It could be argued that Eliud Kipchoge is the greatest runner of all time. After all, the Kenyan runner took home consecutive gold medals in the marathon from both the 2016 Rio Olympics and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. He then defied the idea of what was humanly possible by achieving a sub-two hour marathon, covering the 26.2 mile distance at an unsanctioned 2019 race in 1:59:40.
But at this summer’s Olympics in Paris, Kipchoge defied expectations in a very different way: for the first time in his marathon career, he dropped out of a race. He reportedly began to feel a pain in his back about 20 kilometers out. Then, around the 31K mark, he “decided not to finish and try to get out.”
After the surprising conclusion to his Paris journey, Kipchoge was not quick to declare what would come next. “I don’t want to comment on what will happen tomorrow. I want to try to evolve—if I don’t evolve, then I do other things,” he said. “I don’t know what my future will hold.”
But truly, what is there left to conquer for Kipchoge? He’s already achieved the fastest marathon, and as Runner’s World noted before, “This Is Kipchoge’s World and We’re Just Running in It.”
So perhaps the only thing left for Kipchoge’s is to see if there are more worlds left to conquer. Because as it turns out, outer space might offer a way for the G.O.A.T. of running to shave even more time off his marathon.
Now, this proposition might seem a bit odd if your only image of people moving in space are those old grainy videos of astronauts in space suits slowly striding across the lunar surface.
But a 2017 study took a look at how running would be effected by a decrease in gravity in outer space—particularly Mars—and the data suggest that a trip to the stars might make Kipchoge even faster.
The study was conducted with an eye toward both lunar missions and future Mars missions, which both rely on treadmills as a form of exercise for their astronauts, in order to prevent musculoskeletal system changes during space exploration. To determine the effects of these different gravity levels on running performance, they studied eight treadmill runners moving at 6 mph during parabolic flights meant to match “Martian and lunar gravity conditions.”
The study found that as gravity decreased, there was a proportional decrease on ground reaction forces during the first and second force peaks (the first 20 percent and 40–60 percent of the contact phase, respectively) as well as an increase in stride length.
Now, the simplified version of all this is to say “You can run faster on Mars,” and we do intend to extrapolate from that point regarding Kipchoge’s cosmic competitive prospects. But it’s worth noting that in the 2017 study, how much a runner’s performance improved in these conditions varied from runner to runner. In fact, one subject, Subject #5, defied the trend showed by the others and actually had a better stride length on Earth than on Mars. Plus, as we learned recently from the Paris Olympics, there’s a myriad of other elements that can impact a run (including back pain) in ways that defy expectations.
But getting back to the matter at hand, yes, this study does suggest the high likelihood that if Eliud Kipchoge should get stranded on the red planet, a la Matt Damon in The Martian, he would shatter his previous unprecedented marathon record.
As noted by NASA, Mars’ gravity is approximately 38 percent of what we experience here on Earth. As such, since the increase in running performance is purportedly proportional to the decrease in gravity, it would stand to reason that Kipchoge’ performance would see a 62 percent increase if he were sprinting on the fourth planet from the sun.
So, assuming optimal running conditions, if Kipchoge’s peak performance for a marathon was a time of 1:59:40, or 119.67 minutes, then a 62 percent performance increase could see Kipchoge completing a marathon in just 1:14:12, or a staggering 74.2 minutes! To put that in context, you could not even watch the entire 2021 documentary Kipchoge: The Last Milestone in the time it would take a Mars-set Kipchoge to break the record he’s depicted as setting in that documentary.
So, science has now determined just how fast Eliud Kipchoge would be if he found himself stranded out in space, like Matt Damon in the movie Interstellar. The next big question we must answer? How fast would Kipchoge be if he were shrunken down very small, like in the Matt Damon movie Downsizing.
The ball is in your court, science.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
