Modern Wisdom - #113 - Alex Hutchinson - Analysing Eliud Kipchoge’s Sub-2 Hour Marathon

Episode Date: October 21, 2019

Alex Hutchinson is a journalist, athlete and author. Eliud Kipchoge recently rocked the world by breaking the previously unthinkable 2 Hour Marathon Record. Today we get to hear a full analysis of his performance from endurance expert and previous Modern Wisdom guest Alex Hutchinson. Expect to learn about the controversy surrounding his new Nike shoes, the course selection, the racing strategy, Eliud's mindset, training approach, pace setters and everything else. Do not miss this one. - Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/sweatscience Endure The Book - http://amzn.eu/d/f19Ihzf Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello humans. Hope everyone is well in podcast land. Today is an absolute treat. Unless you have had your head stuck in the sand, you will know that the last couple of weeks have been insane for distance running. Elliot Kipchogay recently broke the previously unthinkable two hour marathon barrier. Did this in Vienna a couple of weeks ago, and I needed to get someone on who could analyze it and who better than Runners World writer, author of Endure, and previous modern wisdom guests, Alex Hutchinson.

Today's episode is so sick. We get a very scientific analysis, super in depth, Alex has spent time with Elliot himself. He was in a monster for the last breaking to attempt that Nike had sponsored to do with this. We talk about the controversy to do with the shoe technology that's going on at the moment. An Ironman record was recently broken. Paula Radcliffe's 20 year female marathon record was recently broken and we get to break down

absolutely everything to do with Elliott's performance. Alex is just a hero. Enjoy this one. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Alex Hutchinson. Oh yeah, PS. While this intro music is playing, go and give us five stars wherever you're listening if you would. It would make me very happy. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Alex Hutchinson has joined us again. Alex, welcome the show. Thanks a lot Chris, it's great to be back. It is timely to talk about endurance and running. This is the, where are the, like the genesis point of the new world of running right now, right?

Yeah, it's certainly an exciting time. What do this way? I did Canadian radio this morning. I'm talking to you, talking to New Zealand radio in a few hours and then Australia, a few hours after that. So people are talking about endurance right now and hey, I'm happy to see it. I bet you are. So, for those of you who don't already follow Alex, if you have even the slightest interest

in running at sweat signs on Twitter, ever since the podcast that we did at the start of the year, I only follow, I think I follow like 82 people or something on Twitter. So, you make up more than like about 2% of probably what I see on Twitter every day. And the articles that you've been putting out recently have been fascinating. So we're going to go through Ellie Kipchowge's recent marathon performance.

There's some really awesome breakdowns that you've done in the build up to that. And then afterward, then we're going to talk about some other records that have been broken. There's some controversy surrounding the shoes and the kit that people have been wearing. So we got a lot to get through today. It's going to be exciting. Fantastic. Yeah, it's been a busy week. So we'll have lots to talk about. Cool. So let's start with Kipchow gives most recent performance. Let's say that someone

somewhere has been living under a rock and doesn't know what's happened. Can you describe what the INIOS 159 challenge was? Yeah, for sure. So, you know, the bait headline, the top headline is a human being ran less than or faster than two hours for 42.2 kilometers, 26.2 miles, the marathon distance. The second headline is, but it wasn't a world record. It's not an official world record. It was not, doesn't count under the official rules. And that's where things start getting a little tricky. So this race was an exhibition race held on a streets in Vienna, a park in a park in Vienna.

Only one competitor, a Elliott Kipchogi, who is the reigning Olympic champion and official world record holder. But every possible thing anyone could imagine to make him faster was done. The reported budget, this is just rumors. The reported budget was 15 million pounds for this one race by one person.

And so this is what made it exciting and interesting for people like me who are interested in the sort of the science of endurance, but also made it controversial. Made it, you know, people felt it was a bit of a stunt, a marketing stunt, maybe even a sport washing stunt for any of us. But so they had, you know, they had an electric car driving in front of them at exactly two hour marathon pace, shining lasers on the ground, so that his teams of, there were a total of 41 world-class runners

who were serving as pacemakers for him, blocking the wind in teams of, I think it was a one, two, three, four, five, I think seven pacemakers at a time were trying to encompass him or cocoon him from the forces of drag. And they were, I knew exactly where to run

because the car was shining lasers on the ground. You know, he had a guy on a bicycle, handing in water bottles every few kilometers, which is instead of, you know, he didn't want to slow him down by having to pick up a bottle off the table. And he had these wacky prototype shoes on that nobody else, basically nobody else has seen or run in, which are the latest iteration of a pair of shoes called the Nike Vaporfly, which in the last three years has basically rocked the running world and totally reshaped

what people think shoes are capable of doing for us. So all this stuff is boiled into, you know, people didn't think you could do it, people aren't sure whether it's fair, people aren't sure whether it's a good or a bad thing that we've got this exhibition event that won't count as a world record. And so basically everyone in the running world is having a big massive brawl about it. Yeah, I can imagine there's so many different people, right? Because for me as someone who I don't have a, apart from entertainment and a genuine interest in sport and fitness, I don't have a side here. I would, you know, if someone could run a one hour marathon like sweet, he had rockets on his feet, but you know, he's still running or whatever. I just want the entertainment value, but I imagine there's

some sport purists out there who are going to be much more critical. So to set the scene, no matter what the shoe is and the track and the paces and the car and stuff like that, how does someone, how does he come in with two legs and two arms in the head create a physiology which is capable of running your two-hour marathon? Yeah, so the first really important task is to pick your parents correctly. You need, you've got to be born to run that fast. There's only, you know, you can work as hard as you want and you can pull in all the science, but the only person, you know, the the thing we don't want to do is say, Oh, Kipchogi ran us up to our marathon because there

was a bunch of science and it made it easy. It's like, no, there's still only one human in the world who could have done this. There's, you know, all the other great runners in the world, you know, massively talented have worked hard. There's still not at Kipchogi's love. Kipchogi is a super special guy. He's got the physical tools. And maybe just as importantly, or at least part of the package, he's got the mental tools. He's got, he's been at the top since 2003. He won a world championships as a teenager 16 years ago. And that's unheard of. Nobody has that sort of, or almost nobody has that sort of longevity.

So he's been, he's the classic, he grew up in the Rift Valley of Kenya and at altitude. It's a total cliche for World Beter runners, but you know, running back and forth from school, hugely active as a kid, accumulating more training as, you know, as an eight-year-old, then most university-aged runners, even serious runners in Canada, where I am or in Britain would, and then started training seriously. He's been doing it year after year, week after week. Hundreds, he was running reportedly in the neighborhood of 140 miles a week, leading up to this. So that's, we're talking well over 200 kilometers a week. Some of that at a relaxed pace,

some of that at an absolutely inhumanly fast pace. And, and you know, one of the cool things, I think one of the things that makes people root for Kipchogi is he got a lot of publicity two years ago. There was a very similar attempt sponsored by Nike called Breaking Two, where he came within 25 seconds that time of Breaking Two hours. And there was a documentary that National Geographic put out about his preparations for that.

