race in school, did really well, then got invited to go run in a national competition. He knew other people were going to have shoes, but he couldn't afford any. Instead, he had a pair of insoles from shoes, so he sewed them to the bottom of his socks. He ran in those and came third. The Ethiopian team was like, "Yes, great, we'll sign you up. Here's a bag." He went back home to his village and opened the shoes in front of his whole family.
It's incomprehensible to us. I feel like before any of us do any exercise, we've Googled 17 different opinions on it, trying to maximize. Zersenay's entire running strategy was: Run as fast as you can from the beginning to the end and try to beat everybody. That's it. That's why scientists were so intrigued by him, because there's basically no question that Zersenay has the best god-given structure. If Zersenay had had rigorous scientific training from his late teens, early 20s onwards, there's little doubt he would have been the best runner in the world. But he didn't. And also, he's Eritrean. When he started running, there was no Eritrean Federation. There's no Internet in Eritrea. It's pure street learning.
I've had the honor of filming Serena Williams and Kobe Bryant, I've spent a lot of time with elite athletes, and I've never been more impressed with anybody than I was with Eliud Kipchoge. He's like a cross between Yoda and Bruce Lee. He's got this profound wisdom inside him, an earned and grounded wisdom that is absolutely intoxicating. How many millions and millions of dollars that he's earned—he's a big Nike athlete, he's won all these marathon—and yet, five days a week, he goes up to a place in the rural highlands, which is really remote and about 8,000 feet up. There are 11 rooms in the building, 22 runners at any given time, two per room. I think there were four Olympic gold medalists in that crew of 22. There is no running water, and they're not allowed to hire anybody to help them. They have to go to the wells to get the water, they have to clean the toilets, they have to scrub their own plates. You have the gold medal Olympic champion sharing a room with a 19-year-old wanna-be. Well, in this group, you're not a wannabe, you're on your way. Eliud's the pride of Kenya, and yet he shares a room with a young man as part of his training and part humility.
The runners in the camp wake up at 5:15 every morning, and they start running at 6 a.m. without fail. They run about 120 miles a week, sometimes more, and then they come back, they have lunch—some tea and some rice, and two days a week they have meat. In the afternoon at 4:00 they run again, and because they've run so hard, around dark it's time to read a book and go to bed. I haven't spent time with monks or anything like that, so comparing it to that is not fair for me, but there was such an impossible sense of purpose in everybody in that camp. Everybody in that camp knew what they were supposed to do. They knew they were pursuing absolute excellence.
When I first looked into breaking the two-hour limit, and I was like, "Wow, they have to run 26.2 miles at 4 minutes and 34 seconds a mile. I couldn't run one of them." It's unthinkably hard. Then I started drinking the Eliud Kool-Aid. I was spending all this time with him, watching him, and he was so utterly radioactive with confidence. He so completely believed he could do it. I cried when he crossed the line, but not out of sadness. I didn't consider it a failure even in the moment, because he ran every mile at 4 minutes and 35 seconds, and he was supposed to run it at 4 minutes and 34. It's so agonizingly close.