“Most of the time, we say that when we have success, life gets easier, but I think it gets harder,” says Sifan Hassan. If that’s true, then life must have been very hard lately for the 30-year-old runner from the Netherlands. How’s this for a recent racing resume? World champion in the 1,500 and 10,000-meters in 2019. Olympic champion in the 5,000 and 10,000 in 2021, with a bronze in the 1,500-meters to boot. London Marathon champ in 2023. Multiple world records and Diamond League titles along the way. With respect to Eliud Kipchoge, nobody has done more to expand the limits of what might be possible in elite distance running than Hassan.
In some ways, she is the anti-Kipchoge, at least when it comes to her voracious approach to racing. Her range is preposterous; she is the only professional runner capable of producing a world-class performance in every distance from the 800-meters to the marathon. While Kipchoge adheres to a strict diet of two marathons per year with no tune-up races or seasonal dalliances on the oval, Hassan sometimes seems bent on exhausting the possibilities of the pro circuit. Barely a…