And it gave people a window onto this guy who is probably one of the richest men in Kenya. He has a wife and a few kids. He visits them on weekends, but he spends his weekdays at this totally Spartan training camp where he lives with other runners. It's not quite mud hut, but it's absolutely Spartan. They have a roster. He takes turns, mopping out the toilet, washing from getting water from the well and washing from it.

He could live like an absolute sultan there, but he is a very simple guy and he's got all these aphorisms about how if you don't control your mind, your mind controls you. And so he's just, he's totally focused on performance and he lives this hard life, very simple life, trains. And so this is a long answer, but the point is, this moment has been, you know, not years in the making, but decades in the making and he's worked very, very hard to become the, you know, absolute running machine that he is now.

Yeah, I think one of the things that fascinates me and a lot of people with Kipchoghe is the fact that he has this monastic, very zen-like, transcendent quality that that he just how he talks about his sport or it's not even his sport, is it's life or his calling, whatever he wants to refer to it as. But then he gets thrust into this world where there's a guy on a bike giving him water during the race. Then when he takes the bottle of water back, they measure how much water's been drank, offset how much they know he needs

because they've done muscle fiber tests to work out how much he dehydrates. So you have this beautiful kind of ying and yang of the real technological cutting edge stuff that's attached to someone who has this purely very back-to-basics approach to running. I think that's what makes it interesting. You're absolutely right. There's this amazing juxtaposition. And so, you know, two years ago, when he was doing this first Nike race, I had a chance to chat with him a few times. And, you know, I'm a science journalist, so I was like, I want to know all

about the formulation of the drink you're using and, you know, how are you going to alter your training distribution blah blah blah. And he's a smart guy. Like he knows what's going on. So I don't want to make it sound like he's just like, oh, the scientist to care about. But he knows what his job was and he knows the science was not his job. So he was able to in in the midst of this sort of massively scientific and, let's face it, commercial enterprise, his job was just to run and to look within himself and learn to push his limits. And he was able to maintain that. So I would ask him all these questions. He'd be like, yeah, that stuff's important.

And I leave that to the scientific team. My job is to train my mind and be ready to go. And I think that's one of the, you know, I think when Nike chose him two years ago, they were lucky that they got him because that's one of the reasons this whole endeavor has this sort of magical feeling to it. And rather than feeling like a sort of Barnum and Bailey, like, step right up and see the, you know, the fatest woman in the world or whatever, it's like, he gives it a purity

because he really, like, he comes off as absolutes and sears. So what you said, I think that juxtaposition is absolutely fascinating. He's a great guy. So just before we get onto the race itself and the course of the course choice and stuff like that, physiologically, Elliot, is he, if you were to design a runner in a lab, I remember reading a while ago, something to do with long shin

bones, being genetically something which is disproportionately more in Kenyan athletes, which means that they're good and then they need light feats and other bits and pieces and VO2 max and running efficiency. How does all that tie together for you? You've been reading the right stuff. I've been following you on Twitter, Alex. That's what's been happening. You know, so there's been this great mystery for the last 20 years.

Like, why are the Kenyans so good? And let's figure out if we can copy it somehow. And so there's all these things, like you said, so going back decades, there's been fascinating experiments where it's like, okay, let's take a light weight, a few ounces, and let's strap it onto someone's foot or their shin or their hip or wherever, and let's see how their running efficiency changes.

And what you find, sort of not surprisingly, is the farther away from the center of your body, a weight is the harder it is, the more, I mean, you can think about that, you know, you hold a weight up in front of you. It's one thing. You hold your arm out straight and hold a weight up. It's a lot harder. So if you have a little bit of extra weight, a tiny bit of extra weight on your feet, for instance, with shoes, that changes your efficiency quite a bit. So what that means is that it's very advantageous to have very long but skinny, like no calf muscle legs. And that gives you these levers that can propel

you forward without paying that weight penalty. So, you know, then this happens to be a sort of typical characteristic of people who grew up in the area that Kipchogi grew up in. Was Kipchogi a perfect running machine? So when Nike first embarked on this project a few years ago, they, I mean, and they sponsor a pretty large fraction of the best runners in the world. So they said, they brought about more than two dozen of their best runners into the lab to say, let's get out the calipers, let's get out the treadmills, let's measure all these guys and see who has the greatest endurance capacity. And Kipchogi was not at the top of the heap by those measurements. There's a guy named Lalissa DeSissa who actually won the World Championships this year.

So very good runner. And he's won Boston a couple of times. So he's good and they could see in the lab that he was off the charts. But he has never run as fast as Kipchogi has. Kipchogi had good, like, he had the kind of VO2 max and lactate threshold and running economy that you need to be a world-class runner, but he didn't have the kind that makes you say this guy is a one any generation talent. He's a world-class runner, but whatever makes him once in a generation is something that doesn't show up in those lab tests.

How amazing is that? Like, how cool is that to hear that you've got this guy who is, you know, he's elite level, but not a freak. And there's something which can't be measured because everyone talks about it in sport, right? They all talk about this X factor, but I think increasingly now as we get into the 21st century and we have pundits who are able to analyze with increasing dexterity and resolution on what's happening. We're becoming more and more cerebral about sport. We think

more and more about the quantifiable metrics and to hear that we have someone that's got this difficult to define X factorised. It's so magic. It's just, it's a hero. Yeah, and you know, it's interesting because for me, again, I'm all about the science, I'm very interested in it, and you're absolutely right that our ability to analyze and understand the, the, the basis of success is getting better and better.

But for me, the moment, we reach the point where you can go into a lab, measure 10 people and tell you with 99% certainty who's gonna win a race and who isn't. That's the moment to me that sport loses its interest in a way. If everything becomes quantifiable, then it's like it's just a race becomes a plumbing contest who's got the biggest aorta or whatever. And there has to be something that we can't measure for it to be interesting. To me, that's some of the magic. I'll tell you, you talk about the X-Factor.

I met Keptchogi for the first time, three years ago maybe. It's easy to say this in hindsight, but he has a presence that is hard to quantify. I'm not going to say, I knew that moment that he was going to hard to quantify. And it's like, I'm not gonna say, I knew that moment that he was gonna break two hours, but it's like, this guy has that, some people just have a presence where it's like, it's not a swagger because he's very humble and very quiet, but you feel that he's bigger than he is.

And I think that's something that in some unquantifiable way that plays into his abilities. I'd love to see him at a party talking about Swagger. Like, apparently he likes to spin the tunes. He was, he was, he, he, he, he was, there was a big dance that night and he was giving out prizes to all of his, the pacemakers, these world class runners who paced him. But yeah, he's, he's not like a super party guy, but I think he can get down. After you've just run a sub-to-armyrathon, you've got to at least have a beer or something, right?

