One Of The World’s Fastest Marathon Runners Explains What It Takes To Run 4-Minute Miles

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Great Big Story / YouTube


Kenenisa Bekele is a 35-year-old elite marathon runner from Ethiopia who runs a 26.2-mile marathon in half the time it takes the average marathon runner to complete the race. Last year, Bekele was just 6-seconds shy of breaking the world marathon speed record of 2 hours, 2 minutes, and 57 seconds. This happened at the Berlin Marathon where the mostly flat race course leads to some blazing fast marathon times from the world’s elite runners.

The Berlin Marathon was back in September and it was won by Eliud Kipchoge with a time of 2:03:32, not too far off the world record. The global marathon circuit is more or less all year long, with the biggest races (Boston/NYC) marathon being spread out. Kenenisa Bekele is training all year long and pushing himself to limits most of us cannot even begin to comprehend. Great Big Story caught up with Kenenisa Bekele to discuss what his twice-a-day training routine looks like and what it takes to run 4-minute miles:

If you’re not subscribed to the Great Big Story YouTube channel yet then I highly suggest you do so. They’re telling some of the most fascinating stories found anywhere on YouTube. Yesterday, I watched this video which tells the origin story of the man who voiced the most famous characters in Mortal Kombat my favorite childhood video game. If you haven’t seen that yet then 100% check that out if you were ever a Mortal Kombat fan.

As for Kenenisa Bekele, I hadn’t really heard of him until today. I don’t keep up with the world of elite distance running but I checked out his resumé on Wikipedia and holy shit, he’s the most accomplished distance runner in IAAF World Cross Country Championships history.

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Cass Anderson is the Editor-in-Chief of BroBible. Based out of Florida, he covers an array of topics including NFL, Pop Culture, Fishing News, and the Outdoors.