How the Two-Hour Marathon Limit Was Broken

[gunshot fires] [crowd cheers]

[Robbie] On the morning of Saturday, October 12th,

Eliud Kipchoge became the first person in history

to complete a marathon in under two hours.

His time, one hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds.

[crowd cheering]

To inspire many people, to tell people

that no human is limited; you can do it.

I'm expecting more.

It is a major milestone for athletics,

comparable in significance to Roger Bannister

running the mile in under four minutes.

The marathon was staged specifically for Kipchoge,

and he was aided throughout by coordinated groups of pacers.

He was also racing on a fast course

and wearing some very fancy and very controversial shoes.

With us today to talk about how all

of those factors came together in Kipchoge's race

on Saturday is Dr. Michael Joyner.

Dr. Joyner is a world-renowned expert

in human performance and also,

about 30 years ago, you wrote a paper positing

that a sub two-hour marathon was possible.

What were the biggest factors that came together

to produce this unprecedented time?

Right, well,

you have really a truly superior generational athlete

who's been very good at distance running for a long time,

who's typically never had a bad day in the marathon

but also has excellent times at shorter events.

He's run a mile in close to three minutes and 50 seconds.

So superior athlete.

Mr. Kipchoge trains really, really hard.

He's been able to avoid injury over many, many years,

so he's been able to be very consistent.

So you start with the athlete, and the course,

a very flat course with minimal turns is helpful,

and then the pacing scheme

that they used, and also the shoes.

[up-tempo music]

It was Kipchoge's second attempt

at breaking the two-hour barrier.

The first came in 2017.

At the time, we examined what it would take

for somebody to break the two-hour barrier

in our first episode of Almost Impossible

by inviting WIRED staff members

to try running on a treadmill at two-hour marathon pace.

And it did not go as well as we'd hoped.

It's impossible.

[people laugh]

He did manage to finish the marathon faster

than anyone had in history,

but he still came short of his goal.

Fast forward two years, and Kipchoge has pulled it off.

So I was just really in awe of the whole thing

as I watched him do this, but it really,

frankly, was not that surprising based

on what we'd seen a couple years ago.

After what we saw in 2017, I was pretty confident he

would do it barring misfortune, getting tripped,

a cramp, something like that, and if the weather cooperated.

A lot of people, including myself,

felt he would've done it in 2017

if it had been five, 10 degrees cooler.

So I was mostly focused on just his tremendous sense

of rhythm and tempo I saw and the tremendous effort he

was putting forth and, at the same time,

his ability to relax.

What are the major takeaways

from Kipchoge breaking two in Vienna?

Well, really standard stuff for any athlete.

You need to be consistent, you need to learn how

to manage your effort, and you need to learn how

to put forth great effort and relax at the same time.

Then there are larger logistical lessons.

It could be adopted by other marathons

in terms of getting an optimal course,

improving the field, running the course

at the right time of day under good weather conditions

that could lead other people

to run very, very fast marathons in the near future.

Why isn't Kipchoge's performance

in Vienna eligible for world record consideration?

I think there are two main reasons.

The first is the pacing strategy.

The pacers did not start the race with him,

and the fact that they drifted in and out or came in and out

in shifts was one real problem in terms of a record.

The second is that water was handed to him

by people riding bikes versus having

to stop at the aid stations and grab the fluids.

So those would be two of the main reasons

that it was not record eligible.

On top of being a tremendous athlete,

he was also running this at an exhibition event

Correct.

on a fast course with some pacers and some shoes.

Let's go through each of those one by one

and talk about what kind of impact they might

have had on this already phenomenal athlete,

Right. right?

So let's start first with the course.

This was an exhibition event staged specifically

for Kipchoge, and what does that mean?

That just means no other people

were doing the race with him?

No other people were doing the race.

They actually had a window of days and time

so they could wait for good weather.

They got good weather on the first day

of their window, so that worked well.

Then they were running down one

of the great avenues in Vienna,

an old imperial road from the Habsburg Empire,

which is straight, and then they had a lollipop,

essentially, on each end.

So they minimize the number of turns.

It's known especially that right angle turns cost you

about a second per turn, so they really only had six

or eight turns the whole course,

and they were relatively gradual.

And the course was completely flat, close to sea level,

so there was plenty of oxygen around.

And there might have been a few bumps in the course,

but actually, that may be a little bit better

than a completely flat course because it breaks

up your biomechanical pattern a little bit.

So the course itself, super fast.

Right off the bat, a good sign that things

are gonna go well. Correct.

He also had this pace group.

Now what was unique about the pace group?