You've got to chill out somehow. Yeah, yeah, you've got to unwind. He takes a month off after a marathon like that and just chills out. He's not one of these obsessive people. He's like, okay, I've already taken 12 hours off. I have to get my next work out in. He goes hard, then he relaxes and has a good time Talking about the way that he has presence. There's a clip

um, and if anyone goes back and watches the intro to the race So the pacemakers at the very very beginning of the race The pacemakers are all there and then Elliott walks through this gap in the barriers behind them And I remember so I haven't watched the full race. It was a silly time last week if we're in the UK and I'd work late and blah, blah. And I watched this clip and it looks, I don't know this sounds weird and existential, but it looks like the universe just parts around him as he walks through those barriers. And it's like, it's like he's not moving. The universe is moving around him and he just parts through it, man. And you can just the

way he looks, you know, he's there with his that look on his face. And it's just, that's just where he's meant to be. So getting onto getting onto the race itself, why did they choose Vienna? Yeah, it was a sort of global search for, for trying to find the best of all possible worlds for a bunch of different factors they had to optimize. One was they wanted a course that was as flat as possible with as few sharp turns as possible. They needed to get the temperature and the altitude and the humidity and all these things right.

Even from a logistical perspective, they needed to find a place where the city was willing to say, yeah, we can guarantee you access to this for like a two week period because they didn't want to just say, we're gonna run this race on October 12th or whatever. They, what they said when they planned it is, we're gonna run it sometime between,

I think it was like October 10th and 23rd or something like that. And they were gonna decide the last minute based on the weather forecast because if it happens to be a little warm or rainy or something, they weren't going to do that. So there were a, and you know, when they were originally searching for places, they considered all sorts of options. They considered the world's largest indoor convention center or at least the largest Convention Center in North America in Chicago. So it's indoors, climate controlled, perfectly flat, huge. The problem with that one was that the air conditioning in the building wasn't strong enough to get it as cold as they wanted. No way. They considered a dike in the Netherlands, which is perfectly flat for like 23 miles or something

like that, and has a really reliable tailwind in one direction. So you could be, let's just run straight along this dyke with a wind blow. They decided that would feel too much like cheating. Yeah, okay. So, and they even considered building like ice walls along a track that would keep it locally cool. I mean, they were, and then like the Nike one ended up

on a Formula One track in Northern Italy. So it was like a 1.5 mile loop. Then Vienna gave them longer straightaways. And crucially, the one thing that's different really from between the Nike race two years ago and the NUS race this year is Kipchogi wanted crowd support. He wanted people cheering. It was sort of deathly quiet on the Formula One track aside from just at the finish line. There were a few people, some people cheering. It was eerie when they saw off, wasn't it? Yeah, it was like five in the morning. Oh, it was missing. And it was fluorescent lights. Kevin Hart that was being loud,

bouncing around with any energy. Yeah, it was. Yeah, so Kip Chogi wanted people cheering, and he got that in Vienna. And, and, you know, I actually think if I were designing it, I would want it to be deathly quiet for the first like 25 or 30K. Because the marathon's supposed to feel easy for a long time. And you don't want to get too excited too early in the race. So my optimal, if I were designing it would be totally quiet, relax, just chilling out for 25, 30K. And then- Then open the gate.

When it's getting hard, then you get some crowd. For the next, yeah, you get like medium crowd. Tape the crowd. The last part of it is like, everybody go nuts. So you kind of want to, you want to have a volume control on the crowd that brings it brings it up But anyway, he got a crowd in Vienna, so that's probably the the main difference from the last attempt This route if anyone was to look at it There's some go-to at sweat signs on Twitter and you'll be able to see it

It's from an aerial view It's like a lollipop stick. It's like a long thing thing with a little bump at one end, and then long all the way back with a longer round about at the top end and then you go back down. One of the concerns that I'd seen you talking about was what do corners do, or corner that's this sharp, right? So you got to do 180 degrees in the space of,

is that 25 meters, something like that? Yeah, so the radius of curvature was actually, if you think about a standard athletics track, 400 meter track, one of those little lollipop ends was tighter than the curves on a track. And so that was a concern and they got in touch with a guy at the University of Colorado who's one of the world experts in running biomechanics and they had him build a model of how much does it slow you down or how much extra energy that take to go around a curve and not to get too deep into the vector diagrams of forces and stuff but if you're going around a curve you've got you've the force of gravity is always pressing you down and that's a big factor in how

much energy you spend running then you've also got to spend a little extra energy turning so pushing into the curve. And the result is that you effectively, the way you can think about it, is you weigh a little bit more when you're going around a corner. And what they calculated is on the tight corner, the extra weight was the equivalent as if Kipchogi was carrying two and a half cups of water with him. So he's that much heavier when going around the corner. And so they ran the calculations and they decided it's no big deal. In the end, they, what they concluded is that course overall was would be about five seconds slower than if

they'd been able to come up with a hypothetical track that was perfectly straight and perfectly flat and just 26.2 miles in a straight line along like the salt flats in the Utah desert or whatever. So five seconds, you know, if he had run two flat zero and three seconds, they would say, God damn it, we should've done the Utah. But they decided that that was pretty close, that it wasn't a big deal. If it had been 20 seconds on the curves, 30 seconds on the curves, they would have been more concerned. And the other thing they could have done is, if it had been significant, they would have altered the pace around the curves so that it wasn't

working too hard around the curves. They would have said, let's slow down a bit on the curves so that you're not pushing into the red zone. Got you. Okay, so we've got the track, we've got Kipchalge. He's been doing his 140 miles a week, which is, I mean, that's got to be pretty extreme even for like normal marathon prep, is that in the normal window? For a world-class marathon or that's in the normal window. It's on the high end. It's there's certainly people who do less, but yeah, if you go to the start line of the Olympic marathon and do a little survey, you'll find a quite a number of people will have hit 140 miles a week. So it's not such an number of people will have hit 140 miles a week.

So much an amount of volume, though, isn't it still? So anyway, we've got him there and then he's got how many how many pace is 70 paces, did you say? He's got a total total group. I think it was 41 paces, including like Olympic champions, world champions. So some of the best runners in the world and we were getting paid reasonably well, I think. And they were divided into teams of, I think it was seven runners.

Five in front, two behind, yeah. Exactly. The two behind was a sort of surprise. That was another difference from the last time, because you'd say, who cares? Why is there someone behind them? They're like, push them forward if he falls down. But they ran these simulations, these wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamics simulations and determined, and cyclists know this too,

because cyclists have thought about drafting before. It's faster to be in the middle of the peloton than at the back of the peloton. And the reason is you want the air to be as smooth as possible going past you. And if you're at the back, the air behind you is kind of turbulent. Very messy.

But two people behind you, the air just keeps flowing right past you and then the turbulence is pushed back behind the last pacemaker. Yeah. If you've ever been driving on the motorway behind a big truck and you're close and then that truck pulls away a little bit and you start to then catch where those winds start to cross over. It's really ugly.

It's like a lot of turbulence. That's exactly. Yeah. That's the perfect analogy. Kip Jogi wasn't going as fast as a truck, but... But not with a pen. I've seen some trucks in the UK that go about as quick as he did. So, we've set them away.

