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Ketchell’s expertise was a driving force in Nike’s Breaking2 project, a scientific endeavor wedded to the pursuit of pushing human boundaries. The vision behind Breaking2 was to get the greatest marathon runner in the world (Eliud Kipchoge), surround him with some of the brightest scientific minds (including Ketchell, with his mastery of data science), put him in the most optimal circ*mstances, and see if he could accomplish what no other marathoner had ever done: run 26.2 miles in less than two hours.
Despite the painstaking work, the project, attempted on a Formula 1 track in May 2017, fell short of its mission by 26 seconds, when Kipchoge finished in 2:00:25. More than that, to Ketchell, it felt like just that — work.
“It was cool to me,” Ketchell said. “But it really was just a project.”
While Ketchell and his family were at the hospital, Brailsford would check in, ask how things were going, how Marya and the baby were doing. But on one call, Brailsford had a work question.
Team Sky was changing sponsorship. It would start going by the name INEOS. Chairman Jim Ratcliffe told Brailsford he would increase the budget and wanted him to lead a marathon project similar to Nike’s. Brailsford reached out to Ketchell.
Ketchell thought about his family. He thought about his son. Wyatt was born with Down syndrome. Ketchell thought about what the opportunity would mean for them.
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“It was a tough spot in my life in terms of not only what we had going on, but where I was in my career,” Ketchell said. “I had a startup at the time. It wasn’t doing great. This was kind of my comeback. I was given another chance to work on something and I wanted to make the most of it.”
Related: For the first time, a human runs the marathon distance in less than two hours.
Ketchell and Marya didn’t have a name for their son until one night when Marya got a phone call from her doctor.
“It was a horrible phone call,” Ketchell remembered. “Basically, it said all the worst things about Down syndrome. And at the end of the call said, ‘And by the way, it’s a boy.’”
When Marya got off the phone, she came in the house upset. Ketchell sat down when she told him what the doctor said.
Ketchell told her, “Don’t worry. We got this.”
That night they realized they still needed a name.
“Within like two seconds we came across Wyatt and that means ‘warrior,’” Ketchell said. “And then we needed a middle name and I wanted it to be strong, so we chose steel because you can’t hurt steel.”
Then he embarked on a project that meant far more to him than just work.
“I had a personal motivation here that he did something for me in terms of taking care of us and I wanted to contribute back,” Ketchell said. “Because of that, I was more motivated.
“I literally went above and beyond for this project. I’ve never worked so hard. But I had a different reason for it. I adopted Eliud’s mantra of no human being is limited — personally — because of everything with my son and our family.”
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A series of giant leaps
For as long as marathons have existed, the two-hour threshold has felt like the edge of human limits.
What 61 home runs was to baseball, what 4,000 passing yards was to football, and what the career scoring title was to basketball, two hours is to marathon running.
“I think that’s kind of always been the number,” said Jonathan Gault, a former distance runner at Dartmouth and now a staff writer at LetsRun.com. “But I think among serious running fans, you would see a few people talking about a sub-two-hour marathon, for sure.
“I think certainly, when my bosses hired me, they were very skeptical we’d ever see a sub-two any time soon, just because no one had come close and it was just such a leap for the sport.”
But the sport has seen its share of giant leaps over the past 25 years.
After Ethiopia’s Belayneh Dinsamo set a record in 1988 with a time of 2:06:50 at the Rotterdam Marathon, it took 10 years for another runner to threaten it. It wasn’t until Brazil’s Ronaldo da Costa ran 2:06:05 in 1998 at the Berlin Marathon that a new bar was set.
Since Khalid Khannouchi broke his own world record in 2002 with a time of 2:05:38 at the London Marathon, the record has been broken eight times. Each breakthrough was another step in the march toward the two-hour mark.
If any runner was equipped, both physically and mentally, to truly come within reach of a two-hour marathon, it was Eliud Kipchoge, who will run the Boston Marathon for the first time in 2023. In fact, in a 2018 interview with CNN, he scoffed at the notion that the barrier was unattainable.
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“The professors in the science department are saying, ‘There is no human being who can run two hours before the year 2075,’ ” Kipchoge said at the time. “So I had to actually prove to them that I am one of them, and I can run that time.”
When Kipchoge ran a 2:00:25 in Italy for Nike’s Breaking2 project, it reframed what the running world thought was possible.
“Before that event, I thought, I’m probably never going to see someone break two hours in a legal marathon before I die,” Gault said. “Or if I do, it’s going to be when I’m very old.
“After that event, and especially after Kipchoge ran 2:01:09 in Berlin last year, now I’m thinking we might not be that far away.”
Nike’s event wasn’t an official effort to break a world record — nor was INEOS’s endeavor in 2019 — but it was an attempt at pushing the possibilities of marathon running, and it brought the two-hour mark into sharper focus.
Context is crucial
In 2018, Kipchoge made history when he ran 2:01:39 at the Berlin Marathon. In 2022, he returned to Berlin and broke his own record.
“We could see a sub-two-hour marathon, record-legal, in the next decade or two,” Gault said. “But at the same time, it could just be Eliud Kipchoge is the greatest marathon talent in history. This is as close as he has come, and it’s going to be 20 or 30 years until we see that. I’m kind of open to either option.”
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The marvel of Kipchoge’s performances at the Berlin Marathon wasn’t solely that he broke the world record, but that he shattered it.
