Within hours, the team in the UK had booked a session in a wind tunnel to see if Ketchell’s idea worked in real life. Ketchell had to rush off the phone because the hospital needed his family to change rooms. “I remember saying to him, ‘I’m really glad that you’re saying this because that means that we’re doing the right thing.’ Because if we weren’t questioning the validity of what we’re doing, then we wouldn’t truly be innovating.” Ketchell knew no one was closer to the data than he was and no one had been working as hard to think outside the box. “This is awesome, this is great innovation, but people don’t run like that,” Ketchell remembered the colleague saying. When the team saw what Ketchell came up with, they were impressed - and skeptical. A colleague had challenged him to think about drafting formations. While he was navigating things at the hospital, he was also on one of INEOS’s weekly calls - held at 1:59 p.m. The watershed moment in the project actually came while he was sitting in the waiting room at Boston Children’s. He would travel, then he would come home, then he would go to the hospital. “I could rattle off all these numbers and different things that we were working on and the status of each project,” he remembered. The stress almost made Ketchell more focused. Ketchell still has vivid memories of being on the course in Vienna in the middle of the night, sleeping in a sleeping bag because he was so worried someone was going to drive over the asphalt where the team had just installed a new banking for Kipchoge’s run. I’ve basically measured every millimeter of this course 5 million times.” “42.195 kilometers plus or minus 10 centimeters,” he said. Robby Ketchell (left), with his son, Wyatt, and distance runner Eliud Kipchoge.
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