Faith Kipyegon is no stranger to the extraordinary.
A three-time Olympic champion over 1,500m — the only athlete in history to win three Olympic titles over the distance, male or female — the 31-year-old smiling assassin of a racer has achieved almost everything running can offer.
But what she is targeting in Paris this week is bordering on the impossible.
It is running's holy grail, the 4-minute mile, a mythical barrier first breached by British icon Roger Bannister at the Iffley Road track in Oxford on May 6, 1954.
Australian legend John Landy famously became the second man to do so, less than two months later.
It is estimated that more than 1,700 runners have broken that mark in the subsequent seven decades, including New Zealander Sam Guthrie, who became the youngest man to beat that time aged just 15 years.
Pointedly, though, all of those sub-4-minute runners are men.
The same year that Bannister and Landy broke 4 minutes, Diane Leather ran a mile in 4:59.6, becoming the first woman to run under 5 minutes.
The fastest time a woman has ever completed the mile — 1,609.34 metres — is 4:07.64.
That woman was Faith Kipyegon two years ago.
So how on earth is this Kenyan superstar planning on taking over seven-and-a-half seconds off her previous record and ink June 26, 2025 at the Stade Charléty as one of athletics' most indelible moments?
Another Nike passion project
It is one of Nike's rivals that has the slogan "impossible is nothing" but the same is true of the Oregon-based sportswear brand's latest trend of smashing sport's established markers.
And yet everyone involved in this challenge is under no illusion that this poses an enormous task.
In Nike's press release announcing the attempt in April, the word "moonshot" is mentioned seven times — the same number of seconds that Kipyegon will need to erase from her own world record should she even come close to breaking the barrier.
But, of course, breaking a mythical barrier is something Nike has championed to great success before.
Marathon legend Eliud Kipchoge was given every possible level of support as he broke the 2-hour record for the marathon in 2019, from prototype trainers and a laser pointer guiding his optimum position, to pace makers and a specially selected course.
Kipchoge, a training partner of Kipyegon, has been providing emotional support and will be there in Paris to watch the attempt.
"It will be lovely to see Eliud after the finish line," Kipyegon told AP last week.
It should be noted that Kipchoge's 1:59.40 was not ratified by World Athletics due to all the extra assistance that he received.
It remains to be seen whether Kipyegon's attempt will also be ruled out, but Nike seems convinced that all the technology she is going to be utilising will not breach any rules.
So, how is she going to do it?
"I'm a three-time Olympic champion. I've achieved World Championship titles. I thought, What else? Why not dream outside the box?" Kipyegon told Nike.
"And I told myself, 'If you believe in yourself, and your team believes in you, you can do it.'"
Dreams, it is safe to say, can only get you so far.
The rest of it will come down to technology.
A special skin suit has been designed for Kipyegon, featuring 3D-printed "aeronodes" to create turbulence that will reduce drag — the same technology that makes a huge impact in sliding sports like luge and skeleton where athletes hit speeds of up to 100kph but admittedly less likely to play a role at the almost 15kph she will be running.
She will wear a special, body-mapped 3D-printed bra and a drag-reducing headband too.
And then there's the shoes.
Custom spikes weighing just 85 grams with a carbon plate and titanium pins — lighter than the spikes she wore at the Paris Olympics and with a greater energy return ability — will drive Kipyegon on.
If this is all starting to sound a bit similar to swimming's super suit era, then you're probably not alone.
When Nike's carbon-plated super-cushioned shoes first came onto the market in 2019, athletes wearing the shoes dominated, with runners claiming 31 of the 36 podium places in the six major marathons that year.
The technological arms race around shoes has leapt into the stratosphere since then, with Kipchoge's marathon super shoes and others prompting World Athletics to issue strict limits on what is and is not allowed.
Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa took over 2 minutes off the marathon world record in 2023 by running a staggeringly fast official time of 2 hours 11 minutes and 53 seconds at the Berlin Marathon using Adidas's latest "disposable" shoe, which she then held up in a vaguely Python-esque display of recognition post-race.