We've got a guy, we've got a man with a wonderful moustache. He's one of the pacemakers, great moustache. We've made many, many couple of moustaches. A lot more white athletes than I actually thought at that very, very top end of it. I would have thought it would have been, I think breaking too was heavily Kenyan African-based, and it seemed like any of us had really pulled out every athlete from everywhere that they could. I think they were, I'm speculating here,

I suspect they were consciously trying to make it a globally appealing event. So they had several American athletes, they had Australian athletes. I can't remember if they had American athletes. They had Australian athletes. I can't remember if they had British athletes. Representative pacemaker's. Yeah, yeah. So they brought together.

All those guys were amazing. They're all near the top. They had Norwegian athletes, the three Norwegian brothers, the Ango Britsons, who were the first time three brothers have ever made the World Championship final this year. So anyway, they had, they had, I think they were, they were just saying, let's find the cheapest pacemakers we can. They were like, let's find people who were all world-class, but let's also give people around the world a reason to tune in. That's awesome. I really like that idea. So we're onto the race. They've set away.

They actually started off on a section of the track that they only ever run once, didn't they? Yeah, and they start off on this stopped on this ink decline, sorry. And that's free time. So before they got onto this loop, they did about a 500 meter down a bridge, which I think it descended 13, 14 meters. And the calculation was that that actually saved about 10 seconds. And before you say, hey, that's cheating. The official IWF rules for world records in road races, you're allowed to have a little

bit of a downhill, and you're allowed to have a 1 in 1000 ratio descent. So that means for a 42 kilometer race, you're allowed to go down 42 meters. And so they only went down I think 13 meters. So they took advantage of about a third of the allowable downhill that they could have put in the race. And you know, 10 seconds could have, that's actually, you know, if anything, it would have been nice if they could have got a little more downhill, but the bridge, the bridge, extend the bridge up a bit more. You want to have 41.9 meters like you

know, ideally you want to have that that descent and you probably wanted at the end where they're tired, but anyway, they couldn't they couldn't get everything. How to do that. Yeah, exactly. You'd have to kind of get the earth movers out to build the actual perfect course. Got you. So moving on to the race, how did you, because did you watch it live? Did you get to watch it live? I did. It started at 2.15 in the morning, my time. So I have very few memories of the first 45 minutes of the race, but I finally was awake by about three in the morning. I was like, I think this is happening. I think this is going to be something. So what did you feel like? You're watching it. You're analyzing him. You know, this is what you do. How did you, did you feel, did he look worried at any point? Did you assess his running form?

Yeah, you know, so I was worried about just before halfway, he started to say drift back a little bit. He, there a gap opened up between him and the pacemaker in front of him. And he didn't look too happy. And I thought, man, if he's struggling now, I think this is going to be trouble. Now, after the race, he reportedly said, people asked him about that because that wasn't the only person who noticed that. And he was like, no, I don't know what you're talking about.

I felt great the whole way. So I don't know if that's just a little bit of revisionist history. You don't always remember what you're thinking in the middle of the race or it was just he was not paying attention or something. But so I was watching for little signs like that. It was interesting because so I was in for the Nike race a couple years ago. I was there in Italy and at that point I for that race I expected to feel kind of cynical because it was you know it was a sort of big Nike marketing stunt as well as an athletic event. And I ended up feeling

totally blown away by the sort of magical feeling of that breaking too. So this time, I think my expectations were a little higher. I was like, take me to that special place Eliot. I want to, you know, you know, you know, it was, it was special, but it was, it was less surprising because he'd already been within 25 seconds. So instead of feeling like, I can't believe he's doing this, I was more feeling like, I hope he doesn't screw up because, you know, there's no second place in this race. Like, he doesn't do it. That's 15 million pounds down the drain.

And if that's everyone just, you know, that's a night of sleep. Like, I'll tell you, I was wiped out for the whole weekend after watching this. So there was a little bit more of just kind of like, just do it already, I'll add. And I hate to say that. It was still magical, but it was just the second time is never the same as the first. I agree. I think to give any us, who are in there, like an engineering company, right? Yeah, they're a petrochemical company and obviously the tie-ins with running make perfect sense. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, because if you wanna fuel up, I guess, on the way home from the race.

Yeah, exactly. No, I think they just wanted their name out there, yeah. Okay, well, if you got the money. But yeah, there was something you write. I'll be interested to see, there'll be a after movie documentary thing. I don't know. Eventually, I'm gonna guess.

But yeah, the Nike breaking too, it really did feel very special. Like I loved how they got Kevin. Obviously it's Nike. Like when you think about the people that they can call in, like who the fuck's in EOS? Like you can call in like a petrol pump attendant or something who's like really wants to demarrathen.

But yeah, like the Nike one really did feel magical and you're right, maybe the magic wasn't as optimal starting in this misty morning in Monza where they've got no crowd and it's just deathly silent and you've got this Tesla that just pff, just pulls away and that's it. And like, it was special. Now, I wonder, and I wonder what would have happened had he have done it on that first time. I wonder how people might have changed. And so, so getting onto one of the more major contrabacies that's going on at the moment,

before we talk about some other records that have been broken recently the shoe that Elliott had on for the first one was was again a new iteration of a line of shoes and then they've then taken it up a notch for this can you can you talk us through how they relate. Yeah, and this is really important because I don't think we can talk about this race without talking about the shoes because I don't think we would be having this discussion or be here if it wasn't for a major change in shoe technology that took place in 2016. And Nike introduced a new line of shoes which has two distinct features. One is a stiff carbon fiber plate that goes through the midsole. And the other is that the midsole was made of this new ultra light, ultra resilient foam. By resilient, I mean, you squeeze it down and it springs back really quickly. So, marathon flats used to be as thin as possible. You wanted to be racing in a shoe that weighed nothing.

So they're basically just a piece of rubber wrapped around your feet. Now, they're these big thick, you know, more than an inch thick is the sole of this foam, this lightweight foam, and then it's got a carbon fiber plate through the middle of it. And comical. If you look at the shoes that they're wearing, now at the start of the race, it looks funny. Look at that foam shoes. It's sort of taking us back to the 70s. They look like sort of running pimp or something like that.

And it's, you know, initially when Nike introduced these shoes, no one believed they worked. So they're like, it's all a big stunt, you know, all the magic is in the drafting or the course. And they're just trying to sell us these shoes. But it's become clear that no, the data was true. These shoes really are several percent better than any previous shoe. And the sort of all time lists and records

have been rewritten over the last two years. And it's not just that one pair of shoes. So, so Kipchogi was two years ago was wearing the initial line of the shoe. Since then they've had a second iteration. It was the vapor fly 4%, then the vapor fly next percent. And now Kipchogi was wearing yet another shoe, which is even, which looks even wackier than the previous ones, because it's got these two pods under the forefoot in addition to the thick sole. And it's thicker, even thicker than the initial, like the initial ones were something like 31 millimeters thick.

And apparently the prototype, although no one has been allowed to touch it yet, is pushing 40 millimeters, which is, I don't know if, you know, a lot of people have heard about hoca shoes, which are these big, super cushy, maximalist shoes that with thick soles. The Nike shoes are even thicker than these sort of clown shoes that everyone used to make fun of.

