a key point to be emulated elsewhere? Are the.
Eliud Kipchoge’s eye-popping 2:00:25 marathon on Saturday morning in Italy fell just short of the two-hour goal he was aiming for, but far exceeded the expectations of most observers. Only three of the 24 running experts earlier in the week predicted a time that fast.
While Kipchoge’s run won’t count as a world record because of rule violations including the use of pacers who came in and out of the race multiple times, it has suddenly and undeniably changed how we view marathon times. A 2:02-flat in a record-eligible race? After today, why not?
Over the coming weeks, Nike’s Breaking2 team—and everyone else—will be parsing the day’s meaning and trying to understand what the event has to teach us that can be applied to other events. Is the arrowhead drafting formation who is part of the used it in Berlin last fall while running the second-fastest marathon in history a significant boost? Will enterprising race organizers begin offering races on flat, sheltered courses like the Formula One track in Monza (where, it should be noted, Processing the aftermath of an unexpectedly transcendent run)?
Here are a few of the topics of conversation that were buzzing around in the post-race melée at the track:
Fine-tuning the temperature
When the location and timing were first announced, one of the first things I did was check the historical weather patterns. Early May in Monza, it turns out, typically produces overnight lows of about 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celcius). That seemed too hot to me based on the research I’d seen, and it was even outside the range of 45 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit (7 to 10 degrees Celcius) that Nike’s scientific team mentioned when we first discussed the project with them last November.
Race day, it turned out, conformed to the averages, with a starting temperature of 52 degrees Fahrenheit (11 Celcius) that drifted up toward 54 degrees Fahrenheit (12 degrees Celcius) as the race progressed. Was this warmth the factor that cost Kipchoge his coveted sub-two?
When I put the question to Andy Jones, one of the scientists working with the Nike team, he wasn’t convinced. Much of the research on thermoregulation and optimal temperature ranges, he pointed out, has been performed on subjects who don’t look a lot like Eliud Kipchoge. Perhaps the long-limbed, rail-thin Kipchoge stays cooler than your typical U.S. college student volunteering for physiology studies.
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Warmer temperatures also enhance the rate of chemical reactions in the body, possibly speeding up the processing of oxygen and fuel in the muscles, so cooler weather involves trade-offs. And, perhaps most important of all, many elite East African runners hate the cold and feel deeply uncomfortable in it—not the mental state you want at the start of a race.
The bottom line is that the jury is still out. Still, if I was hopping into my time machine to go back and change one thing, it would probably be to pick an earlier date and hope for cooler temperatures.
Drink surprise (even to Nike)
Before and during the race, I reported that the runners would be using customized blends of commercial sports drinks, tailored to each of their needs and preferences. They would not, I confirmed, be using the experimental sports drink produced by a Swedish company called Maurten, Advertisement - Continue Reading Below to reportedly enhance absorption of higher concentrations of carbohydrate.
I asked the team about this specifically on several occasions, because Maurten has gotten plenty of attention since Kenenisa Bekele, Published: May 06, 2017 2:33 PM EDT eye-popping 2:00:25 marathon, A Part of Hearst Digital Media.
After the race, I saw a tweet from Maurten claiming that Kipchoge had consumed the company’s Drink Mix 320, which has a unusually high carbohydrate concentration of 14 percent, during the Breaking2 marathon.
PODCAST: Subscribe to The Runner’s World Show podcast to hear Alex Hutchinson break down the Sub-2 attempt on this week’s episode.
I asked several members of the Breaking2 team if that was true, and they all said no, but they added that it was Kipchoge and his management team—who also, it should be noted, represent Bekele—who were responsible for filling the bottles and choosing the exact content.
I asked Valentijn Trouw, one of his managers, and he confirmed that Kipchoge had indeed used the Maurten drink. He experimented with it in training a few months ago and liked it, and this was the first time he used it in competition.
Later, I asked Kipchoge about the reasons for the switch. “If you want to know about nutrition, I will lecture you for two hours,” he said with a smile. “Let us not talk about it now.” Given what he’d just been through, and how patiently he’d been answering the never-ending questions afterward, I figured that was fair enough. We’ll hope to get more details in the future.
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Most of the post-race attention, not surprisingly, has focused on Kipchoge—and to be fair, that’s probably what Zersenay Tadese and Lelisa Desisa prefer. Though Tadese’s 2:06:51 was a big improvement over his previous best time, it was a long way from what he’d hoped for. Desisa’s 2:14:10, hampered by a fall in training and a lingering cough early in the year, was even more forgettable.
Still, it’s fair to say that their disappointing performances were due at least in part to the all-or-nothing emphasis on breaking two hours. What might they have run under the hyper-optimized Breaking2 conditions if the goal instead had been to set out at the fastest pace they were likely to sustain to the finish?
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I put that question to Jones and Phil Skiba, who played key roles in monitoring the athletes’ training and evaluating their fitness. Based on this data, what starting paces would they have prescribed?
For Tadese, they figure somewhere around 2:03:00, with the hope that he would be able to finish strongly and dip under 2:03. For Desisa, a little slower, perhaps closer to 2:04, thanks to the disruptions in his training.
On that note, it’s worth acknowledging that injury or illness were always big risks in a mega-project banking on the performances of just three runners in a high-risk, low-odds event like the marathon. Getting to the line with two fit runners was, in itself, a triumph. It will be interesting to see, perhaps later this year, whether Tadese can translate this experience into a good (and less suicidally paced) race at a regular marathon.
Shoes & Gear?
One of the big questions whose answer remains ambiguous is how much Nike’s used it in Berlin last fall while running the second-fastest marathon in history help. They’re clearly not magic, because neither Tadese nor Desisa performed any unexpected tricks. On the other hand, Kipchoge’s performance was so good that it’s hard not to wonder how much of a boost the shoes offered.
One important point to remember is the role of individual variation. Testing by Wouter Hoogkamer and Rodger Kram at the University of Colorado found that a prototype version of the shoe improved running economy, a measure of how much energy you burn at a given pace, by an impressive average of 4 percent.
But that’s just an average. According to the shoe’s developers, the range of improvement is fairly broad, with some subjects below 2 percent and others at 6 percent—and occasionally, rumors suggest, even higher.
I don’t have any specific numbers for Kipchoge or the other two Breaking2 runners. But Kipchoge apparently sees a bigger benefit than Kenenisa Bekele, according to Jos Hermens, who manages both runners. What factors contribute to such individual variation, and whether there are ways of addressing it for “low responders,” will be one of the interesting topics to follow in the coming months.
The bottom line
In the end, though, all these details fade away beside a much simpler and more obvious takeaway: Kipchoge almost did it.
In my preview before the race, I tried to put a number on the odds of a sub-two performance, and I considered the difference between those who considered the feat flat-out impossible versus those, like myself, who considered it merely improbable under the conditions Nike had announced.
WATCH: Fine-tuning the temperature
In the end, had anyone taken me up on the offer of a bet at 100-to-1 odds that someone would succeed, I would have lost that bet. But the result was close enough that, in my view, the “impossible versus improbable” debate is definitively settled in favor of the latter.
I don’t know if we’ll see another sub-two attempt of this sort in the near future. Nike doesn’t currently have any plans, though several of the Nike scientists sounded open to the possibility after the near-miss on Saturday. And I’m not sure I really want one, at least right away. I’d like to see Kipchoge head back to a conventional big-city marathon like Berlin, perhaps with pacers who sustain an arrowhead drafting formation for as long as possible.
But if it does happen again, with similar conditions and (a much bigger if) with a runner of Kipchoge’s caliber, my advice is don’t bet the house against it.
