2019 London Marathon winner, Eliud Kipchoge as a child ran two miles to school on a daily basis, and started as a 5000metres runner, though his track career didn’t quite progress, he didn’t quit, rather he switched to marathon and started his Journey to becoming the greatest male marathon runner of all time.
At the 2018 Berlin Marathon, 34-year-old Kipchoge set a new world record of two hours, one minute and 39 seconds, an incredible run that took 78 seconds off the previous best.
It was the biggest single improvement for over 50 years. Nobody in history has gone closer to breaking the magical two-hour barrier.
Kipchoge was little more than a kid when he began his journey to becoming the greatest male marathon runner of all time. At the 2003 World Championships in Paris, aged 18, he won 5,000m gold – a breakthrough victory.
Between 2004 and 2012 he won global medals galore but none of them with gold. Olympic bronze in 2004 was followed by silver in 2008. The only addition to his World Championship collection was a 5,000m silver medal at the 2007 championships in Osaka.
Having failed to even make the Kenyan team for the 2012 Olympics, he switched his focus to the roads. Out of 365 days in the year, Kipchoge spends 300 days training away from his wife and three children at a simple training center in Kaptagat, a tiny village in the Kenyan highlands.
For Kipchoge, the once-in-a-lifetime athlete who is the current marathon world record holder says everything he has achieved is down to the power of the mind.
“The mind is what drives a human being,” Kipchoge says. “If you have that belief – pure belief in your heart – that you want to be successful then you can talk to your mind and your mind will control you to be successful. My mind is always free. My mind is flexible.”
“I want to show the world that you can go beyond your thoughts, you can break more than you think you can break.”
Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge ran the second fastest marathon in history to win the London Marathon for the fourth time, he has now won 11 of the 12 marathons in which he has competed, only missing out in Berlin in 2013 after he switched from track to road running that year.
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