Kelvin Kiptum took 34 seconds off Kipchoge's men's record at Chicago later that year, setting a new mark of 2 hours and 35 seconds in Nike's latest runner, while last year, Ruth Chepng'etich obliterated Assefa's mark by 1 minute, 57 seconds in a pair of Nikes to set yet another world record, also in Chicago.
Can it be done?
To take the necessary 7.65 seconds off the previous world record, Kipyegon has to take a time equivalent of just over 3 per cent off that previous record.
For context, when Usain Bolt obliterated the men's 100m world record at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin's Olympiastadion — often considered one of the most staggering runs of all time — he beat his own previous record by 0.11 seconds, taking 1.13 per cent off the previous mark.
For additional context, the scarcely believable marathon record set by Assefa, when she took 2 minutes and 11 seconds off the previous mark, equated to 1.6 per cent.
Even Kipchoge's 1:59 Challenge saw him take "just" 1.63 per cent off his then-world record of 2:01:39.
To almost double that percentage time jump is a wildly improbable proposition.
To put it into even more context, she'd need to go through 1,500m almost five and a half seconds under her current world record.
Yet it is not impossible.
In 2009, Dr Michael Deakin of Melbourne's Monash University told the Australian and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics group that athletes could, according to the modelling, one day run the mile in 3 minutes, 25 seconds.
The current men's world record stands at 3 minutes, 43 seconds, set by Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj in 1999.
A study published earlier this year in the Royal Society Open Science journal by Edson Soares da Silva, Wouter Hoogkamer, Shalaya Kipp and Rodger Kram suggested that, with one pace runner just over a metre in front and another one behind who would switch with fresh runners at the midway point, Kipyegon could run a time of 3:59.37.
What will breaking 4 minutes mean?
Let's not beat around the bush: taking more than 7 seconds off her previous personal best is a mind-bending prospect.
For context, the largest jump in the world record since Anne Smith set World Athletics' first recognised record in 1961 was when Italian legend Paola Pigni-Cacchi took 5.8 seconds off Ellen Tittel's mark in 1973, with Romanian Natalia Marasescu taking 5.7 seconds off that in 1977.
Yet Kipyegon is not beyond making huge leaps herself — when she set the current world record in Monaco's Stade Louis II in 2023, she beat the previous record set by Sifan Hasan by 4.69 seconds.
"I want this attempt to say to women, 'You can dream and make your dreams valid,'" she told Nike.
"This is the way to go as women, to push boundaries and dream big."
The mile is not run as often as it used to be, with the event not an Olympic discipline at the expense of the "metric mile" distance of 1,500m.
Indeed, Kipyegon has only officially competed over a mile three times in the last decade, in 2023, 2016 and 2015.
But based on the world record in the 1,500m, the progression has been similar.
[GRAPH]The biggest leap in that world record, which is also currently held by Kipyegon, came in 1976 when Soviet athlete Tatyana Kazankina took 5.38 seconds off the previous mark.
"I think breaking four will really cement my legacy," Kipyegon told AP last week, somewhat under-statedly.
"The next generation is looking up to us to show them the way and this is what I'm doing now. … Everything we do, we have to dream big and just believe in ourselves that we could do it."
Is Kipyegon the only likely candidate?
Absolutely.
Nobody has ever got close to the time that Kipyegon, described as a "once-in-a-generation talent" by Nike chief executive Elliot Hill, ran in Monaco last year.
When Kipyegon set the current world record of 4:07.64, she smashed Hassan's previous record of 4:12.33.
Hassan, who set that record in 2019 at the same Stade Louis II track, had taken just 0.23 seconds off Svetlana Masterkova's 4:12.56, a record that stood for a month shy of 13 years.
When Kipyegon set the record, Ciara Mageean was the closest runner to her, finishing just under 7 seconds behind.
Mageean is one of just four athletes to have ever come that close to Kipyegon in a mile race.
Should Kipyegon even get close to the magic 4-minute mark in Paris, even getting that close ever again will be a triumph.
