Faith Kipyegon almost breaks 4 minutes in the mile

Faith Kipyegon ran the mile of her life today. And yet the 31-year-old Kenyan, the best female middle-distance runner of all time, failed to add a new line to the history books, by running six seconds shy of becoming the first woman to run one mile in under four minutes.

Surrounded by pacers, Kipyegon streaked around the track at Paris’ Stade Sébastien Charléty in a time of 4:06.42. The blistering run was more than a second faster than the world record that she already owns. Still, the result meant that history would have to wait for another day. 

To break four minutes, Kipyegon had needed to shave 7.65 seconds from her world record, which at her pace, is the equivalent of only about 51 meters. But in the mile, where the best runners measure their improvement in tenths or even hundredths of a second, her attempt was extremely ambitious.

Kipyegon was the woman best positioned to deliver, though. She’s a three-time Olympic gold medalist in the 1,500M and the owner of four world championships. When she set the world mile mark in 2023, she obliterated the previous record by more than four seconds. She hoped the run in Paris would “cement her legacy” by creating a moment that transcended sport, she told me earlier this year when I visited her training camp in the highlands of Kenya. And she wanted to teach her 7-year-old daughter to think without limits, and “motivate young girls and young women around the world to push themselves in everything they do,” she said.

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.

But times are changing, fast—led by standouts like Kipyegon. “The number of women who have run under four min for 1,500 m, the so-called “metric mile,” has more than doubled in the last five years (51 women between 2020 and 2024) compared with the preceding 10 years (21 women between 2010 and 2019),” the authors wrote. “Accordingly, more women than ever before are running fast times for middle-distance events, thus increasing the probability that a sub-four min mile could be on the horizon.” 

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In 2017, when Kenyan distance running sensation Eliud Kipchoge first attempted to break two hours in the marathon at another Nike-backed exhibition, he missed the mark by 26 seconds. But getting so tantalizingly close shifted the sporting world’s understanding of what the human body is capable of. Two years later, Kipchoge tried again, this time running 1:59:40. 

Will we see the same from Kipyegon? In search of an answer, I look back to my time at her training camp this spring. “Everything is possible,” she told me after her morning workout, the first of two for the day. “You know, impossible can be possible.”