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Smashing Paradigms – Running a two-hour marathon

by | Sep 26, 2018 | Open Leadership, Smashing Paradigms, Storytelling

Berlin Marathon

For the first months of daily writing on this site, I wrote around the theme of “Smashing Paradigms” each Friday, with many written on that theme you can now explore.  I began each one with;

For my story-telling explanation of the definition of a Paradigm, see “What is a Paradigm“. 

One way of defining a paradigm is “we’ve always done it this way”

Today I’m inspired by Eliud Kipchoge, who on September 17, 2018 utterly obliterated the marathon world record, so have come back to the theme of Smashing Paradigms and will share some ideas and thoughts for leaders.

Let me begin by sharing about this achievement, with thoughts from and inspired by an article by Vernon Loeb in The Atlantic here.

Kipchoge, the great Kenyan distance runner, almost unquestionably the greatest marathoner ever, hadn’t just set a new marathon record. He’d shattered the old one by a minute and 18 seconds, running the fast Berlin course in 2:01:39.

Consider what that means: The 33-year-old Kipchoge, who is 5 foot 6 and weighs 115 pounds, had run 26 straight, blazingly fast, 4-minute and 38-second miles.

“It was a performance so far superior to anything we’ve seen before that comparing it to another marathon feels inadequate,” the running-news website LetsRun.com said of Kipchoge’s new record. “This was Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game in basketball, Usain Bolt’s 9.58 in the 100-meter dash.”

A marathon is a little over 26 miles, or to most of the world, 42km.

In the UK, there is a phenomenon called ParkRun , where over 100,000 people get up every Saturday morning and (for free) come together and run 5k. From this article: “consider this: the fastest official ParkRun time for 5km anywhere in Britain this weekend was 14.52. Kipchoge’s average 5km pace throughout a 42km race stood at 14.24”. Going further, his average (average!) time for 5k (remember, 42km is 8+ 5ks back to back) was faster than all but 20 ParkRuns all-time, of millions on record!

So, how did Kipchoge smash the record and what is next, the two-hour barrier? Impossible? Perhaps not.

The secret to breaking that record may well be a combination of innovation , belief and resilience.

Innovation

In an earlier post (here) I told a story (around tourism in Scotland) of how I came up with my own definition of innovation:

“Innovation is simply doing things differently and doing different things”

Also, as I noted above:

One way of defining a paradigm is “we’ve always done it this way”

So, what did Kipchoge do differently?

Sometimes, as in my post on innovation linked above, the solution is quite simple, sometimes it takes technical innovation driven by thinking differently, by questions the “we’ve always done it this way” thinking.

One specific innovation Kipchoge uses is Maurten energy drinks. Now, marathon and endurance athletes have to keep taking in carbs regularly to perform at the “right at the edge” level of elite performance. However unlike endurance athletes such as cyclists, marathon runners cannot have large amounts of carbohydrate-intense liquids sloshing around in their stomach, they will literally be sick.

Cue the innovation by Maurten. They created a drink that, once it hits the stomach, is turned by the alkali environment from liquid to gel. Not only does this reduce greatly the “sloshing”, but it also speeds up stomach emptying. For a full article on this, see here

So, innovations such as this will have helped, but for such achievements more is necessary.

Belief and Resilience

So, is it enough to innovate to truly smash unthinkable records and achieve unthinkable things? I put it to you that, no, you must also shift your beliefs, then have processes in mindset and action that gives you sufficient resilience to carry your beliefs into results.

Shifting beliefs will simply not be enough unless you have process to support you, particularly for an endurance event, such as a marathon, cycling in a record time around the world (I’ve written more than once about my friend Mark Beaumont achieving this, including this one here), or, for example, transforming a business as a leader.

From my definition of innovation given above, let’s take that to a thought around beliefs of :

“Believe differently and you will believe in different things”

So, let’s first go back to Vernon Loeb’s article in The Atlantic, bold highlights mine:

Kipchoge, who won the gold medal in the marathon at the 2016 Olympics, has dominated marathon running like no one before him over the past five years; going into Sunday’s race, he had won nine of 10 marathons he had entered since 2013. In a profile published on Saturday, The New York Times’ Scott Cacciola called him “a man of immense self-discipline” who keeps meticulous running logs and has never had a serious injury. He is also marathon running’s “philosopher king,” according to Cacciola, distinguishing himself as much with his motivational speaking as he does out on the course. “Kipchoge is the type of person,” writes Cacciola, “who says stuff like: ‘Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions.’ And: ‘It’s not about the legs; it’s about the heart and the mind.’ And: ‘The best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago. The second-best time to plant a tree is today.’”

It was little wonder that two years ago, Nike chose Kipchoge as the runner around whom to build an experiment aimed at breaking two hours in the marathon, which the company called “Breaking2, an innovation moonshot designed to unlock human potential.” Nike optimized Kipchoge’s months of training. Conditions during the race itself, which was held on a race-car track in Monza, Italy, were optimized as well. And the experiment almost worked: Kipchoge ran the marathon in an incredible 2 hours and 25 seconds. It did not count for world-record purposes.

For Kipchoge, that would have to wait until Sunday morning. Even he didn’t think he could run a 2:01 on Sunday in Berlin. “I had a great belief that I would run a world record,” Kipchoge said after the race. “But I didn’t know I’d run 2:01. I didn’t know that what I was believing translated to 2:01, but I’m happy for it.

So, around Belief, the “Breaking2” project clearly had Kipchoge both experience running very close to the magical two-hour mark, but also gave him an immense belief that the record of 2:02.57 was soon to be in the past.

Then, around Resilience, the thoughts highlighted in bold above talk about his immense self-discipline and also being running’s philosopher king. For such truly transformative, paradigm-smashing achievements, leaders need both processes to support resilience and then siuch internal mastery.

To close, from a poem I wrote around in “Writing I love – Invictus“, a poem that carried Mandela through 27 years on Robben Island:

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Eliud Kipchoge has exciting times ahead, indeed the master of his fate, the captain of his soul.