No one could believe it: Faith decided to do the “impossible” for Eliud’s journey around the world! What seemed like an ordinary story suddenly took a surprising turn when people discovered how quietly Faith had been preparing for the fundraising campaign. From an idea that felt distant, she turned it into a clear, refined, and surprisingly captivating plan. And when Eliud received that plan, he wasn’t just moved—he uttered a single sentence that brought everyone to tears…

The marathon world knows Eliud Kipchoge as the man who runs with a smile, the philosopher-king of distance running. In 2024, at forty years old, he announced one last dream: to run a full lap around the Earth along the equator, roughly 40,075 kilometres, in aid of children’s education in Kenya. He called it “One World, One Run.”

Most people admired the vision and moved on. Sponsorship talks stalled. The logistics looked insane. The budget needed was astronomical. Eliud kept training, kept smiling, but privately he wondered if the dream would ever leave the ground.

That was when Faith stepped in.

Faith Chepchirchir is Eliud’s youngest sister, the quiet one in a family of champions. While Eliud conquered Vienna and Berlin, Faith studied accounting in Eldoret and later managed the family’s small maize farm. She rarely gave interviews. She never sought the spotlight. Yet for months, while the world watched Eliud’s daily 30-kilometre runs, Faith was working at night.

She began with a single notebook. In it she listed every contact Eliud had ever helped: the shoe technician in Monza, the pacemaker from Berlin, the journalist who once missed a flight and was given Eliud’s own ticket. She wrote down every school that had ever invited him to speak. She tracked down childhood friends now scattered across continents.

Next came the numbers. Faith calculated the exact cost per kilometre: food, security, medical teams, visas, carbon offsets. She colour-coded spreadsheets until three in the morning. When electricity failed, she continued by solar lamp. Her husband brought her tea and told her to sleep. She smiled and kept typing.

Then she did something no one expected. She reached out to the children themselves.

In every Kenyan county, she asked schoolkids to draw what “education” meant to them. Thousands of crayon drawings poured in: girls in lab coats, boys flying planes, a classroom under a tree with a roof made of books. Faith scanned every picture and built a digital gallery she called “The Reason.”

She cold-emailed CEOs she found on LinkedIn, attaching one child’s drawing and one line: “This child believes the world is round because Eliud will prove it. Will you help?” Some never replied. Others wired six-figure sums within hours.

She persuaded a satellite company to provide real-time tracking for free. She convinced Kenyan artists to donate songs for every 5,000 km milestone. She even talked the Kenya Navy into escorting Eliud across the Indian Ocean islands segment. All of it done in silence. Eliud knew nothing.

On the morning of his 40th birthday, Faith walked into the training camp in Kaptagat carrying only a slim folder. The team thought it was another birthday card. Eliud, still in his running gear, sweaty from an easy 25 km, opened it curiously.

Inside was the complete campaign: budget balanced, sponsors confirmed, route permits signed, the children’s gallery live, a countdown clock already ticking on a new website titled “One World One Run – Powered by Faith.”

The room fell quiet. Eliud turned the pages slowly. His eyes filled. When he reached the last page, a single Post-it note in Faith’s handwriting read: “Brother, the world is ready to run with you. Now go.”

He looked up at her, tried to speak, failed, tried again. Then he said the words that would later travel faster than any of his world records:

“Faith, you didn’t just help me run around the world… you made me believe the world is always running with us.”

Someone recorded it on a phone. Within hours the clip had millions of views. Strangers cried in offices in Tokyo and living rooms in São Paulo. The hashtag #RunWithEliud trended for days.

Donations exploded. The original target of 40 million dollars was smashed in forty-eight hours. Schools in Turkana named libraries after Faith. A running club in Norway shaved their heads in solidarity and called themselves “Team Faith.”

Yet Faith still refused interviews. When a reporter finally found her buying tomatoes at Eldoret market, she laughed and said, “I only did the numbers. Eliud will do the running. The children will do the dreaming. My job is finished.”

It wasn’t.

Because every evening now, when Eliud finishes his training, he video-calls Faith. He shows her the route map, asks which child’s drawing should be revealed at the next milestone, checks if the new sponsors have been thanked properly. And every time he hangs up, he repeats the same sentence, softer now, like a prayer:

“The world is running with us.”

On 1 January 2026, Eliud will start from the equator marker in Eldoret. Millions will follow online. Thousands will join him for segments in Colombia, Indonesia, Congo, Ecuador. Every step will be watched, cheered, funded.

But those who know the real story will be watching someone else: the quiet sister who never ran a marathon yet carried the heaviest load. The one who proved that sometimes the greatest distance is not between continents, but between an impossible dream and the first person brave enough to believe it can be planned, paid for, and loved into reality.

Faith never asked for applause. She got the only reward she wanted: her brother’s tears and the certainty that when he runs, no child will ever again feel the world is too big to reach.

And somewhere tonight, in a small house lit by a single solar lamp, Faith is probably checking spreadsheets again. Just in case the world gets tired.

She knows it won’t.

Because Eliud taught us how to run.

And she taught the world how to follow.