Well, they essentially ran in formation

with Mr. Kipchoge behind several pacers.

Now they ran an inverted V.

In 2017, they tried more of what looked

like a flock of birds flying where he was protected.

There's some data going back to about 1970 by a man

named Griffith Pugh who was a well known physiologist.

Pugh had done some very interesting work on pacing

and showed that if people even ran single file at

about the speeds Kipchoge was running at, they could expect

to reduce their energy cost significantly and get an edge.

So I think a lot of people might be surprised to hear

that drag would have as big an impact,

and I think there's two things that are important.

One is that the faster you go,

the more resistance you experience,

and over two hours, it adds up,

Right. right?

If you start getting a percent here and a percent there,

each percent is a little bit over a minute

because a two-hour marathon is 120 minutes.

So if you even just get one or two percents

from the drafting and pacing, that's very helpful.

In a record-eligible marathon,

my understanding is the pacers are required

to start with the front runners,

and they can only lead the group

for as long as they are able to run.

So what was unique about the pacing

wasn't just the configuration that they occupied.

It was also the fact that they stuck

with him the entire race.

Right, he had people the whole way, as you point out,

and there were several as opposed to just one or two.

And besides the drafting,

there's a psychological price you pay when you're in front.

And I think having people to take the pace and you be able

to tap into their rhythm can be very, very helpful.

The third and, I think,

probably most controversial element of this race

was the shoes that Kipchoge was wearing.

In 2017 at Monza, he wore a special elite version

of a shoe Nike calls the Vaporfly 4%,

and that four percent refers

to how much more economical the shoe

is purported to make runners.

The shoe he wore in Vienna he'd never worn in a race

and is faster, even, supposedly.

So this raises this question of technological doping.

[Michael] Right.

Is that something that people

should be legitimately concerned about?

How big of an impact do you think it had in this race?

So what's novel about the shoes

is that they have a carbon plate in the mid sole,

and the carbon plate in the mid sole

is thought to be able to make the runners more efficient

or more economical as a result

of capturing more of the recoil

from landing and then pushing off.

There have been several iterations of the shoes,

and he's run in several generations of them,

including, apparently, a custom-built pair

with more or different carbon plates in Vienna.

It certainly had an impact.

Aero bikes have made a huge difference in cycling.

The tech suits in swimming, which were subsequently banned,

made a huge difference.

And really, maybe the best analogy

are so-called clap or slap skates in speed skating

where there's actually a hinged skate

that permitted people to get a bit more push off

and transfer more force, which revolutionized speed skating,

and there's a big controversy about it.

But golf clubs have changed, pole vault poles have changed,

tennis rackets have changed,

bikes have changed, and so forth.

So it seems to be sport specific,

and nobody's decided to regulate what.

I think that the cat is out of the bag with the shoes,

and when I talked to my biomechanics colleagues,

they think it would be trivial

for people to engineer the mid soles

of shoes using any number of techniques.

It seems to me that one of the biggest issues

surrounding the shoes is that if it

is a technology proprietary to Nike,

then Nike athletes have an unfair advantage

over athletes not sponsored by Nike,

which, in that case, is actually the swimsuit analogy

is very apt, right, 'cause it was Speedo.

And so it was Speedo athletes

just swept the Olympics that year, right?

So when you say the cat's out of the bag and that people

should be able to engineer another version of it,

what I'm hearing is that that should permeate

throughout the rest of the shoe market

and then re-level the playing field.

That would be my hope.

A lot of people place emphasis on fast course,

a systematized pace group, fancy shoes.

But at the bottom of all of those,

the thing that all those things are orbiting

is this athlete, Kipchoge, right?

And there are 10 people on Earth who can run a marathon

in under two hours five minutes this year,

and Kipchoge is the fastest.

And so it's yes, those three things matter,

but on anybody else, it's not a given

that they'd be able to run it in under two hours.

Well, and that's one of the things people have

to think about when you talk about technology

or some of these strategies is you have

to be really a superior athlete to leverage them.

Even though this is not an official world record,

it's still significant.

Why?

Well, for somebody to go out and run 26 miles

and change in just a little over 430 per mile,

a time which would win most high school track meets,

or under 20, 30 per 10,000 meters, that's quite remarkable,

quite remarkable. It's incredible.

Yeah. No matter what circumstances

in which it's run, right? Right.

Yeah, it is quit remarkable.

And the other thing that always happens

when you see somebody break a barrier like this

is people begin to think about what's possible

and maybe push themselves a little bit harder.

I think we may see this in an open race sooner

than people think.

Thank you so much for joining us.

It was great fun to talk to you, Robbie.

Yeah, likewise.

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