Virat Kohli’s march from faking intensity to redefining impossible

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Editor's note: On 25 September, Eliud Kipchoge won this year’s edition of the Berlin Marathon, clocking in at 2:01:09. The Kenyan smashed his own world record by 30 seconds, hit the tape a full four minutes and forty-nine seconds before second-placed compatriot Mark Korir, and equaled the legendary Haile Gebreselassie’s record of four wins at Berlin. In that race, Kipchoge was in what we call “the zone”. We invoke the “zone” all the time—I am as guilty of this as the next hack—but it occurred to me that I have no real understanding of what that place is; no clue where it is or how an athlete gets there; no idea why, once you have found your way there, you can’t take up permanent residence in that rarefied sporting space. Those questions, and the sheer scale of what Kipchoge accomplished—among other things, he now holds four of the five fastest times in marathon history—had me rummaging through my collection of books on running, looking for insight that would make sense of it all. My excavations led me to Ed Caesar’s 2015 book …