So it sparked a big controversy because when you have a shoe that's that much better and it's made by one company and not everyone has access to the newest prototypes, then you start to ask, hang on. Is it the shoe determining who's winning the race? Have we moved to a Formula 1 model where it's an engineering competition rather than a stock car model where everyone's driving the same car. Yeah, it is strange. I think, you know, for me as someone who, if you tried to put 26 and a bit miles in front of me, you could put me in a pararola blades and I'm not making it, but I wonder just how much of a difference the shoes met. I would be skeptical until

reading and hearing more about it. I think, oh, it's just a pair of shoes difference the shoes met. I would be skeptical until reading and hearing more about it. I think, oh, it's just per shoes. I can't make that much of a difference. So it, you know, if the goal is, you know, me and my mates are gonna run a marathon in a year just as a big challenge and we wanna make it to the finish. And, you know, it doesn't really matter about the shoes. If you're racing yourself,

and if you're trying to set up best time or if you're trying to hit an best time, or if you're trying to hit an external time like the Boston Marathon qualifying standard or something like that, then all of a sudden you start really paying attention to two minutes here, three minutes there. And there was a big, so for the elites, it's one thing. There was a big, the New York Times did a big crowdsource analysis a year or two ago where they used data from Strava,

which is this online platform that where people upload their runs from GPS, including their races, and they sometimes record which shoes they're wearing. So they said, let's look at the same runners who have switched from one shoe to another, either from another shoe to the vapor fly or the vapor fly to another shoe.

And what they found was more or less exactly what Nike was claiming. The runners were a couple of minutes, a couple of percent faster in the vapor fly than they were in other shoes. That's so crazy. So what's the, what does that pod do? If you've got any idea what the pod is,

that similar to the, is it the joy ride or the float ride that they've just brought out that Nike had brought out? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. That's the one that's got, that's a pod that's got little beads inside of the pod, like a beanbag. Oh, okay. So that's that they recently brought that out, but the thing that Elliott's got looks a lot more like hardcore than that. Yeah. So the only the only information we have is that there was a patent filing that someone

unearthed that looks like Kipchoggi's prototype. And so people are speculating that this is what's in his shoe. It's not clear that, but the pod itself had these sort of fibers within it that get tensed and stretched. Like, this is serious space-aged shit, isn't it? Yeah, and here's the thing. It's like shoe companies have been making

these crazy claims for technology for as long as I've been alive. Every year, there's a new, it's like, we're introducing the Nike shocks. We're introducing, you know, the gel, this or the torsion, that or whatever. And there's always this complicated, plausible sounding explanation of why this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread. And the sort of the heuristic that I learned over the years is just ignore all that because it's never true. It never makes a difference. All this stuff is just noise. And so that's why the Nike shoe caught everyone by surprise. So it was like, whoa, this really works. So now they're still doing the same thing. There's still, so here's these pods in the pods have torsion or beads or whatever the heck you want.

My default is still to say, probably doesn't do anything. Like let's just ignore what that is. We've been wrong once. The carbon fiber plates in the foam really did do something. And we'll see whether the pods do something more. But the pods may just be sort of a, you know, pay no attention to the, to the, you know, the man in the big hat or whatever, like a distraction

to the fact that they actually, the other thing in this prototype or in this patent application is they suggested they could have up to three carbon fiber plates in the shoot. So maybe it's still all about the carbon fiber plates in the foam or maybe the pods do something, but that claim hasn't been tested by scientists unlike the carbon fiber plates in the form, or maybe the pods do something, but that claim hasn't been tested by scientists, unlike the carbon fiber plate. Got you. So what have been some of the criticisms then of this particular run from the running purists and the people that you'll have to see having their bickering's online? What have people been saying?

Yeah, well, you know, how long do you have? Because there's lots of criticism. There's two basically two basic things. One is the sort of general criticism of exhibition races like this that they should have been done, like my grandfather used to run a marathon. This is how we run races and this is how it always should be. I hate all this publicity and this advertising.

And I think that's basically grumpiness. And I understand whatever, but yeah, I'm not, to me that doesn't carry a lot of water. If they're not interested, they don't have to pay attention to it. The other criticism is more based on the shoes. And to understand that, you have to go back to 2016. So no one knew these shoes existed.

They weren't publicly announced until mid 2017. But a select few Nike runners were given prototypes of the shoes, which were especially fabricated to disguise what they were. They were disguised as Zoom Street 6s. So they looked like old shoes, but they actually had these carbon fiber plates in the foam in them. They took these shoes. They went to the Olympics. They swept the top three spots in the men's marathon, and they also won the women's marathon. No way. So now you've got a situation where you've got a shoe that helps and only a few people have it and they're taking sweeping the medals. And so people are like,

and they're taking sweeping the metals. And so people are like, that's not fair. That's not fair. A race should be among the runners, not among who happens to be favored by Nike and given the best shoes. And I have a lot of sympathy for that argument. In fact, I agree with it. I think that was not kosher and that should not be done.

Now, the IWAF, the governing body of track, changed the rules the next year to say, okay, any shoe that we're not gonna ban carbon fiber plates, but any shoe used must be widely available to all, in the spirit of the universality of athletics. Now, that rule is now on the books, but it hasn't changed anything.

People are using prototypes, elite athletes are still using unreleased prototypes, so I don't know why they put the rule in if they're not actually going to be enforcing it. That's where I think the real meat of the controversy is. First of all, is it fair to have these shoes? That's I think banning the shoes, I can see arguments on both sides, but there should definitely be regulations or rules to make sure that there aren't, that only a few people, you don't have a situation where only a few people have a shoe and nobody

else doesn't, and it's making an appreciable difference. That's just not how the Olympics do. What about, if the shoes available to all, but you're, as an athlete, you are, with a different sponsor. Yeah. So that gets a little, that gets tricky. And there have been some amazing, amazing instances of runners at like the world championships running in the Nike shoes, but having painted them to look like they're new balance or

rascals or whatever. Yeah, painting the end for new balance onto the vapor flies. And they get busted. People are there with with cameras And they're like look at this dude, and I personally know a couple of people who've lost their sponsorships because they race in Nike shoes Yeah, and I and I you know, there's a guy I know a number of you know elite marathons with sponsorships and one of them was saying recently It's like I have to decide is it worth it to me the relatively small amount of money that I get from shoe company X to race in a slower shoe or should I just give up my sponsorship?

So that I can, because maybe I'll make so much more prize money if I'm a minute or too faster. So this is a real challenge. And I think the best case scenario, there's a few different paths we could go, but probably the best case scenario is that other shoe companies come out with comparable shoes and then everyone, we can be back to where we were Five years ago, whereas like yeah, there are differences between shoes, but it's not determining races and there are At least three and probably more companies that have their elite runners

Racing in prototypes that have carbon fiber plates in them. So I think that's and in fact we were talking about this before we started recording last weekend the Ironman in them. So I think that's, and in fact, we were talking about this before we started recording. Last weekend, the Iron Man World Championships in Hawaii, Jan Ferdino from Germany, said a new course record at the Iron Man World Championships. He was wearing ASIC shoes, but they had a carbon fiber plate in them. So that's maybe one way that the playing field is going to be releveled is that everyone else is going to catch up. And everything, so these shoes are going to be widely available. The only difference is now that 10 years on 10 years, all the numbers are going to be maybe 2% to 4% quicker across the board.

