222 seconds to glory: Inside Josh Kerr's high-stakes gamble to set the mile world record
Danny Orr's stomach churned with nervous excitement last Saturday throughout his short walk from his hotel to London Stadium.
He downed a beer soon after making it inside, but even that did little to ease his growing anxiety.
Orr is the senior director of footwear innovation at Brooks Running, a Seattle-based company that specializes in performance running shoes and apparel. He had traveled to London to learn in person whether the most audacious marketing campaign the company had ever undertaken would turn out to be a strategic masterstroke or an ill-conceived misstep.
On March 28, Brooks-sponsored runner Josh Kerr declared his intent to run the mile faster than any human in history. With the help of a custom-made pair of Brooks spikes and a one-of-a-kind speedsuit that the company was engineering, the Scottish middle-distance star hoped to take down a world record that had stood for 27 years in front of 60,000-plus fans at the prestigious London Diamond League meet.
"Project 222" is what Brooks named the campaign, a reference to the 222 seconds it takes to run a 3:42 mile. That's how fast Kerr would need to go to supplant Morocco's Hicham El Guerrouj, who on July 7, 1999, at Rome's Stadio Olimpico ran a time of 3:43.13 to become the reigning king of the mile.
At the same time that Kerr was training intensely at altitude to try to shave 2.68 seconds off his previous fastest mile time, Orr and his team of Brooks developers and engineers spent months meticulously designing, building and testing a pair of shoes for this single race. Now, it was finally the day of reckoning. Race day had arrived, and Orr was a wreck.
"There was a lot of anticipation," Orr told Yahoo Sports. "It just felt like the pressure was building and building."
Josh Kerr's audacious plan
There are few middle-distance runners who could call their shot months ahead of time about breaking the mile world record and not get ridiculed for their naivete.
Only three men before Kerr's attempt had even come within a second of El Guerrouj: Kenya's Noah Ngeny, who finished second in that same 1999 race; and Norway's Jakob Ingebrigtsen and the U.S.'s Yared Nuguse, who went 1-2 at the 2023 Prefontaine Classic.
Kerr had never mounted a serious challenge to El Guerrouj before Saturday, but his credentials suggested that dismissing him would be unwise. This is a runner who won three NCAA titles and set a collegiate record in the 1,500 meters at the University of New Mexico, who medaled at the Tokyo and Paris Olympics at that distance and who, at 28, is still squarely in his athletic prime.
When Kerr pitched his record-breaking idea to Brooks last November, he was looking ahead to a 2026 season without an Olympics or World Championships. He needed a new challenge to motivate himself. He needed a creative way to generate interest.
Those close to Kerr advised him to make his attempt at the record in a controlled environment, somewhere with pristine weather and no crosswinds. They painted a picture of something like Matthew Centrowitz's solo attempt to break the American mile record at Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, in 2023. Kerr's vision was grander but riskier. He targeted the London Diamond League meet knowing that he'd have a crowd of 60,000-plus behind him and he'd be paying homage to Britain's rich history in the mile.
"He was adamant that it could be done there," Orr recalled. "He wanted that level of energy. He wanted to do it in a stadium that was his home stadium."
The idea of supporting Kerr in his pursuit of history was energizing for those at Brooks. It was rare to build custom shoes and gear for a high-profile athlete. It was even more unusual to do it for one particular race.
"By Josh saying that he wasn't going to hold back in any area of his preparation and training, I feel like that just set the table for us," said Bryan Conrad, senior manager of run research at Brooks. "We didn't want to let him down."
Whereas middle-distance races at global championship meets are infamous for slow, strategic opening laps giving way to a blistering finish, Kerr's record pursuit was never going to follow that pattern. The formula for a 3:42 mile was Kerr throwing down a punishing 55-second opening lap and trying like heck to match that pace the rest of the way.
The aggressively curved rocker shape of the Hyperion 222 spike that Brooks designed was engineered for exactly that sort of fast, sustained race. Computer modeling helped Brooks tailor the shape, fit and stiffness of the spike to Kerr's specific foot shape, stride and force production rather than catering to the average measurements of the typical elite runner.
Brooks engineered Kerr's tight-fitting sleeveless speedsuit with London's July heat in mind. It featured laser-cut perforations to maximize breathability and two different fabrics to reduce aerodynamic drag while also prioritizing stretch and ventilation.
Asked when he began to feel confident that the personalized spikes and speedsuit would give Kerr the advantage he desired on race day, Conrad pointed to the look on the two-time Olympic medalist's face when he tested them on a Seattle-area track.
"He was starting to smile," Conrad said. "He clearly felt very confident in the shoes the first time he started running some laps in them. I think that's when I started to get excited about what the potential outcomes of this could be."
As race day approached, Brooks released a series of five 222-second YouTube episodes about Kerr's pursuit of history and the custom shoes helping make it happen. Media outlets around the world picked up on the story and highlighted Kerr's quest. Kerr also generated buzz by running a personal-best time in the 800 in late May and an unofficial world-record time in the 1,200 a few weeks later.
