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Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

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Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#321
post #12

Stunning results at the top of the field. Some interesting takeaways on both fuelling and shoes. Maurten spent months working with Sawe and other runners getting their gut capacity trained so they could absorb and burn 100 carbs per hour[0][1] > The Maurten research team was embedded with Sawe’s team in Kenya for 32 days across six trips between last and this April. They were training his gut to absorb that load by m…

> could absorb and burn 100 calories per hour burning a hundred calories an hour is trivial. Most people will burn 100 calories per mile when walking or running, and more if moving as fast as these athletes, and many, many humans can do this for far, far longer than 2 hours. It's the absorbtion that's the challenge. Maurten is not somehow alone in the particular stuff they've developed - ultra runners are generally s…

What are the long term effects of a lot of processed carbs on the gut?

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#322
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fastest marathoners are moving at 4m30sec per mile or faster. Very few mere mortals could run that fast for even 100m.

> Very few mere mortals could run that fast for even 100m. That works out to roughly a 16.7-second 100m. While certainly not crawling, that would be a fairly average pace for a fairly fit middle- to early-high-schooler with a bit of practice. Yes that’s insane to maintain for a marathon, but it’s not even remotely out of reach for 100m for most relatively-fit people at some point in their lives.

I ran a 16s 100m in highschool.... as a thrower, and was very slow. The 100m dash with the fast people was like 12s.

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviews say that they have very very good, but not record breaking energy return and shock absorption. But what they are is insanely light at sub 100g. https://runrepeat.com/adidas-adizero-adios-pro-evo-3

For a while it was all about getting the lightest shoes, because picking up heavy shoes slowed you down. Then the energy return (pebax foam, carbon plates/rods) became the main focus because the weight didn't matter as much when the shoe was literally springy. Surely this is now going to spark a race for the optimal balance between weight and energy return.

I can absolutely imagine that the "correct" balance varies from one person to another, and yet that this is both measurable and also irrelevant for non-pro athletes.

Like the number one endurance runner in the world will get a minute off their marathon time because a shoe manufacturer spent $1M making custom shoes for that athlete which don't even have a size they're just "For this one specific person, now" but then some guy on Reddit wants better shoes because he's sure his four hour marathon would have been "more like three" if he had those elite shoes instead of the $100 Nikes he wore...

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what else could it possibly be if not that?

Well, the marathon record has been broken 53 times since the early 1900s. So, there are a lot of factors at play. Better training, better nutrition, better tactics, and, yes, better shoes. The advancements in shoes have made a measurable impact, but there are lots of optimizations being worked on.

Also population and access. In the time since the early 1900s a lot more humans exist, and more of them have the opportunity to attempt this record. Population in Africa exploded in that time and access improved significantly.

If you're bloody quick and born in Birmingham (either of them) in 1900 you can probably find out about and get yourself a chance to attempt that world record, but if you're born in Kapsabet (in Kenya) in 1900 good luck, even in Nairobi I wouldn't bet on it.

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#325
post #255
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro cycling has been on the high fueling strategy for a while, with huge results for record times. Its a game changer for endurance sports.

Can someone explain this in more details? Like will you run out of energy, your result will suffer drastically, anything else? The reason I am asking - I hike a lot, and for shorter hikes (<35km) I don't even bother with food. Just last Saturday I did 28km hike with 550m elevation gain - last meal I had was 5pm on Friday. No breakfast. No problem. I walk at a brisk (for layman) pace, ~7±2 km/h. Am I missing something…

It won't matter for your level of performance. A hike isn't a race. I'm assuming you don't care about finishing the hike faster and simply being out in the wilderness at all is the main point, the longer the better as long as you still get home by the time you have something else you need to do there.

Aside from that, this isn't a well-understood topic. Even extremely lean humans have more than enough fat to fuel crossing North American without technically neeeding to eat anything. Fat is less efficient to mobilize than glycogen, and glycogen is less efficient than free glucose already in the bloodstream, so there's some tiny bit of gain there possibly, but frankly, as fast as these guys are going, they're still far enough below lactate threshold that the energy efficiency gain is unlikely to be any real contributor to a faster finishing time. Beyond that, you can't deplete glycogen just from running a marathon, unless you were already depleted at the start of the race. You definitely can and will in longer races, but not a marathon.

