The Making of An Icon: Eliud Kipchoge’s Journey to Being World Best

Eliud Kipchoge might have been crowned as IAAF’s male athlete of the year 2018 but such a fete did not surely come on a silver platter. Kipchoge has been putting in work and has never stopped pushing himself hard even during his training sessions.

Kipchoge is regarded as a man of immense discipline and despite being enormously wealthy, the Olympic Gold Medalist is so down to earth that he even clean’s the toilet.

A look into his daily routine reveals that he wakes up at 5 a.m. for his morning runs. He splits his time between his home in Eldoret, Kenya, where he lives with his wife and three children, and a training camp up in the hills, 8,000 feet above sea level, where he shares chores with teammates.

Kipchoge records  every workout in a notebook. He has 15 notebooks now, one for every year he has spent on the world stage.

But perhaps what is most unusual about Kipchoge, now 34, and his diet of monastic extremes is the one thing he does not do, that is overextend himself in training. Kipchoge says that he wants to run but with a relaxed mind.

It is also important to note that the reigning Olympic champion has never sustained a serious injury. This has mainly been attributed to his well planned and managed training sessions. His good diet has also played a major part in this.

Eliud ran his incredible 2:01:39 marathon world record in Berlin in September and that performance followed his victory on the roads of London in April, when he clocked 2:04:17.

The 34-year-old took 78 seconds off the previous record with his time in Germany.

He had won nine of the 10 marathons he had previously entered before the Berlin Marathon heroics, heroics that saw him crowned as Word Best in Monaco.