So before we started, there was a screenshot that I saw. It's quite cool for anyone who wants to keep up to date with the new shoes and what's going on. Protoss of the Graham, P-R-O-T-O-S of the Graham on Instagram is quite a cool account. And they reshared a post from a guy called Ryan Holt. Now I'll read this out and then I'll let you take us through what's actually happening here, Alex. But so at Ryan Holt 3, with all due respect Elid Kippchöge as he is quite clearly the greatest marathoner of all time, irregardless of the shoes he is in, when a shoe company

puts multiple carbon fiber plates in issue with cushion between the plates, it is no longer a shoe, it's a spring and a clear mechanical advantage to anyone not in those shoes. I'm just hoping that IAF athleticsics make sure that the upcoming Olympics and WM majors are fair playing fields for athletes of all brands. And then this protos of the Gram has reshared that photo and said can someone please tell Reinhold 3 that the new Asics prototype, his wife, Ranne, and Marathon PB in, has as we quote, John Frodenos interview, think of it as a rocking chair. It has a carbon fiber plate in and is the answer to the 4% of the competition.

As we also quote Sarah's answer in the Let's Run.com interview, running a polter type of the new A6 Marathon shoe. It does not have a carbon fiber plate, so I do not attribute my PR to the shoe. Why are you lying Sarah? Other brands need to up their game to catch up to Nike running? I love it. I love it. I love it. I love it. What are you bargedy going on here? So what's happening? Break that down for us.

Yeah. So Ryan Hall is one of the greatest American marathoners in history. He retired a few years ago. He's he plays pretty highly at the London marathon in one of his first marathons, he ran like 206. So a very, very well-known athlete here in North America. His wife, Sarah Hall, is still competing and recently in Berlin ran a 222 marathon making her the, I think it's the fourth fast to American in history.

So these are two, a couple, which are, who are both among the fastest marathoners in history. Both sponsored by ASICS. So Ryan is getting a little preachy here about Nike. And this is one of the sort of dynamics that makes this shoe in debate so interesting is that everyone's got a vested interest. Everyone who's defending it, everyone who's criticizing it, if you're an elite runner or involved in elite running, almost everyone in that world has an affiliation to a shoe company. So it's hard to tease out what's a principled stand

against technology and running shoes. And what is it like, hey, that's no fair, which I had those shoes. Yeah. And so anyway, in the comments, yeah. technology and running shoes and what is it like, hey, that's no fair, I wish I had those shoes. And so anyway, in the comments, yeah, so Ryan Hollis criticizing these spring shoes and I think that's, I think that reflects on him maybe an imperfect understanding of what's going on with the shoes because they're not, they're not springs any more than any other pair of shoes as a spring. Every shoe has squishy midsole and they act as a spring. The carbon fiber plate isn't a spring,

it's a stiffening element. But anyway, that's kind of beside the point. Ryan's calling out these shoes. Someone else is pointing out, actually your wife ran an unreleased prototype in Berlin just a few weeks ago. And they were speculating that it was the same carbon fiber plate prototype that

Jan Frodeno ran at the Iron Man World Championships last week. However, Sarah Hall has gone on record as saying that actually her prototypes don't have a carbon fiber plate. Now, she still did say that they're unreleased prototypes. And the IWF rule is crystal clear now that you can't run and choose that aren't generally available to all. So I'm a little mystified by whether this rule is just there for decoration or whether you know, like, it's going to be enforced at some point. Yeah, or they, I mean, I guess they need to give a warning because it's happening so commonly, but it's pretty clear to me that that she's publicly saying, yes, I did this thing that

is against the rules. So I would be a little cautious if I were Ryan and Sarah about chucking, chucking stones through windows because they are as far as I can tell in, in violation of the rules. But the point is Ryan's argument appears to be predicated on the fact that this carbon fiber plate shoe technology is advanced. Any other technology advances, as you've said before, they're just kind of nondescript and they don't really matter. But obviously, that shoe, let's say the assets have come up with something they probably

haven't, but let's say that they've come up with something which is even better than a carbon fiber plate. You've still contravene the rules, you've still used something which is an unreleased prototype, all that you're just, it's apples and oranges here, right? Like you're criticizing one thing because of its type, not because of the principle. That's exactly it. And the history of the carbon fiber plate is actually very, very, very interesting because it, Nike didn't invent this carbon fiber plate. In fact, Adidas is

the company that sponsored the development of the carbon fiber plate. And they had, in fact, Haley Gabor-Selassi said a marathon world record in a D.D.S. shoes in 2007 that had a carbon fiber plate. The guy who developed that carbon fiber plate, not to get into the nitty-gritty here, but he's an academic at the University of Calgary here in Canada. One of his PhD students then went to Nike and developed a paper plate. So there's a clear, so the car fiber plate that is in the Nike shoe is a direct, lineal descendant of the one in the Adidas shoe.

And the same with the foam, the Nike's foam does exactly what Adidas's foam, which was called the Boost, did. And they had five consecutive world record, marathon records in the Boost foam, which was resilient. So all the ingredients of the Nike shoe are things that other shoe companies and the Deedas wasn't the only one. Fila and A6 and I think Hoka all had carbon fiber. Yeah, there's a little list,

there was a little list at the bottom of that thing. Hoka has a plate, ASIC, Brooks running has a plate, Sorkini, new balance have plates, get with the timings. And some of those have been since the vapor fly but some of them were long before the vapor fly. So people are all in some saying, oh my god, carbon fiber plates are cheating. It's like nobody cared about carbon fiber plates when they weren't beating you.

So there's, I think there's a lot of self interest in the criticism. And that's why I'm sort of skeptical of the, we should ban carbon fiber plates because people are getting self-righteous about the plate itself. And it's not the plate. It's the fact that it works. It's the problem. And so there was a proposal published yesterday or the day before in the British Journal of Sports Medicine on how to regulate shoes.

How to stop it from getting out of hand so that people don't end up wearing what look like ski boots or something like that, disconnected from what we think of as running boots. And they said, look, let's not get bogged down with like, can you have a carbon fiber plate? No, well, what about a fiberglass plate? Can you have a plastic plate? Well, how long can the plate be? Let's get every before every race. You have to go through the MRI and test your shoes. That's a pain in the neck. Let's just put a limit on the thickness of shoe soles that already exists for high jump shoes because I can't remember 40 or 50 years ago, someone started being like, hey, if I'm trying to jump high, why don't I just wear platform shoes and so they started wearing thicker and thicker shoes. So the Ida blessed it. Okay, you can only have

shoes this thick. I don't know the exact number to do a high jump, which made sense. So they should do the same for running shoes. And this is what the proposal is from in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. With those dimensions, you can fit whatever technology you want. You just got this much room that you can put in it. Yeah, let's say you have 31 millimeters, you can stick a carbon fiber plate, you can stick to, you can stick to your fancy pods or whatever you want, but you're not gonna have unlimited real estate because what's happened with the, with the, the three successive versions of the vapor fly is they've gotten thicker and thicker, they've gotten about 25% thicker to the point where it's like running supposed to be a simple sport. Let's make sure it doesn't look like you like it's a tech an equipment dominated sport. So let's just put take the simplest rule possible at least say you cannot wear platform shoes. Yeah, totally right. I guess as well, the thing is there would come a time where you would add so much thickness onto the bottom of the shoe, that it would become so heavy

that you would then begin to lose marginal gains. If there was a, like, if you got rid of this particular ruling and we'll that right, people have started wearing seven inch thick soles, but how does that change? You're running mechanics and you're running gates, how does that then add weight onto the bottom of the leg and stuff like that.

