How Eliud
Kipchoge Trains.

Who is Eliud Kipchoge

Kipchoge started on the track and won the 5000 m world title in 2003 as an 18-year-old, beating Hicham El Guerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele. He moved to the marathon in 2013 and lost only a handful of marathons over the next decade. His 2:01:09 was the world record until Kelvin Kiptum ran 2:00:35 in 2023. In April 2026 Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London, the first official sub-two. In 2026 Kipchoge started a world tour of marathons across all seven continents, beginning in Cape Town.

Kaptagat: the camp

For most of his career Kipchoge has lived during the week at a training camp in Kaptagat, at around 2,400 metres in Kenya's highlands, with the rest of his group. Everyone shares the chores. He goes home to his family at weekends. The camp is part of the method: a simple life, early nights and nothing that competes with training and recovery.

Kaptagat is a closed camp, but nearby Iten takes amateurs. See running camps in Kenya to train in the same hills.

His week

The structure that Kipchoge and his group have described many times is remarkably stable:

Day	Session
Tuesday	Track intervals, e.g. long reps such as 1200 to 2000 m
Thursday	Long fartlek, e.g. 1 minute fast, 1 minute steady, many times over
Saturday	Long run or long tempo, often 30 to 40 km
Other days	Easy runs, often twice a day, very slow

Weekly volume in a marathon build is reported at around 200 km or more. The easy runs are strikingly slow, and the hard days are hard but not raced. He also writes every session in a notebook, and has done so for his whole career.

What normal marathoners can take from it

• Three key days, the rest easy. Intervals, a fartlek or tempo, and a long run. That is the backbone of our training week guide.
• The long run is the centre. Build it slowly and make some of it marathon-specific. See the long run.
• Consistency beats peaks. Kipchoge's edge is twenty years without long breaks, not one huge week.
• Write it down. A training log, even a short one, shows you what works.
• Easy is easy. Check your easy pace with the zone calculator.

Sources: World Athletics athlete profile; Berlin Marathon results; INEOS 1:59 Challenge (2019); NN Running Team interviews on the Kaptagat camp; World Athletics report on the 2026 London Marathon (Sawe 1:59:30); Cape Town Marathon announcement, March 2026.