DARE TO TRY

WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR KENYAN SUPERSTAR FAITH KIPYEGON TO BREAK A 4-MINUTE MILE?

- BY JEFF DENGATE

85-degree day in March that had onlookers reaching for sunscreen and looking for shade, Faith Kipyegon flopped to the ground at the end of a long jump runway inside Kipchoge Keino Stadium in Eldoret, Kenya. The three-time Olympic gold medal winner in the 1500 meters had just wrapped up a session of four 600-meter and four 300-meter repeats, with a 200-meter recovery jog between each. On paper, the work-out may not look so grueling, but by the end she was shadowing her longtime pacer Bernard Soi through the 300s in roughly 43 seconds by my stopwatch.

That's smoking fast, even for the world-record holder.

It’s a speed she'll need to maintain for a full mile when she takes to the track in an attempt to become the first woman ever to run a sub-four-minute mile. The “Breaking4” event will happen in Paris within a three-day window from June 26 to 28 to ensure optimal weather. “I achieved the world record, the Olympic record, the Olympic medals, and the World Championship Medals,” she said during my visit to her training camp. “I was like, ‘What else can I achieve?’”

But can she do it?

The gap between Kipyegon’s 4:07.64 world record run in the summer of 2023 and a sub-4:00 remains enormous. Perhaps even more daunting, that result is the only time a woman has run the mile faster than 4:12.33, a mark that had been held by Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands since 2019. Then again, Kipyegon’s five-second shattering of the old world record in itself was improbable because runners usually chip away at records by small amounts at a time. For context, it took nearly 21 years for the men’s mile world record to be lowered from 4:07.6 to sub-4:00. Even though track surfaces have improved and footwear and training practices have evolved, some people still believe the seven-plus seconds is an insurmountable barrier for any woman.

But before it happened, some didn’t think a man was capable of a sub-four-minute mile either.