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Eldoret, Kenya — “Watch her,” says the man with the stopwatch, nodding toward the far end of the sun-cracked track. It’s a Saturday morning in March at the dilapidated stadium in the city of Eldoret, high above the Great Rift Valley in western Kenya. I follow the man’s gaze to where the greatest middle-distance runner of all time rounds the last turn, training for the impossible.
It’s hard to gauge the speed of 31-year-old Faith Kipyegon. She is too smooth. Though she runs nearly at a sprint, her arms and legs slide forward and back with a liquid ease. Her face shows so little strain she might be a jogger out for a brisk trot around Central Park. Only her eyes betray her effort. They seem not to notice the spalling concrete of the never finished stadium, the weeds that grow in its grandstands, the chunk of missing track the size of a manhole cover in lane 4. Her gaze is turned downward, her thoughts focused on only what matters, which is to run faster.
Kipyegon is only 50 yards away from us now, the distance collapsing rapidly. Her longtime pacer, Bernard Soi, moves from his position in front of her. She presses the accelerator to unleash her ruthless kick, the final burst of speed that has carried her to an unprecedented three consecutive Olympic gold medals in the 1,500 meters and four world championships.
To train for the attempt, the 31-year-old has spent weeks at a legendary camp in Kaptagat, Kenya, where two dozen of the world’s finest endurance athletes hone their craft.
Each week, the group wakes before dawn to head out for a weekly 20-miler on the rolling dirt roads surrounding the camp.
Today, though, Kipyegon isn’t training for titles. She’s working toward something closer to sporting immortality. In late June, she’ll try to do what no woman has done before: run a mile in less than four minutes.
Roger Bannister broke the quasi-mythical barrier in 1954. His run still stands as one of greatest physical feats in human history—the sport’s equivalent of the first summit of Mount Everest. Seventy-one years later, no woman has come close to doing the same.
To break four minutes, Kipyegon will have to drop nearly eight seconds from the current world record of 4:07.64—a record she holds. Shaving that much time in a distance where improvement is measured in hundredths of a second is, to say the least, incredibly difficult.
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Kipyegon will make her attempt on June 26 at Paris’s Stade Sébastien Charléty at an event put on by her sponsor, Nike. The exhibition has been dubbed Breaking4 and will be held on a closed course with a phalanx of pacers—factors that technically make it ineligible for ratification as a world record by the sport’s governing bodies. In many ways, Kipyegon’s attempt mirrors what fellow Kenyan Eliud Kipchoge did in 2019 when he became the first runner to break two hours in the marathon, a feat streamed live by 20 million people and later chronicled in a documentary.
For Kipyegon, the motivations are many: she wants to break a barrier, of course. But she also wants to “cement her legacy,” she says, by creating a moment that transcends sport. She’s the mother of a six-year-old girl, and doing what others doubt can be done, she says, will “motivate young girls and young women around the world to push themselves in everything they do.”
Kipyegon has a six-year-old daughter, and she hopes her attempt will “motivate young girls and young women around the world to push themselves in everything they do.”
As the inevitable media circus ramps up, and the eyes of the sporting world turn to one diminutive Kenyan runner, it’s hard not to wonder: How likely is this moon shot?
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At most distances, women tend to run around 10 percent slower than men, says Thomas Haugen, an endurance sports researcher at Norway’s Kristiania University College. Since the men’s mile record currently sits at 3:43, that rule of thumb might put the next women’s record around 4:05.
Still, a recent study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science argued that it’s possible for Kipyegon, or an elite female athlete like her, to run a mile in 3:59.37.
The runner would need drafting provided by a pacer exactly four feet in front of her and a second running exactly four feet behind her, the authors wrote, with fresh pacers swapping in halfway through the race. Drafting reduces aerodynamic drag, allowing an athlete to run faster without expending more energy. And the rear pacer pushes air into the back of the runner, propelling her ever so slightly forward, says Rodger Kram, one of the paper’s authors: “NASCAR racers know about [the effect].” Many variables could alter the outcome, the study acknowledged—from a slight wind (bad) to use of pacing lights on the track curbing (helpful).
