Faith Kipyegon almost breaks 4 minutes in the mile
The exhibition run was put on by Nike, Kipyegon's sponsor, and the brand pulled out all the stops to help. She ran in bespoke racing spikes that the company made expressly for the attempt, each shoe weighing the equivalent of a pack of playing cards. Designers crafted a textured suit to reduce aerodynamic drag, not unlike how dimples help a golf ball cut through the air. And Nike researchers contrived a complex arrangement of 11 pacers to shield her from the wind and reduce aerodynamic drag as she ran at 15 miles an hour. Strict regulations governing everything from shoes to pacers meant that the run wasn't eligible for official world records.
Though she didn't manage to dip under four minutes, this remarkable performance isn't a failure.
A recent white paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology projected that a woman might not run a mile under four minutes until as late as 2065. One reason is that the history of women's middle- and longer-distance running is brief; as recently as the 1960s it was commonly thought that the exertion required to compete in such events was dangerous for women, and bad for reproduction. As a result, women have only specialized in the mile for 50 years.
Training for the mile, wrote the authors, also requires 'great finesse' to delicately balance the challenge of running an event that demands both extreme speed and also endurance—a balance that sports science still doesn't completely grasp, the authors wrote.
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