When he was starting his career 20 years ago, says Eliud Kipchoge, all the athlete had to do was follow his coach’s instructions and hit the targets set for the race.
His talent, discipline and good coaching resulted in his first major win, the junior race at the 2003 World Cross Country Championships held in Lausanne, Switzerland before going on to bag the gold in the 5000 metres race at the 2003 World Championships in Paris.
This was a year before Facebook was launched and three years before the start of Twitter. Google, which had been launched five years earlier and had grown into the most popular search engine on the web, announced its plan to float on the stock market in 2003.
Today, the current world marathon record holder and arguably the greatest marathoner of all time says technology has grown to be an important component of his training regime.
He started incorporating technology in his training and competing 10 years into his career.
“We now find ourselves running in a smooth way, knowing what is going on. You know without technology you are empty. You are just running and following time. With technology, you know how many kilometres you have covered and at what speed, if you are balanced, if your legs are balanced, how glucose is running in your body, you know what to eat and how to get energy,” he says.
Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa (fourth left) got to train with Eliud on a recent visit to Kaptagat.
The 38-year-old whose 2:01:09 world record time that he set at the Berlin Marathon in 2022 was last week ratified by World Athletics is currently preparing for the 2023 Boston Marathon to be held in April.
Having won London and Berlin marathons four times each and breasted the tape first at Chicago and Tokyo marathons once each, winning Boston and New York marathons is all that remains to Kipchoge becoming the first men’s runner to win all six majors.
“2023 is a new year and my resolution is to win the Boston Marathon as I plan to consolidate all the six world major marathons under my belt and get that six-star medal,” he told the Safaricom Newsroom.
For the past 18 years, the Olympic marathon champion has trained at the Global Sports Communication training camp in Kaptagat situated around 25 kilometres northwest of Eldoret in Uasin Gishu County.
The camp founded by Kipchoge’s coach Patrick Sang, himself an Olympic medal-winning athlete, is famed for its basic, no-frills approach that seeks to ensure athletes have no distractions.
Yet even in these simple, rustic environs, the impact of technology as a catalyst for continued success in sport is understood and embraced.
“Technology has played a huge role in my success by giving the whole data of what’s going on in my body, from glucose to the heartbeat and to the general wellness of the body. Technology has made my career grow by showing me where I need to push, explore, keep up the pace,” he says.
The variety of gadgets, apps and software around him, he says, enables him to concentrate and know what he is doing every day.
“With it you can win a race and know what you have been doing right for the past four months,” he says.
Without giving too many trade secrets away, the legendary long-distance runner who transitioned to marathon running in 2013 and won the Hamburg Marathon on his debut shared with Safaricom Newsroom some of the gadgets that are a must-have for his daily training.
“On a typical day, the first gadget to wear is the watch. Second is the pod which monitors my steps and the balance of my legs. I also have a heart rate monitor and I have the glucose sensor which monitor my glucose levels. All gadgets are important but the Abbott Libre Sense Glucose Sport Biosensor is a must,” says Kipchoge.
When he announced his partnership with Abbot, Kipchoge said on Twitter: “I am learning how my glucose levels relate to my running performance and have already started to see how quickly small adjustments can make a big difference. This innovation will hopefully help runners around the world to better understand the relationship between nutrition and performance to help them improve.”
To get the best out of the device, users wear a small biosensor on the back of their upper arm which includes a thin filament inserted under the skin. The biosensor, which costs Ksh 20,000 for two pieces online, tracks the body’s levels of glucose and sends this data to an app on the user’s smartwatch providing an athlete glucose data to help give them insight into their body’s fuel level at all times.
For his smartwatch, Kipchoge rocks the COROS Limited Edition Pace 2 (Eliud Kipchoge) Running Watch with GPS/Heart Rate Monitor/Accelerometer White/Nylon Strap. This watch, which is currently out of stock since only 15 pieces were made available, retails at Ksh 34,000.
He then pairs this with the COROS POD which costs Ksh 10,000, which is clipped on vertically to the waist in the center of the back and which provides advanced running analytics such as stride ratio, height and length, ground time, left/right balance and ground time, all sent to the watch in real-time, enabling faster correction.
The only challenge Kipchoge encounters in his whole-hearted embrace of technology is fluctuation in network coverage because he trains in a remote area that has the Kaptagat forest around it.
The Abbot glucose biosensor, the advanced COROS smartwatch and the COROS POD and whatever other tech that Kipchoge uses are merely catalysts to the overwhelming success that is anchored in incredibly sheer hard work and discipline that is at the core of long-distance running.
“Without technology, our careers would be naked. But aside from technology, working hard and working smart has had great value to my career,” is how the philosophical sportsman sums up the place of technology in athletics.
Science and technology played an important role in enabling Kipchoge to become the first human being to run a sub-two-hour marathon, which he did in Vienna, Austria, in October 2019.
The course, a tree-lined avenue, was selected because of its long, flat straight sections and its protection from the wind.
He was able to run at a consistent pace set by the electric timing car, with beams to guide his steps, and with elite athletes as his pacemakers going at two minutes and 50 seconds per kilometre throughout the race. The target was to stay at between two minutes and 48 seconds and two minutes and 52 minutes per kilometre.
Kipchoge’s running has also been boosted by Nike’s Air Zoom Alphafly running shoes.
With his ever-present good humour, never-say-die attitude, his thirst for knowledge and desire to motivate the next generation – which saw him use the Ksh 100 million he got from former president Uhuru Kenyatta after his sub-two-hour marathon to construct a library at his home, Kipchoge continues to be an inspiration on and off the track.
It is in this vein that Safaricom PLC recently unveiled murals of the marathon legend at Rupa’s mall in Eldoret, Uasin Gishu County. The telecommunications firm also announced a Ksh 1 million donation to the Eliud Kipchoge Foundation plus 5,000 tree seedlings donation in support of his tree-growing initiative in Kaptagat forest.
Eliud Kipchoge at the run with Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa.
Eliud Kipchoge at the run with Safaricom CEO Peter Ndegwa.