Kipchoge lowered the record by 1:18 in 2018, then returned four years later and broke his own record by 30 seconds. Before that, no one had shaved more than a minute off the world record since 1967 and 1969, when Australian Derek Clayton broke the record by 2:24 at the f*ckuoka Marathon in Japan, then lowered his own record by 1:03 two years later at the Antwerp Marathon.
“If you look at the improvements on the world record since the marathon became an event, the improvements are getting smaller, as you would expect — as we approach what we expect humans to be capable of,” Gault said.
“But then [Kipchoge] comes out and he takes the record from 2:02:57 to 2:01:39 — that isn’t how it’s supposed to work. We’re not supposed to be taking larger chunks off the world record as time goes on.”
For the same reasons that make it tricky to compare Aaron Judge with Roger Maris or LeBron James with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or Tom Brady with Joe Montana, comparing marathon times across eras is a fool’s errand.
“You’ve just got to understand the context,” Gault said. “Passing for 4,000 yards in 2023 is a lot easier to do than it was in 1980. Even though it’s the same metric, the sport’s in a different place than it was 20-30 years ago.”
Times that were once bar-setting are now commonplace. In 2003, Paul Tergat set a world record with a 2:04:55 in Berlin. Since then, 146 different runners have cracked 2:05. Given the advances in technology, nutrition, and perhaps most importantly — and controversially — footwear, today’s runners have advantages that come with evolution.
Related: This year’s Boston Marathon has one of the most impressive pro fields in the event’s history. See who’s racing.
“There are all these factors,” said filmmaker and Boston Marathon historian Tom Derderian, who worked at Nike in shoe design in the 1970s and ’80s. “Faster courses, shoes that really allow runners to train longer and harder with less stress.”
It’s also no coincidence that each of the most recent eight record-breaking performances have happened at the Berlin Marathon, a flat course designed with record-breaking times in mind.
“I think that’s something you’ve got to be cognizant of when you’re looking at these records,” Gault said.
Putting his mind to it
There are humans behind all these numbers. Lives behind all the advancement.
The work that Ketchell put into INEOS’s 1:59 Challenge in October 2019 was just that, but the mental toll was just as exacting. He was constantly between two time zones, in Vienna for work, then flying home to be with family. Sleep deprivation was the norm.
“It helps you realize how to unlock your greatest potential,” Ketchell said.
Ketchell convinced himself that if Kipchoge was going to break two hours, he would do it by only one second. So the motivation was to find every second possible. In the months preparing for the event, Ketchell had measured the course so many times he had the numbers seared in his memory banks.
“42.195 kilometers plus or minus 10 centimeters,” he said. “I know that. I’ve basically measured every millimeter of this course 5 million times.”
Ketchell still has vivid memories of being on the course in Vienna in the middle of the night, sleeping in a sleeping bag because he was so worried someone was going to drive over the asphalt where the team had just installed a new banking for Kipchoge’s run.
“I was all in for it,” he said.
The stress almost made Ketchell more focused.
“I could rattle off all these numbers and different things that we were working on and the status of each project,” he remembered.
He would travel, then he would come home, then he would go to the hospital.
The watershed moment in the project actually came while he was sitting in the waiting room at Boston Children’s. While he was navigating things at the hospital, he was also on one of INEOS’s weekly calls — held at 1:59 p.m. UK time, of course. A colleague had challenged him to think about drafting formations. When the team saw what Ketchell came up with, they were impressed — and skeptical.
“This is awesome, this is great innovation, but people don’t run like that,” Ketchell remembered the colleague saying.
Ketchell knew no one was closer to the data than he was and no one had been working as hard to think outside the box.
“I remember saying to him, ‘I’m really glad that you’re saying this because that means that we’re doing the right thing.’ Because if we weren’t questioning the validity of what we’re doing, then we wouldn’t truly be innovating.”
Ketchell had to rush off the phone because the hospital needed his family to change rooms. Within hours, the team in the UK had booked a session in a wind tunnel to see if Ketchell’s idea worked in real life. They did it without informing Ketchell.
The test confirmed what Ketchell told them.
Kipchoge’s manager told Ketchell, “How did you come up with this formation? It’s better than anything we’ve tried.”
Mutual inspiration
Ketchell looked at the Breaking2 challenge as the foundation, a stage setter for what the INEOS attempt was able to accomplish when Kipchoge finished in 1:59:40.2.
“There are so many scientific concepts that we overcame that set the framework,” Ketchell said. “It’s like standing on the shoulders of giants to do the next step. We were able to build on that in terms of things with aerodynamics that we discovered — something that we never even thought about. But would we have gotten there without Breaking2? That’s the question.”
Ketchell’s family was in Vienna for the 1:59 Challenge. He has pictures of Wyatt with Kipchoge. He never spoke to Kipchoge but smiles whenever he conjures the image of Kipchoge holding his son. In March, Wyatt celebrated his fifth birthday.
The significance of pushing past the two-hour threshold carries extra significance for Ketchell and his family.
“I wanted to do it for Wyatt to show him what you can achieve when you really work hard for something — and he does that every freaking day,” said Ketchell. “So I wanted to honor that in a way with what he inspires me to do. It’s hard to put into words, but it’s obviously super special.”
A joke Ketchell would often hear among colleagues on the project is that Ketchell would have the biggest impact on Kipchoge’s career without ever saying a word to him.
The truth is the impact they had on each other.
Ketchell said, “He really believes in what it means that no human can be limited.”
Julian Benbow can be reached at julian.benbow@globe.com.
