THIS IS KIPCHOGE'S WORLD

PAST MARATHON LEGENDS SHOWED US WHAT WAS POSSIBLE. ELIUD KIPCHOGE MADE US BELIEVE IN THE IMPOSSIBLE.

- DAVE HOLMES

EVERYTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE until somebody does it, to paraphrase Nelson Mandela.

Think about how many very recently unthinkable things we encountered today alone: the electric car you saw this morning, the tablet I'm tapping this out on, Flaming Hot Doritos. They didn't exist, they couldn't exist, until they did.

Sometimes breakthroughs are the result of advanced technology. Sometimes they come from the exact right team of people with the exact right mix of skills. But sometimes, the thing that brings it all together and makes it work is nothing more than pure will. Discipline. A defiant smile, and a single step forward. And then, if this is a marathon we're talking about, several thousand more steps forward.

For decades, physiologists said a sub-two-hour marathon was impossible. Then, in 2019, Eliud Kipchoge broke the very recently unthinkable two-hour-marathon barrier, completing the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in Vienna, Austria, in 1:59:40. I'd call it a quantum leap, if I didn't suspect that physicists had already started calling quantum leaps 'Kipchoges'.

He carried us into a new world. It is, in fact, Kipchoge's World, and we're just running in it. Much more slowly.

"Sub-two-hours? It doesn't seem real," says marathon legend Bill Rodgers. "I remember when the physiologists said a human being can't run [a marathon in] under two hours and two minutes."

A little more than a decade ago, "people started to wonder whether we would see a sub-two happen, and I said it would happen in our lifetime," says Meb Keflezighi, 2004 Olympic silver medallist in the marathon. "I just didn't imagine it would be this soon."