Instead, what I'm pretty sure is happening here is you're just hacking the way fatigue works. Your body has more than enough fuel to do insane amounts of work without eating, but bodily systems for doing work are regulated by predictive models. There is no literal fuel gauge in your brain or muscles. They're guessing how much you have left and those guesses are conservative because selective pressures of all animals in the past pretty strongly leaned into leaving something in reserve just in case. If you suddenly find yourself in a struggle to the death, you need to be able to give it your absolute all, and that will require mostly if not entirely glycogen, which means your body's natural regulatory systems will work very hard to keep you from depleting it, so even if you have plenty left, if it's going quickly, you'll get more tired and sore than it was being depleted less quickly. Your autonomic systems don't know you're going to stop at 26.2 miles and eat a giant feast 20 minutes later and the chance of a tiger randomly popping up on the course is effectively 0. All it sees is you're depleting energy stores far more quickly than you can replenish them over the long term and it tries very hard to keep you from doing that.

In a sense, this is all endurance sport really is, training away and hacking away your body's inhibitory mechanisms to get as close as you possibly can to expressing your true physiological limits, but nobody will ever truly get there.

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#326
post #154

Posted to my in-laws, who asked how: Super shoes. Most shoes have carbon plates in them now, they act as a spring, storing energy and propelling athletes forwards. Better understanding of fuelling. Most athletes are taking between 100-120g carbs (sugar) per hour. Bicarbonate of soda has also been effective. Better planning tools. Athletes look at elevation, headwind, tailwind and will plan a strategy around going har…

> probably a metric tonne of PEDs (performance enhancing drugs) Note that Sawe funded extra testing drug testing for himself for the 2 months before winning the Berlin marathon. The testing followed Athletics Integrity Unit protocols (so surprise testing etc): https://www.letsrun.com/news/2026/04/how-sabastian-sawe-conv...

Drug testing has its loopholes: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetorch/2016/07/19/486595080/r...

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#327
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that even if you absorb it all, there's some question about whether it's useful. This Alex Hutchinson article suggests, among other things, that it may spare your fat stores rather than your muscle glycogen: > Even if you can absorb 120 grams per hour, it might not make you faster. In Podlogar’s study, cyclists burned more exogenous carbs when they consumed 120 rather than 90 grams per hour, but that didn’t…

Kejelcha is 6'1" and under 130lb. What fat stores?

It doesn't take much. If an elite burns 1500-2000 kcal running a marathon, even ignoring glycogen and exogenous carb, that's only ~195-260g of body fat (~7.7 kcal/g). Even at an extremely lean 4% body fat, Kejelcha would have 2360g of body fat available. (He's probably in the slightly higher 5-10% range.)

(And obviously, the majority of those 1500-2000 kcal are coming from stored glycogen rather than fat.)

If we're only talking about the marginal difference between 90 and 120 g/hr of exogenous carb, then that's 60g over two hours or 240 kcal -- equating to 31g of stored body fat. That's nothing.

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#328
post #140

It's always interesting to see East Africans doing so well. Even with technology like advances in shoes and diet/training, genetics is still a huge factor. Also it must be an crazy feeling to be Kejelcha, the guy who came in 2nd place. It would have been a world record, except for Sawe!

Is it actually allowed to suggest that some races are better than others in some areas?

Kinda, sorta. There's a statistical effect here but it's crucial to remember these are outliers and so these people are extraordinary in how far from the median they are regardless of that statistical effect.

It's also worth remembering that "race" is a social construct and is only somewhat correlated to genetics, whereas almost certainly any effect we're talking about here is dominated by genetics, although fun fact, Sawe's uncle is apparently a moderately famous runner and hooked him up with a trainer, so it's not like "Knowing a guy who knows a guy" didn't help and that's way less to do with genetics.

The "scientific racism" of confusing "The world's fastest sprinters tend to be from this Haplogroup" with "Everybody in that Haplogroup is an Athlete and so can't do intellectual stuff" is completely insane, that's how you get "I bet this old white man from a Reality TV show will be a better executive leader than that black politician we had last time".

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#329
post #122
post #15

There's something about the London course today that made for very good running. Three athletes broke the men's world record. One athlete broke the women's world record, and three were in the all time top 5. An Irish record was also broken, likely other countries too that I'm not familiar with. Not to take anything away from the achievements. Incredible running.

It was good weather for London. Clear skies and cool.

> It was good weather for London.

Unusual!

Re: Sawe becomes first athlete to run a sub-two-hour marathon in a competitive race

#330
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, most of the studies show there is a very large individual variation. The original 4% figure and similar studies were an average of something like 1-7% across runners. Also interestingly, the shoe in this record uses much less carbon than past shoes, both saving weight and allowing even more super foam where much of the energy return comes from. Though there so much variance in shoe design and materials there are…

I read somewhere that the carbon plate is more to stabilize the shoe, that with only the foam the shoe would be very unstable.

Yes, that's correct. There's a mistaken belief that it's the major source of performance improvements. It plays a role, but the bigger gains come from the stack height (limb lengthening effect) and the energy return of the foam. But that leads to very unstable shoes. The carbon gives rigidity to balance this out.
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