So yeah, I think it would have just come up with that pretty, uh, Journal of Medicine or whatever. It was of So yeah, I think it would have just come up with that British journal of medicine or whatever it was of sports science, I think that's a fairly good approach. So there was something else that you'd mentioned before. If there'd been some other records that have been broken recently, there was the Iron Man, there was Elliot and then what else?

Yeah, so the women's world record for the marathon went down the day after Elliot Kupchoggi's sub two. And this was, to me, it was actually more surprising than Elliot, because Elliot was already 25 seconds from the barrier, we kinda knew that it could happen, even though it wasn't gonna be easy. But then the next day in Chicago, Bridget Cosgate broke Paula Radcliffe's

marathon world record. Paula's record was 215, and it stood since 2003. And basically no one had come within them, well stood since 2003 and basically no one had come within them, well not a mile, but no one had come within the showed and distance of that record. Mary Katania I think was the second fastest and she was like 217 something. Miles of. Yeah, like ages, ages off and out of nowhere, out of absolutely nowhere. You know, not completely nowhere, but very surprisingly all of a sudden, Bridget Coscatius, Kenyon

runner, ran 214. So smashed Paula's record by over a minute. In Chicago, off a very fast pace, it wasn't even optimally paced. And after the race, she said, yeah, I think a lady can run 210. I'm going to keep trying. So it's like, what? And needless to say, the important, you know, maybe the first thing I should say

is she was wearing Nike's vapor flies. So it's so close. Doesn't it suck that we're all, that this is the discussion that we're having now, that every performance that's good has got to be caveated with an asker, that's talking about it was in this pair of shoes. I hope, I really do hope

for the sport that they just work out what the rule is, implement it, hard lines, and everyone can get back to talking about running. I 100% agree. It's unfortunate that that's the discussion. And so it's understandable that some people would say, therefore we wish the shoe had been banned, you know, strangled at birth and just gotten rid of. And maybe that would have been the best situation, but it's not, it's not what's happened. And at this point, I think there'd be, it would be more trouble or more disruptive than it's worth to

try and like erase all the records that have been said in these shoes. So I think we have to say, okay, this is where we're at. But let's put, and this is what the British Journal of sports medicine paper says, let's, let's put a limit on where we're at now and not let it go any farther. And then, because the most disorienting thing is when the standards are changing every six months and since we're getting faster, once they settle into a new stasis, even if it's faster than it was five years ago, we'll get used to that. Yeah.

We've gotten used to it in many other sports before. It's like, oh, okay, now Speed Skaters have clap skates on. Everyone's faster than they were in the 90s, but we're not arguing about it every six months. It was there was a brief period of disruption in the late 90s, and then it was done. And even with the swimsuits in 2010, I guess it was, records were just falling, falling, falling.

They said, okay, here's where we're to set the line of what swimsuits are allowed. And then since then it's kind of a non-issue now. So I think running can do that, but they need to, they need to set a, you know, set some rules now so that people understand what the parameters are and what's allowed and what's not. It's interesting. It's quite a philosophical debate or quite a philosophical thought about what are you allowing to be enhanced with regards to an athlete? For instance, if someone had come up with some unbelievable new intra-workout nutrition

drink, which was able to fuel muscles at 10 times the pace or what, do you know what I mean? Like if it was where are we allowing this to happen and where are we not? I think it's because it feels somehow because the shoe is not a part of the athlete. It is not literally integral to the athlete is perhaps why people feel a bit sort of icky about it. Yeah, I mean, it's funny. You should say that because the other innovation in the last two years has been a new sports drink called Morton, made

by a small Swedish company, where it has Morton MAURTE end. The claim is that it has these two ingredients pectin and alginate, I think made from seaweed or something like that. Other than that, it's a standard sports drink. It's got a bunch of carbohydrates in it. You swallow it, and when those ingredients get in your stomach, they react with a stomach acid to create a hydrojail, which encapsulates the carbohydrates, effectively hiding them from your stomach. Normally, if you try and take a bunch of carbohydrate when you're exercising, you reach a point where

you can't handle any more of your stomach rebels and either get diarrhea or you vomit or you just feel like crap. The hydrojail hides this carbohydrate. It's in your stomach, but you're not detecting it. Then it goes into your intestines and is absorbed into your bloodstream. The claim is that you can drink much higher concentrations of carbohydrate and to get more fuel in during a marathon or other endurance activity without messing up your gastrointestinal system. And this has swept the endurance world in the last couple of years.

It's, everyone loves it. There's been no data showing that it actually works the way it claims. But my question is always, how do we know you're not just pooping out a bunch of hydrogel, six hours later, 12 hours or whatever the deal is. But Kipchogi, for example, is swears by Morton. Elie Kipchogi does lots of the top endurance athletes in the world. So they're, I know one is saying, ban hydrojails. This is unacceptable.

Now partly that's because no one knows whether it really for sure makes such a big difference. It's much easier to finger, but I think what you say is also true that it really, it's a sort of what does it feel like test? And the role of sports technology or the role of aids and technology is a tricky issue. I've been writing recently about electric brain stimulation with the idea that you hook up electrodes to your brain, run some current through your, and it makes you able to push a little harder for about an hour or two. And I've been really wrestling with that. So that also feels icky to me. Why? Should it

be banned? Why would I say that should be banned? Whereas, you know, all these other things, like sports drinks should be banned. Yeah, caffeine, it's taking a pill, and it makes you faster, or taking us a coffee or whatever. So I don't think there's a, I don't, the people who say it's 100% obvious that X should be banned and why shouldn't be banned. I don't agree with them. I think it's always gonna be a subjective line and what we need to do,

what sports governing bodies need to do and fans like us need to do is think about what what what makes us feel comfortable or uncomfortable what is it about. So running for example is a very simple sport right like we were talking about earlier. So. The the to have a big effect of an external technology like shoe feels different than it would. In a sport that's much more gear dependent, like cycling. Cycling, of course, your gear matters. It's not, you know, you're never going to claim that the bike is irrelevant, but in running we at least have the illusion that it's, you know, man-o-amano.

