Eliud Kipchoge: Marathon world record holder has ‘the qualities of an ascetic monk’

When filmmakers were invited to document Eliud Kipchoge’s second attempt to run a marathon in under two hours, it was the runner, rather than the run, that captured their imagination.

Amid the bluster and noise that often surrounds professional sport, they found that Kipchoge’s quiet, contemplative demeanor was unique – the calm at the eye of the storm.

“Eliud’s almost like a holy man – he has the qualities of an ascetic monk,” says Jake Scott, director of “Kipchoge: The Last Milestone.”

The film, releasing digitally from August 23 in the UK and from August 24 in the US, tells the story of the first sub-two-hour marathon – a feat Kipchoge achieved in Vienna, Austria, in 2019 as part of a venture dubbed the INEOS 1:59 Challenge.

A behind-the-scenes look at the carefully engineered environment created to maximize Kipchoge’s performance over 26.2 miles, it’s also about the understated manner of the athlete himself and his long-distance training environment back home in Kenya.

Kipchoge takes part in a training session near Eldoret in March 2017.

“We went down to Eldoret, which is a high-altitude training camp in Kenya, and we found a few dozen of some of the world’s top middle-to-long-distance athletes living like monks,” producer Ross Plummer tells CNN Sport.

“There was no distraction, no entertainment, no family; they were running 100 miles a week and sleeping 14, 15 hours a day.

“To us, it seemed like they were training themselves to ignore pain for the last 10 kilometers of a marathon. And we thought, well, this is fantastic – we’d love to make a story about this.”

Eldoret, a town located more than 2,000 meters (6,562 feet) above sea level in the Rift Valley, is a hallowed destination for long-distance runners because of its high altitude, temperate weather and long stretches of winding, country roads.

The rural region is the place from which Kipchoge, the fastest marathon runner of all time, builds the foundation for his success in races around the world.

He set the marathon world record of two hours, one minute and 39 seconds in Berlin three years ago, before becoming the first man to unofficially run the distance in under two hours the year after. Of the 14 major marathons he’s entered, he’s won 12 of them.

Kipchoge, in the white vest, is accompanied by pacemakers as he attempts to break the two-hour barrier for a marathon.