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The simplicity of the mile masks its exquisite difficulty. It is too long to be a sprint but too short for a runner to hold much back. To be successful, “athletes need to develop both speed and endurance at the same time,” says Haugen, lead author of a 2021 study about the physiology and training for 800 meters and 1,500 meters. It’s a balancing act. “[I]f you emphasize endurance training too much, it may hamper your speed,” he explains. “Bottom line: Middle distance training is challenging because one type of training often is on the cost of other crucial performance attributes.”
When pursuing the unknown, though, the X factor often isn’t physiological—it’s mental. “The hardest thing to control is the mind,” says Kipchoge, who is still the only man to run under two hours in the marathon and has been Kipyegon’s mentor for a few years.
Kipchoge is confident that Kipyegon has the physical ability to break four minutes; she trains seven days a week and is a famously hard worker who never complains. He’s also sure of her inner toughness. Still, he knows from experience how doubt creeps into the head of even the best runner in the world when the body is pushed to its limit. Focus wanders. Confidence ebbs. “What will happen in the third lap?” he muses. “In the last 300 meters?” For Kipyegon to succeed her mind can’t flag for a moment.
How do you teach mental strength, though? “Faith to me is somebody who is so strong mentally that there’s not much I can work on,” says Patrick Sang, Kipyegon’s coach. “The only thing is to stand by her side as a coach. And when she turns around, she sees that there is a shoulder to lean on.”
Recovery is just as important as training hard; an ice bath helps to reduce muscle inflammation.
Marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge has served as Kipyegon’s mentor for years and has no doubt that she has what it takes to run sub-four.
For her part, Kipyegon says her success in the last few years has given her a confidence that she didn’t always possess. “Since I break the world record in the 1,500 meters and the mile … everything is possible,” she says. “You know, impossible can be possible.”
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Kipyegon is training for the attempt at a camp in Kaptagat, nearly 8,000 feet above sea level, among farms of maize and wheat. March is the planting season, and everywhere Kenya’s red earth has been turned over by the harrow to await the seed.
Two dozen of the world’s best male and female distance runners, primarily Kenyans, train year-round at the camp, which consists of about a collection of cinder block and stucco buildings beside a running track, with cows grazing on the infield. The buildings, blue with corrugated steel roofs, frame a leafy courtyard. Men share rooms in one dorm, women in another. In a nod to her elevated status, Kipyegon stays in her own small apartment in another building. The camp has a TV room with old curtains and a few inspirational books, and a dim dining room that serves ugali, the famed corn porridge that propels Kenyan runners. Young lime and pomegranate trees crowd the courtyard, each with a sign announcing the name of the visiting athlete who planted it. The metaphor is clear: Hard work takes time to bear fruit.
Kipyegon grew up in a small village about 140 miles west of Nairobi, the eighth of nine children in a family of athletes. She is from the Kalenjin tribe, famed for producing runners. As a girl she and her siblings ran two and a half miles to school, home for lunch, and back again—10 miles a day—through eighth grade.
She first began to realize her gift for running when she was 14. Her PE teacher organized a brief footrace at school, and Kipyegon outran all her classmates. Just three years later, at 17, she’d won the junior race at the 2011 World Athletics Cross Country Championships—while running barefoot, the style she’d grown up with.
One of Kipyegon’s defining skills as a runner is her famous finishing kick, which she hones with intense track workouts.
In her attempt to break four minutes, Kipyegon will draft off a cast of elite pacers to reduce aerodynamic drag.
In 2018, Kipyegon stepped away from competition for 18 months to have her daughter, Alyn. (She’s married to Timothy Kitum, the 2012 Olympic bronze medalist in the 800 meters.) Afterward she had difficulty running even 50 meters, she recalls, and thought her career was finished. Instead, she threw herself into training and the opposite happened. “I got stronger,” she says with a laugh. Motherhood “gives me energy. I have a girl who looks up to me. I have to push barriers, to show other young women that you can do everything.”
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Over 50 days in 2023 she set three world records. In early June, in Italy, she set the world record in the 1,500-meter race, running 3:49.11—the first woman ever to run under 3:50. One week later, in Paris, she set the then world record for the 5,000 meters. A few weeks after that, she obliterated the women’s world mile record, chopping more than four seconds from the mark. She finished off her season by winning gold in both the 1,500 meters and the 5,000 meters at the biennial world championships, the first woman to do so at the same championship. She was named World Female Track Athlete of the Year. A sportswriter called it one of the great years in running history.
