How the Two-Hour Marathon Limit Was Broken | WIRED

on the morning of Saturday October 12th Eliot Kipchoge a became the first person in history to complete a marathon in under two hours his time one hour 59 minutes and 40 seconds many people tell people at Penn know you - limited you can't 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 hip show game 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 Kipp Chagas race on Saturday is dr. Michael joiner dr. joiner 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 nine right well you have really a truly superior generational athlete who's 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 and close to 3 minutes and 50 seconds so superior athlete mr. Kip Jogi 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 I mean you start with the athlete in the course of a very flat course with minimal turns was helpful and then the pacing scheme that they used and also the shoes it was Kipchoge a 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 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 a has pulled it off so I was just kind of really in awe of the whole thing as I watched him do this but it 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 have done it in 2017 if it had been five ten 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 relaxed what are the major takeaways from Kipchoge a 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 Kip Chagas performance in Vienna eligible for world-record consideration I think there are two main reasons the first is the patient 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 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 eight stations and grab the fluids so those would be the two of the main reasons that it was not not record eligible on top of being a tremendous athlete right he was also running this at an exhibition event correct on a fast course with some Pacers and some shoes right let's go through each of those one by one and talk about sort of 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 right stage specifically for Kip Cho gay and what does that mean that just means no other people were doing the race with them no other people were doing the race they actually had a window of days so they could had time so they could wait for good weather they had good weather on the 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 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 fat 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 things are gonna go well correct he also had this pace group right now what was unique about the pace group well they essentially ran in formation with mr. Capshaw he behind several Pacers now they ran kind of 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 the 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-fire file it at about the speeds kept told he was running that they could expect to reduce her energy cost significantly and get an edge so I think a lot of people might be surprised to hear that drag would be right have as big an impact and I think there's sort of two things that are important right one is that the faster you go career more resistance you experience and over two hours it adds right right if you start getting a percent here and a percent there each percent is a little bit over a minute because two hour marathon is 120 minutes so if you even just get one or two percent from the drafting and Pacey that's very helpful in a record eligible marathon my understanding is the Pacers are required to start right with the front runners right 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 yeah 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 kind of tap into their rhythm can be very very helpful the third and I think probably most controversial elements of this race was the shoes that kept show gay was wearing right in 2017 at Monza he wore a special elite version of a shoe Nike calls the vapor fly for president that 4% 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 right and is faster even supposedly so this raises this question of technological doping 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 midsole and the carbon plate in the midsole this 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 running several generations of them including apparently a custom-built pair with with more or different carbon plates right 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 you know golf clubs have changed Paul ball polls have changed tennis rackets have changed bikes have changed in and so forth so it seems to be kind of sports 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 right Nike athletes have an unfair advantage over right athletes not sponsored by Nike which in that case is actually the swimsuit analogy is very apt right because it was speedo it was speedo athletes just swept the Olympics right here right so when you say the cats out of the bag and that people should be able to sort of write engineer another version of it what I'm hearing is that that should permeate throughout the rest of the shoe market and the right real 'evil the playing field though we might hope you know a lot of people place emphasis on fast course right a a systematized pace group fancy shoes but at the bottom of all of those sort of the thing that all of those things are orbiting is this athlete right keep choking right and like there are ten people on earth who can run a marathon in under two hours five minutes this year right and captial gay is the fastest right 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 under too well and that's one of the things people think about when you talk about technology or some of these strategies is is you have to be really a superior athlete to 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 28 30 per 10,000 meters that's quite remarkable yeah quite remarkable it's incredible on what you sort of yeah no matter what circumstances right it's wrong right it's yes yeah it is quite 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 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 for joining us it was great fun to talk to you around man [Music] you

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Id: 14xZ8iiFPYc

Length: 10min 47sec (647 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019