As part of WIRED's exclusive look at Breaking2, Nike’s attempt to break the two-hour marathon mark next month in Monza, Italy, our writer is using the same training regime, apparel, and expertise as Nike’s three elite athletes to try to achieve his own personal milestone: a sub-90-minute half-marathon. This is the fourth in a series of monthly updates on his progress.

Last week, I travelled for work to Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. The trip came at a bad time for my upcoming attempt to complete a sub-90-minute half-marathon in Monza, Italy. I should have been in the meat of my training regimen, doing a high-mileage week. Instead, I was in Bangui, chasing interviews in an unstable, poor, and fiendishly hot country in crisis. Moreover, there was nowhere to run. Even though the violent chaos I witnessed during my last trip to C.A.R. in 2014 had subsided somewhat, in the capital at least, the considered opinion among my journalistic colleagues was that the city remained too unsafe for a foreigner to gambol in the streets alone. I felt the scratchy panic of an addict whose dealer had left town.

There was no question of not running. I had sweated too much, and progressed too far, to ruin my chances of breaking my record with several days of inactivity. In any event, I realized I had passed over a threshold, one that separates runners from people who run. The question of whether I would train had been replaced by how and when. The Australian marathon great Derek Clayton covered between 160 and 200 miles a week while working a full-time job. I have no idea how he did that, but clearly there was no question of his not running.

In Bangui, therefore, I found a solution. I rose early each day, ate some bread and honey in the kitchen of the ex-pat French restaurateur whose room I had rented, joined my incredulous driver, who would tap on the car’s thermometer (in the 80s, even at 7:00 am) as if to remark upon my folly, and rode across town to the Ledger, a $300-dollar-a-night expat and politician’s hotel that possesses, I believe, the only treadmills in Bangui. There, in the sweatbox gym, I performed the exact same sessions I would have done at home: mile repetitions, a progressive six-miler, an easy run, a long run. The satisfaction that accompanied the end of such workouts was not only physiological. Impressing the familiar pattern of my program in a steamy, chaotic place was a little victory. I held on to that feeling, trying to understand why it mattered to me. And then, on my way back from the gym on my final morning, I scribbled a single word in my notebook: “speed-bag.”

Find Your Rhythm

One summer, a decade ago, I joined a boxing gym. I had been assigned to profile Ricky Hatton, the British boxer and crowd favorite. I didn’t know much about boxing, and I didn’t want to be found out. So, I joined a gym—a joint in appropriately insalubrious surroundings, underneath a railway arch in Vauxhall, London. The club drew both serious fighters and faddy dilettantes from the professional classes, like me. (Our number included a member of parliament, whom I had great pleasure punching repeatedly in the face one morning before breakfast.)

I committed myself to mastering the various stations of the gym—the heavy bag, the floor-to-ceiling bag, the medicine ball, the skipping rope—with patchy results. My nemesis was the speed-bag, a stuffed teardrop hung from a wooden circle at shoulder height or above, depending on the size of the fighter. Worked correctly, the speed-bag should become a blur as it rebounds and responds to a boxer’s lightly whirling fists. The sound of a speed-bag in action is one of the most satisfying in sports, like a teller counting a wad of money.

For weeks, I couldn’t get the hang of it. I hit the speed-bag once, twice, three times, but soon it was moving too fast and I would lose the flow as it ricocheted limply away from my fists. The harder I tried, the worse I became. A real fighter eventually took pity on me and offered some advice: Stop trying to hit the bag. Instead, I should simply decide upon a rhythm, and drill that rhythm into the plane where the bag hung. The speed-bag was not chiefly a measure of hand-eye coordination, he explained, but of rhythm and self-control. At the very next attempt, I worked the bag for a minute or more until, thrilled at the sound of counted money in my ears, I lost concentration, and the infernal teardrop wobbled to a standstill.

The best runners have learned the lessons of the speed-bag. Of course, the sport rewards effort and willpower. But I now understand, as I approach my race in Monza, that it also rewards steadiness and rhythm. A training program consists of different sessions, deployed through a series of weeks and months before a competition. In order to achieve a result far in the future, it’s necessary to mold, and then hold in one’s head, a plan to reach that goal. Real life—a job, a family, travel—makes that plan much harder to adhere to, but doubly satisfying to achieve.

The author recovering from an early training session at Nike HQ in Beaverton, Oregon in November, 2016. Cait Oppermann for WIRED

Meanwhile, you must plan intelligently, and impress your own rhythm, within your training sessions. Your brain works as hard as your lungs. Through practice, monstrous error, and advice from the sports scientists at Nike, I have developed a fine understanding of my limits and paces. I know, for instance, that any effort where my heartrate rises to within four or less strokes of my maximum of 175 beats per minute is unsustainable for more than a mile or two; if I drop the effort by a couple of beats, my legs can seemingly go all day. After six months of training and self-monitoring, I can now tell you the difference between these two efforts without wearing a heart-rate monitor. The key on race day will be to lock in on the infinitesimally lower effort.

This kind of self-control is more difficult than it sounds, because it’s hard to think straight when your body is under stress, which is why being alive to the details of training matters. Indeed, I have begun to find intense satisfaction, perhaps incomprehensible to non-runners, in the correct execution of a specific session. This feeling is not a high, as such. It’s more profound than that: the sound of money being counted.

More Control, Lower Times

My toughest “threshold” set in my training is four repetitions of 2,000 meters. On a perfect day, I run the first repetition in eight minutes exactly. Each subsequent repetition should finish 10 seconds faster than the last, with the final repetition clocking in at precisely seven and a half minutes—a time much faster than my race pace. I recently ran that set, almost to the second, at lunchtime at my local track in Manchester, England. The place was empty except for me and my training partner, and I was barely conscious of giving a victory air-punch when I finished. The triumph was not only in knowing that I was fitter than I had been, but, equally important, in knowing that I was in control. My new-found mastery manifested itself in a performance 10 days later where I ripped a minute per mile out of my previous best time, achieved last year in my first Coniston 14—a hilly, nearly-14 mile race in England's Lake District.

Runners, led by Eliud Kipchoge (third from right, front), setting their watches at the start of an early morning run in Eldoret, Kenya in January, 2017. Cait Oppermann for WIRED

Eliud Kipchoge, the Olympic marathon champion and the favorite of the three elite athletes attempting to break the two hour barrier in Monza, feels the same, deep lure of control. In every repetition of every set he completes, in every mile of every long run, he could go faster. But he runs only what he is required to run. (Naturally, even in races, he is controlling himself—because if he blazed the first mile of a marathon in his personal best for the mile, he would never finish the race. Instead, he runs only what he knows he can sustain.)

Occasionally, on a final rep of a training session, he will scorch ahead, just to feel the blood pumping with the finish line in sight. Twice now, I have watched him burn his teammates on a final repetition of a 12 x 1,200 set with a radiant look on his face. But the grand idea is to execute the set perfectly, not the repetition. Kipchoge told me recently that when he stands on the start line, he fears none of his competitors, because “I believe my training has been the best.” The best, not the hardest. Whether his preparation will be enough to break two hours in Monza next month is another matter. Kipchoge admits no doubts. The rest of us will know soon enough.