The Scientist Who Helped Eliud Kipchoge Break 2 Hours: Dr. Andy Jones on the Limits of Human Performance and Possibility

The woman who breaks four minutes in the mile has probably already been born.

That's the opening claim from Professor Andy Jones, the Exeter physiologist behind Nike's Breaking2 project, and he gives her ten to fifteen years. The problem right now, he explains, is a split field: some women have the aerobic engine and the critical speed but no anaerobic reserve, while others have the speed and no endurance. Faith Kipyegon came up short on the 800m side, and Jones believes a properly paced attempt would have landed her near 4:03—a time that would have left the stadium feeling cheated.

From there Dominic takes him back to the beginning. Jones was giving conference talks arguing that 2:02:57 badly underestimated what humans could do, Nike staff were in the audience, and a phone call to Beaverton followed. He describes choreographing the pacemaker rotations in Monza like ballet, with cats, in several languages. He makes the case that 2:00:25 was the more remarkable performance of the two attempts, and says Kelvin Kiptum would likely have been the first man under two hours in a real race. 

The second half turns personal. Jones talks about the VO2 kinetics work he's proudest of, the beetroot research that earned him a nickname, the heart condition that now caps his own easy runs, and why his new book Faster—out January 28 with a foreword from Kipchoge—argues there is no magic bullet, no best method, and nothing that beats consistency.

Tap into the Professor Andy Jones Special. 

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