And so I think we have less tolerance for technology like that. And I think that's okay. I think we have to respect the cultures of different sports. Totally right. So what I wanted to finish on was an article which I'd seen you sharing recently. To do with the suicide pace that people go out at runs. I found that really just fascinating. Can you take us through that? Yeah, sure. So the world athletics championships just wrapped up last month in or a few weeks ago in Qatar. And, you know, I spent a week

or whatever watching all these races streaming them online. And there was something really unique about this year, which was that the, the, the, the, the middle distance and long distance races almost universally went out really, really fast. Not like, let's just judge our pace carefully and go fast, but like, I'm going to go out and I might die, but anyone who's going to come with me is going to die, too. And that's really unusual, because for the last 15 or 20 years, the standard thing in endurance, in championship racing, not time trial racing, but in trying to win a goal, let's say the Olympics, is everyone goes out really slowly and watches their competitors, because there's a real sense that if you're

out in front, you're the hunted, and if you're lurking behind someone, you're the hunter. And there's some aerodynamic stuff to do that if you're leading your sort of breaking win for everyone else. But I think it's more than that, it's psychological, this feeling of if you're the one who's stalking your prey, you can choose one to pounce, and then when you see a finish line, you pounce, you go by them, they don't have a chance to react and it's over. So it's sort of like the cycling pursuit races where they almost go as slow as possible. It's crazy when you say that, isn't it? When they take those big e-gents up and down, yeah, it's so hilarious. Yeah, and those races can be fun to watch, but it's interesting because then you end up with really slow times and and and and then this year was totally different.

There were none of those sort of cat and mouse chess match games. It was like gun goes, I'm throwing down the gloves and I am going balls to the wall to see and see who can last. And so the times were extraordinarily fast and just the way they were run. So I ran some analyses. I calculated what I called the kamikaze index. How fast did deraces start compared to their average pace? And it turned out that this year was anomalous compared to the last 20 years. There's this cultural shift for some reason. And it's hard to know, like, did all the runners, did one runner do it? And then everyone was like, whoa, it worked for that guy.

I'm going to try that and someone while I'm going to try that. And everyone tried. So it's interesting to watch. It's not that one type of race is better than others, but it was fascinating to see people letting it all hang out. And it may, you know, just from a personal perspective and a sort of applying this to general life and the rest of us, It made me look back at the

way I often run races, which is very cautiously. I don't want to blow up. And I've thought a lot about this in recent years, just in the context of endurance, that I think if you really want to find your limits, sometimes you have to blow up. Sometimes you have to go out too fast. And hopefully you go out faster than you usually do in your discover, oh,, I can't maintain this. I can hold on. Yeah. And that's great. Then you said a new best time. Sometimes you discover, ah, no, no, it turns out I can't hold that.

Too fast. That's fine. So you got to, you got to chalk that up as, as, as a valuable learning experience and say, if you really want to find out what your limits are, sometimes you've got to exceed them in crash and burn. Yeah. I love that. And you're right as well.

There's part of me that just loves the idea of someone going out beyond what they usually would and then watching them hold on. It's the same way, so the CrossFit opens out at the moment and right now, workout 20.2 just got released, which is just a grinder, 20-minute amrap of dumbbell thrusters, toes to bar and double-unders. And it's just the grippiest, longest, most painful thing that Dave Castro has ever programmed. It's Savage. And I'm watching the guys in the gym do this morning, and Jordan, who has got the same

score as Carl and Port are the guy that did the announcement. Jordan, who's ex-regional's athlete in Yekassal, absolutely freak. And I'm watching him go out, and it's a 20 minute workout and he's going Sub one minute from the get-go. So he's doing rounds in 45 to 50 seconds. His transitions are rapid And I'm like, oh, he's gone hard because once you've set yourself on that, it's the same with running right to your splits It's like, okay, I'm on this particular split. Whatever it might be. You want to try and run negative splits? You want to try and run quicker if you can and I'm'm watching, I'm thinking he's going to have to hold on. Sure enough, three, two, one, and time clock goes, Jordan's straight outside because he needs

to make sure that if he throws up, he throws up in a drain. And he's just like, I want to watch that. I want to, and I want to watch that on the world stage as well. I want to know that professionals can be as giddy and as caught in the moment as we can. And you want to see them stretch their limits, not just totally under control the whole way. You want to see the fear in their eyes. Two thirds of the way. Like, did you see that? Which of the athletes?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You could and you can see and some of them did blow up. Some of the people who tried to stay with them. Like when when you when the races go like that, you see carnage. You see what happens when a world-class athlete hits the wall. And yeah, it's, I mean, I'm not saying, I'm sure they didn't enjoy it, but it's fun to see.

Because then you know, yeah, this is legit. This is, they're stretched to their limits. There's no, yes. Yeah. I love it. Final thing, just as a parting point, the one thing that we haven't actually said, they're stretched to their limits. There's no. Yes. Yeah. I love it. Final thing, just as a parting point, the one thing that we haven't actually said, how fast was Elliott Kipchogay running during his marathon attempt?

It in brief, I would say faster than most people. Like, I've chatted to a lot of people. There's a lot of people in the world. Most people in the world just wouldn't be able to sprint that fast for 10 seconds. He was doing 434 per mile, maybe 433, and that's 249 per kilometer. So for a 200 meters, that's something like 3334. So 16 to 17 seconds per 100 meters. So is it about 12 miles an hour? Is that it?

What is it in car pressure? So it's 13 and a bit miles an hour. And then the difference between 12 and 13 is enormous when you're at that speed. 13 and a bit miles an hour in a car is a moderately heavy accident. You know what I mean? Like if you fall over at that pace, you're gonna skid for a while. Yeah, I mean, like if you fall over at that pace,

you're gonna skid for a while. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people would be challenged to keep up with them on a bike. It certainly for longer than a brief sprint. Like, it's almost unfortunate that he's such a smooth looking runner and that he was surrounded by pacemakers who are among the best in the world because you don't realize how fast he was going, except sometimes during the broadcast,

you see off to the side, someone has decided outside the barricades to run along beside him. And what you see is someone who looks quite fit, who's probably like a very serious recreational runner and they are just absolutely pegging it, absolutely go, you know, just giving it with their whole being and they last, you know, just giving it with their whole being. And they last, you know, 15 seconds, tops. And then you're like, oh, okay, just because he looks relaxed, just because he's gliding along as if he's floating on air. Doesn't mean he's not really booking it.

Man, how fascinating. Alex, today has been absolutely awesome. To the listeners who didn't catch our first episode, number 49, I want to say, 48 or 49, it was the first episode of this year, still in the top 10 of all time plays on Modern Wisdom, it will be linked in the show notes below. I implore you to go and check that out.

Also, Injure, Alex's book, absolutely fantastic, great analysis if you're into this. And like I said, at SweatScience on Twitter, everything will be linked in the show notes below. Any questions that you've got, go hassle Alex, he's on Twitter all the time or leave them in the YouTube comments below. I want that to be some more athletic stuff coming up

so that I can hassle you again. I can get you back on, man. It's a great thing every year there's something new. Awesome. Alex, thanks so much for your time. It's been great. Thanks for this was really fun to go into the nitty-gritty.