Danny Mackey On Coaching Josh Kerr To The Mile World Record Of 3:42.66

“You can’t recreate the feeling that Josh created for me as a coach in any synthetic way. It had to have been done the way that he did it.”

My guest for today’s episode is Danny Mackey, the head coach of the Brooks Beasts Track Club.

Almost two weeks before we recorded this, Josh Kerr ran 3:42.66 at the London Diamond League and took 47 hundredths of a second off Hicham El Guerrouj’s mile world record — a mark that had been on the books for 27 years. Danny is the guy who wrote the training for it. He’s been coaching Josh for eight years now and this year he’s also got Brandon Miller running 1:42.19 to win in London seventy minutes before Josh’s race. It was an epic day for the Brooks Beasts.

This one is a coach’s-eye reconstruction of how a world record actually gets built. We go back to the workouts in Albuquerque in 2024 when Danny first told Josh he thought the record was there. We get into the PowerPoint pitch to Brooks. Danny walks through how he writes training. We talk about the ninety-minute whiteboard meeting where a few grown men argued over tenths of a second for pacing and what Danny was thinking standing trackside with 350 meters to go. And finally, how this has transcended beyond the running community.

The best part comes toward the end when he reveals who this was all for. We last had him on in 2023 after the World Championships after Josh won gold, so it was only fitting that we got him back on after another momentous occasion.

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