MARATHON MATH

THE NUMBERS THAT PROVE KIPCHOGE IS THE UNDISPUTED GREATEST.

- A.C. SHILTON

IF YOU'VE EVER watched Eliud Kipchoge run on TV, it is possible that your brain has thought, you know, he actually doesn't look like he's going all that fast.

Your brain is wrong. If you cheer at his next marathon, he will seem to blow by. If he passed you on a running path, he'd be gone faster than your dignity after eating a pre-group-run burrito. But because the motorbike-mounted camera is keeping that same incredible 13mph pace, our gray matter fails us. Our visual perception of motion relies on our brain's ability to compute how fast something is moving relative to objects around it. So if you've never witnessed Kipchoge in person, rest assured, he is going very, very fast.

At his marathon pace, he could literally run around the world in-wait for it-just under 80 days. He could run to the moon in 18,233 hours and 12 minutes. And he could kick it down Route 66 in just over a week.

It's not like Kipchoge is the only fast marathoner on the planet. In a Kipchoge-less world (perish the thought), we could be writing here about the world's second fastest marathoner ever, Kenenisa Bekele. His 2:01:41 from Berlin 2019 is not quite 0.4 percent slower-just 32 seconds-than Kipchoge's official 2:01:09 world record. But it's in that sliver of seconds where Kipchoge becomes a legend. It's why he was chosen to break the two-hour barrier-and why he pulled it off.

Slapping GOAT on every athlete having a moment isn't particularly scientific-or accurate. Superlatives unanchored by context tend to just float toward hyperbole. The greatest show on earth? Says who? The country's best yogurt? Using what metric? We wanted to understand that line between great and greatness-both what defines it statistically and creates it physically.