The day before Eliud Kipchoge’s first attempt at a sub-two-hour marathon in 2017, a Nike vice-president described it to me as “a moonshot”. Now, though, the track and field equivalent of landing on Mars is apparently just 3min 59.37sec away.
That was the startling conclusion of a study in the Royal Society Open Science journal last week, which predicted that a woman could shatter the four-minute mile barrier with the help of aerodynamics. Not just any woman but Faith Kipyegon, the Kenyan Olympic 1500m champion and the greatest female middle distance runner in history.
The reports were breathless, the coverage sympathetic. Naturally, Sir Roger Bannister’s mythical 3:59:4 mile in May 1954 was evoked. All that was missing was detailed scrutiny or analysis.
The first thing to say? The study, led by Prof Rodger Kram, a physiologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, is a serious piece of work – according to Dr Michael Joyner, an expert in human performance at the Mayo Clinic.
In 1991 Joyner wrote a paper stating that it was physiologically possible to run a marathon in under two hours. At that point the world record was 2hr 06min 50sec. Nearly three decades later, Kipchoge proved him right by running 1:59.40 in Vienna in 2019, thanks to a quantum leap in super shoe technology and the help of 40 elite pacemakers, who subbed in and out of the run and adopted an arrow formation to help him draft and reduce wind resistance.
Kram was part of Kipchoge’s team for that run – which did not count as the official record – and in his latest paper he scrutinises the race in Monaco where Kipyegon obliterated the women’s mile world record by almost 5sec. As he points out, her time of 4:07.64 was achieved despite poor drafting, and for being alone for the last 600m.
Multiple equations follow. But essentially Kram’s thesis is that if Kipyegon had teams of pacemakers in front and behind – something that wouldn’t be allowed in an official world record attempt – she could have cut the level of wind resistance she faced by 72%.
“Our calculations suggest that with greatly improved (but reasonable) aerodynamic drafting, Kipyegon could break the four-minute mile barrier,” the paper concludes. “We find that she could feasibly run 3:59.37 with two teams of female pacers (one 1.2m in front and one 1.2m in the back) who change out at 800m.”
The experts do note, however, that there is “considerable variability among the drafting effectiveness values reported in the literature”. And this is where every coach I speak to starts to wince, before stressing the vast gap between theory and reality.
Steve Magness, a renowned coach and the author of The Science of Running, reckons that in practice “you’re looking at a second and a half, maybe slightly more” from better drafting in that race. Not the nearly 8sec needed.
But the study does raise an interesting question. What will it take for a woman to shatter the four‑minute mile barrier?
Crucially, says Magness, someone would need to be capable of running a 4x400m relay leg in about 50sec, and an 800m in around 1:53 – something no woman except Jarmila Kratochvilova and Nadezhda Olizarenko in the dark days of the 1980s has ever achieved.
“Women are a little bit more aerobic than men,” Magness says. “But the demands to run a four minute mile are the demands to run a four-minute mile. And we have a good idea historically of what it takes.”
Finding fancy new training methods will not bridge the gap. Joyner owns a book, How They Train, written by Fred Wilt in the 50s, which he says still contains many of the methods used by top athletes today. Magness points out that milers have been employing the legendary British coach Frank Horwill’s Five Pace Training Theory for decades.
So that leaves us with further advances in super‑shoe technology. And according to Trevor Painter, coach of the Olympic 800m gold medallist Keely Hodgkinson, considerable help is on its way. “Nike’s tech team came out to South Africa earlier this year to show us samples of what’s to come,” he told me. “Next year there’s a new shoe coming out which is like: ‘Wow, this is a bit of space age.’ It will shave tenths off track times, no doubt.”
What does Painter make of Kipyegon’s chances? “She has run 1:57 high for 800m but in the right race can probably go 1:55. Can she go sub-four with shoe improvements and with the help of a male pacemaker? Possibly. She often runs the latter half of the race alone at the front, so you never know.”
Another way to get closer, Joyner says, would be to attempt a record on the banked and ridiculously quick indoor track in Boston in the US, where Grant Fisher recently set the indoor 5,000m world record. But even with all these incremental gains, there is still some way to go.
“I’ve learned my lesson from the sub‑two marathon attempt to never say never,” Magness says. “But we’re still too far out. The shoe tech will get us closer. Pacing will help a little bit. Using Maurten’s bicarb system [which allows athletes to legally push harder and faster doing high-intensity exercise] will make a slight but significant difference. But I don’t think it makes up that gap. Seven seconds is still seven seconds, which is a lot in a mile. When someone gets to 4:02-4:03, then it would be like: ‘OK, we’ve got a shot.’”
Joyner agrees, but still wants to see Kipyegon give it a whirl. “I hope she tries it,” he says. “And if she runs 4:03 or 4:04, that’s hardly a failure, is it?”
