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The 2024 Paris Olympics medalist broke a 27-year-old record in front of a crowd of 60,000 in London on Saturday
NEED TO KNOW
- Josh Kerr broke a 27-year-old world record in the mile
- The Scottish middle-distance runner ran the Diamond League race in 3:42.66
- On YouTube, Kerr had been sharing his preparation to break the record
Olympic medalist Josh Kerr broke a 27-year-old world record in the mile over the weekend — and briefly lost his hearing during the race.
In a sit-down with The Athletic published Tuesday, July 21, the Scottish middle-distance champion shared the surprising detail, which happened with about 110 meters to go during the Diamond League race at London Stadium on July 18.
“It’s a very calming sensation, a trigger,” Kerr, 28, said. “As soon as it happens, it is my body telling me everything I don’t need is shutting off, and I’m going to get to the line as quickly as possible.”
That he did.
Kerr, buoyed by his pacers, raced to the finish line in 3:42.66 and bested the record held by Hicham El Guerrouj since 1999.
“It was never going to be an easy record,” he told The Athletic. “We discussed it so many times.”
That’s because Kerr has been touting his plan — called “Project 222” for the number of seconds in 3:42 — for a number of months on YouTube.
In videos and posts, the 2024 Paris Olympics silver medalist in the 1500-meters shared excerpts of his training at altitude in Albuquerque, N.M.
“The sessions were not hard, but the week-to-week was very difficult,” he recalled. “The structure of getting to bed and eating on time, nutrition, meetings — it’s all very mundane.”
But he added: “Everything accumulates. There were some distinct moments that I’m just, ‘F--- this’. I’m 16 miles into a day and I’m sitting here eating a salad and a couple of grains of rice, like, what are we doing?”
What Kerr was doing was closing in on the world record, one training session at a time.
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In London, in front of 60,000 people on Saturday, and as the crowd grew silent at the starting line, forerunning Kerr’s soon-to-be vanquished hearing, he accomplished a long-held dream.
“When the pressure is on, I show up,” he said. “I have had harder times mentally when running events that do not have the eyeballs that this did. I use people’s pressure as a privilege, and I’m in no rush for the emotion of what I have done to settle in.”
Read the original article on People