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The Kaptagat camp where Kipyegon trains calls to mind a monastery. Like that track at Eldoret, its simplicity is not a deficiency but rather its essence, and its advantage: The quiet and spareness give a runner a place to train free of distraction. Almost anything that doesn’t contribute to running success is either discouraged or prohibited outright—including visits from family and friends. The world is reduced to what matters. The athletes run. Rest. Eat. Then they do it again.
Runners remain at camp all week, heading home only on weekends. “The idea of staying here for five days, six days and then you go, is to make you more focused, to make you concentrate more purely on your training,” says Kipchoge, who has trained at the camp for 22 years and is an architect of its milieu. Kipchoge sees no distinction between training to become a great runner and training to become a good human being, and everywhere around camp he has posted motivational signs. One reads: “Talent is not enough. You need Discipline. You need Dedication. You need Character.”
Kipyegon will have to cut nearly eight seconds off her current world record. A tall order in a discipline where improvement is measured by hundredths of a second.
These are qualities Kipyegon has in spades. One morning after the athletes perform an hour of exercises on yoga mats in the courtyard to strengthen their core and back muscles, several runners sit in the yard in plastic chairs and rest, their legs spraddled before them. They speak in low tones so they don’t disturb the others who nap inside. Kipyegon, meanwhile, disappears to do some additional strength work. After the 2024 racing season, Kipyegon traveled to Nike’s sports science lab in Beaverton, Oregon, to undergo a battery of tests. One highlighted a few muscle imbalances to address: “We want to make her hamstrings stronger,” says Eric Muthuri, the camp’s assistant physiotherapist. “That strength you can convert to speed.”
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Another day, Kipyegon wakes up before dawn for her weekly long run on the rolling asphalt around Kaptagat. Though she’s a middle-distance runner, her weekly long run is still 20 miles. Mist clings to the low places. The morning smells of dung and turned earth and woodsmoke from kitchen fires. The two dozen runners in her group—almost all men—fill a lane of the road like a cycling peloton, sweeping around corners and over hills. Kipyegon tucks in near the front. Two schoolgirls briefly break into a run alongside her as she passes, a detail Kipyegon would like. As during the track workout, though, she is lost in concentration.
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Running records tend to fall in a relatively predictable, linear fashion. And some academics have predicted that a woman might not break the four-minute barrier until at least 2033. After all, it took 34 years for the women’s record to drop by the nearly eight seconds that Kipyegon now hopes to shave off in just one run.
“I’ve learned my lesson from the sub‑two marathon attempt to never say never,” Steve Magness, a well-known coach and the author of The Science of Running, told the Guardian recently. “But we’re still too far out.” New shoe technology will help, Magness noted, and so will recent advances in athlete fueling: “But I don’t think it makes up that gap.”
The simplicity of the mile masks its exquisite difficulty: It‘s too long to be a sprint but too short for a runner to hold much back.
Yet newspaper columns and scientific journals are littered with false prophecies that human athletic potential has reached its limit. Even the athletes themselves are often wrong. “It is a brick wall,” John Landy, the great Australian miler, said of the four-minute barrier, only weeks before Bannister ran his 3:59.4. Six weeks later, Landy himself smashed that mark, running 3:58 flat.
“The truth,” wrote sports biomechanist Ned Frederick in 1986, “is that we have no way of knowing of what we are capable.”
If Kipyegon doesn’t succeed in running sub-four in June but gets very close, it will be hard to consider the attempt a failure. As Magness told the Guardian, “When someone gets to 4:02-4:03, then it would be like ‘OK, we’ve got a shot.’”
And if she does break four minutes—will the record stand for a generation? Or will women runners pour in after her, having seen what’s possible, as men did in Bannister’s wake? Today more than 1,800 men have run the mile in under four minutes. As Bannister said, “Après moi, le déluge.”
When Kipchoge thinks of all the reverberations a record run by Kipyegon could have, he smiles. Yes, his friend’s success will change women’s running, he says. More than that, though, the feat will tell women everywhere that they can tackle whatever they want.
“I’m trusting that it will change the world.”