On July 18, with Brooks executives nervously watching from the stands in London or huddled around laptop screens back in Seattle, Kerr at last stepped to the starting line. The first half of the race unfolded to script as Kerr put down a pair of comfortable 55-second laps yet remained in the slipstream of pacemakers Zan Rudolph and Brannon Kidder.
The race plan went awry at the start of the third of four laps when Kidder dropped out after 800 meters and Rudolph stepped to the side a half lap later. That left Kerr on his own more than a lap and a half from the finish, 100-200 meters earlier than what he and his coaches intended.
"It felt like there was a lot of pressure on Josh to go for longer than he had originally planned," Orr recalled. "It was that moment where there was just a little bit of angst, I think, amongst all of us that he had to take it on himself so soon."
The business of setting a world record
Turns out Orr didn't need to worry.
Kerr made the improbable look easy.
He dropped all but Nuguse and Germany's Robert Farken before the bell lap began. Then he distanced himself from his last two remaining rivals over the next 250 meters.
As Kerr glided around the final turn, the clock was his only remaining adversary. The crowd of 60,000 plus stood and roared as the Scotsman powered down the last straightaway, leaned at the finish line and then glanced to see his time.
Kerr had run the mile in 3 minutes, 42.66 seconds. One of the highest-profile world records in his sport now belonged to him.
"It is very overwhelming," Kerr told reporters after the race. "There was a lot of hype.
"There is an incredible amount of work behind the scenes. Today is a result of all that hard work. The last lap was incredible. I was deaf in the last 110 meters."
Aside from perhaps Kerr and his family, nobody was happier than those at Brooks. Orr was "literally jumping up and down" at his seat inside London Stadium. Conrad celebrated from his Seattle bedroom like he too was there in person.
It's difficult to quantify exactly how much Brooks has benefited from Kerr's record-setting run, but there's little doubt the high-risk Project 222 campaign has provided the company unprecedented visibility and global media exposure. More than 1.6 million people have watched a full-length YouTube video of Kerr's race. More than 130,000 people liked an Instagram post from Brooks proclaiming Kerr the "KING OF THE MILE."
"This is the first time in our history that we have seen engagement at this level," Orr said. "We are selling a bunch of the speed suits that [Kerr] wore. We have a lot of demand for the limited number of spikes that we're going to be selling."
Track and field may be a niche sport in the U.S. and only slightly bigger abroad, but sports business experts say that a campaign built around a world record attempt is one way for athletes and their sponsors to gain mainstream traction.
In December 2016, Nike announced its ambition to challenge what is possible in sport by trying to prove humans could break the fabled two-hour barrier in the marathon. Nike outfitted three elite runners in its new Vaporfly Elite shoes and set up a private exhibition race at a Formula One track in Italy with wide sweeping turns, a near-perfect flat surface and built-in wind barriers.
Kenya's Eliud Kipchoge won the 2017 race in 2 hours, 25 seconds, by far the fastest marathon ever run at the time. Though Kipchoge's time was not recognized as an official world record because the event deployed a rotating array of pacemakers and custom fuel delivery, the Nike Breaking2 campaign still drew 13.1 million live viewers and received widespread mainstream media coverage.
"These record-breaking events have a bigger audience and a broader following," San Francisco-based sports marketing analyst Bob Dorfman told Yahoo Sports. "It's not just the hardcore track and field fan. Maybe more casual fans are watching."
Nike and other shoe-apparel giants have since tried to recreate the intrigue of the Breaking2 project with varying degrees of success. These record-breaking attempts are expensive and risky if the athlete falls short or if the achievement doesn't capture the imagination of viewers, but when they're successful, they can boost a brand's global visibility and credibility.
Other running shoe brands have taken a more traditional approach, outfitting elite runners in their shoes with the hope of gaining visibility and legitimacy through the success of those athletes in high-profile races. Adidas scored a big win earlier this year when Sebastian Sawe broke the two-hour barrier at the London marathon while wearing a pair of its latest lightweight supershoes. That $500 Adidas shoe sold out in two minutes when it went on sale the following morning.
"Only 1% of Americans have ever run in a marathon, so it's a very small universe," sporting goods and footwear industry analyst Matt Powell told Yahoo Sports. "But those runners are extremely loyal to whatever brand they're wearing, and if you can get them to switch because they think it's going to make a difference in their performance, it's a win."
Will we see more runners try to generate buzz by proclaiming their intent months ahead of time to go after a storied world record? And will we see more brands supporting those ambitions by creating custom, hyper-personalized shoes or gear?
It's not as easy as Kerr made it look this past Saturday, Orr cautioned. There's a lot of variables that need to fall into place. The athlete has to have a flawless buildup, the weather conditions need to be favorable and the product has to be worthy of the moment.
"But we're constantly looking for these types of opportunities," Orr admitted. "We always want to be visible."
