A few years ago, at the beginning of 2019, I had the opportunity to visit Eliud Kipchoge (38) at his spartan campus in Kaptagat.
We ran together for ten kilometers and then sat in the shade of a eucalyptus tree. Already then Kipchoge was an Olympic champion and world record holder, and a millionaire and athletics legend, and at one point in the talk I told him:
-You spend your days in this center. He shares a room with Augustine Choge, shares a table and tablecloth, cleans the bathrooms, has no luxuries. Your wife and three children live 30 kilometers away and you only go to visit them on a few weekend afternoons. At this point in life, doesn't your wife ask you to let him be and spend more time with the family?
Kipchoge smiled knowingly.
He let a few seconds pass before answering.
And at the end, he said:
-Sometimes, she asks me to stop. But she understands me. We negotiate. We talk daily. On Saturday afternoon I go home and stay until Monday at noon.
(...)
Eliud Kipchoge knows he is on a mission from God, forced to add legend after legend, even in the darkest moments like the current one, after his setback in the Boston Marathon in April (he was sixth).
Kipchoge is like Nadal or Messi.
And that is why, here he remains at 38 years old, with his sub 2h in October 2019 in Vienna (1h59m40s in that Ineos project), and his double Olympic gold (Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020), and his battalion of universal records, a philosopher who trains among friends and colleagues of the NN Running Team, the man who makes the marathon, an emblem of the loneliness of the long-distance runner, a collective exercise.
Here the long-distance runner continues, chasing his three hares that can be distinguished from a league, athletes clad in their striped t-shirts, the hallmark of the pacer: all of them walk the leveled boulevards of Berlin on a gray day of still wind, under a perfect temperature for the long-distance runner (14ºC), arrow formation trampling the dashed blue line, the one that traces the inviolable route, not one meter too much.
Kipchoge advances after the hares and nothing disturbs him, an obsessive Meccano whose face remains impassive.
He looks ahead, he doesn't give away a single gesture, a single movement, he doesn't wipe his face when the mucus appears, he doesn't even glance at his wrist stopwatch, and in that hypnotic parade he lets the kilometers pass by: 14m11s in the 5K ( ten seconds below the hypothetical world record), 28m27s in the 10K (fifteen seconds margin over the record), 42m45s in the 15K (the group is still at -15s), the margin narrows in the 20K: -8s.
The organization sends instructions to the Ethiopian Kindie Derseh, the only rival who has dared to get on Kipchoge's bus. At the aid station, you are asked to stand a few centimeters away from Kipchoge, so that you don't trip and all fall to the ground and goodbye to the project.
Then the pace slows down, the group crosses the half marathon in 1h00m22s, nothing like the crazy 59m51s of 2022, their last world record. There are still the three hares and Kipchoge and the surprising Derseh.
At km 24 things get complicated.
Another three seconds of margin have been lost and one of the hares has already stopped and Derseh occupies the third grazing position. There is science in this exercise, everything is analyzed. Derseh is a kind of hidden hare, the arrow formation is maintained, although not for long: in the 26th the second hare moves away.
And then Kipchoge enters a crisis.
He begins to smile, he dives into his mind looking for positive thoughts, he loses two meters behind the hare, he also seems more in a hurry to follow Derseh, the Ethiopian rival. At km 27, everyone is nine seconds behind his record.
The great plan falls apart.
Derseh says enough at km 31 and the last hare at km 32. Both apologize and get off the hook, and now Kipchoge accumulates a delay of 25 seconds and changes his perspective: he limits himself to seeking his fifth victory in Berlin, one more than those that Haile Gebrselassie had added.
Kipchoge finishes in 2h02m42s, a minute and a half behind his 2h01m09s from last year.
"Let's see what next year's Paris Games have in store for me," he says.
(That's right: always forced to look for the novamás, for example the third Olympic gold in marathon, something that no one else has achieved).
And the interest is focused on the female category, since the Ethiopian Tigist Assefa (26), champion in Berlin in 2022, has run a km in 2m59s (from 14 to 15) and then has crossed the half marathon in 1h06m20s, a partial which could take her under 2h13m (Brigid Kosgei's female record is 2h14m04s, from 2019 in Chicago).
Assefa goes so hard that he breaks the official formation of hares in striped shirts, and charges forward after his personal hare, Gebru, who is suffering because his own pace is suffocating him, and surpasses prestigious male distance runners, people like Jared Ward and Florian Carvalho, and at km 31 he has a margin of 1m11s over the record and at km 33, 1m22s.
The kilometers pass and the talented Ethiopian accelerates more, talented as so many Ethiopian marathon runners have been or are (Derartu Tulu, Tirunesh Dibaba, Letesenbet Gidey) and, rather than exhausting herself, she seems to float on the asphalt. Assefa is harmony in movement, she keeps her hips high and her face relaxed, she puts even more pressure on the hare, who nods and can barely help her.
And he barely flinches when he crosses the finish line, doing so in 2h11m53s, more than two minutes below Kosgei's record.
And the world of athletics declares itself amazed, because until now we had barely talked about Assefa, and because the best marathoners in the world are getting closer and closer to the best marathoners in the world.
