Nike Needs to Throw Everything at the Breaking4 Project

Lunar Landing

This week, Nike announced their next biggest moonshot: an attempt at taking down the 4-minute mile boundary for women. Current world record holder Faith Kipyegon will sit in the cockpit as she attempts to shave off two seconds per lap by blasting around the Stade Charléty in Paris on June 26. 

The odds, quite frankly, are not in her favor. It took 35 years to lower the women’s mile time by eight seconds, from 4:15 to the 4:07 that Kipyegon currently owns. To break four minutes, she would have to match the same time difference at an even faster pace, less than two years after she set the standard.

Some may say it’s not just likely, but straight-up impossible, at least right now. So why even try?

People said the same thing when Eliud Kipchoge made his own attempt at the impossible as part of Nike’s Breaking2 project and the INEOS 1:59 Challenge. There were many that thought it would take at least a quarter century for the men’s two-hour marathon mark to be broken in a standard race. Of course, Kipchoge then broke that mark by a good margin, albeit with pacers on a closed course under optimized conditions. 

Nevertheless, Kipchoge’s performance upended what was possible and marathon times quickly started moving towards the two-hour mark. Before his untimely death, Kelvin Kiptum set the marathon world record in a time of 2:00:35, barely a second per mile off the sub-two-hour pace and nearly the same time as Kipchoge’s first attempt in ideal conditions at Monza. Point being, it feels like the record can fall, and it almost certainly will at some point within the next ten years. It didn’t feel like that prior to Kipchoge. It felt impossible. Then he ran. And then it felt possible.

Nothing about Kipchoge’s attempt was remotely legal by standard race rules. From the bike handlers doling out nutrition to the lead pace car shooting lasers out its ass to the wedge formation of his pacers in front of him and behind him to the pancake-flat course with intense crowd support on all sides, the odds were ever in his favor to at least come closer than anyone ever had to breaking the two-hour mark. All of that stuff was outside the rulebook, but still– that stuff came together to make a thing happen that had never happened before. That matters.

Nike has been mum on the actual set-up for Kipyegon’s attempt, but they did note that it’s their goal to to stay within as many traditional guidelines as possible. That’s dumb. I say get rid of the guidelines and give it the kitchen sink treatment. Give her top-tier pacers, pacing lights, and a packed stadium full of women. Hell, give her Wile E. Coyote roller skates with rockets taped to the back, or that equivalent in the form of the newest carbon plated track footwear. Load her up with Red Bull, 5 Hour Energy, Nerds Gummy Clusters, espresso, and Surge. Hand her the original Four Lokos formula right before the bell lap. Record a video of her daughter telling her she can do it and blast it from the stadium Jumbotron. Give her pretty much anything but a pork burrito.

We need it to happen because women just need to see a woman’s legs propel a woman’s body for a distance of 5,280 feet (1,609 meters) before the yellow Seiko clock hits the four-minute mark. Because once she does that, once she breaks the four-minute mile in real life, a thing that has never been done in the history of earth– I guarantee you another woman will do it. 

She probably won’t do it, just like Kipchoge probably wouldn’t do it. After all, she does have to make up a 3% improvement whereas Kipchoge had a 1.4% difference. It’s probably not going to happen– it’s a moonshot, after all. But once every fifty years, we do manage to reach the moon. 

And sometimes that requires an entire team of scientists and mission control and rocket boosters and spacesuits and astronaut ice cream. The point isn’t how they got to the moon, it’s that they did. 

So get her to the moon. Make it happen however you can, Nike.

Just do it.