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

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. #eliudkipchoge #ineos159challenge #nikevaporfly - 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 - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How does a human with two legs and two arms and a head create a physiology which is capable of running a two-hour marathon?

• 0:06Alex Hutchinson?

  The first really important task is to pick your parents correctly. You've got to be born to run that fast. You can work as hard as you want and you can pull in all the science, but the thing we don't want to do is say, oh, Kipchoge ran a sub-two-hour 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. They're still not at Kipchoge's level. Kipchoge 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 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.

• 0:51Chris Williamson?

  Alex Hutchinson has joined us again. Alex, welcome to the show.

• 0:54Alex Hutchinson?

  Thanks a lot, Chris. It's great to be back.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  It is timely to talk about endurance and running. This is the, we're at the, like, the genesis point of the new world of running right now, right?

• 1:06Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, it's certainly an exciting time. Put it 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.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  I bet you are. So for those of you who don't already follow Alex, if you have even the slightest interest in running, @sweatscience 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.

• 1:40Alex Hutchinson?

  All right.

• 1:41Chris Williamson?

  And the articles that you've been putting out recently have been fascinating. So we're going to go through Eli Kipchoge's recent marathon performance. There's some really awesome breakdowns that you've done in the buildup 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, we got a lot to get through today. It's going to be exciting.

• 2:05Alex Hutchinson?

  Fantastic. Yeah, it's been a busy week, so we'll have lots to talk about.

• 2:08Chris Williamson?

  Cool. So let's start with Kip Chogi's 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 Ineos 159 Challenge was?

• 2:22Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, for sure. So the big headline, the top headline is a human being ran 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 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 streets in Vienna, in a park in Vienna. Only one competitor, Elliot Kipchoge, who is the reigning Olympic champion and official world

• 3:01Alex Hutchinson?

  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 science of endurance, but also made it controversial, made it, people felt it was a bit of a stunt, a marketing stunt, maybe even a sport washing stunt for Ineos. So they had, they had an electric car driving in front of him at exactly two hour marathon pace, shining lasers on the ground, so that

• 3:41Alex Hutchinson?

  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 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I think seven pacemakers at a time, were trying to encompass him or cocoon him from the forces of drag. And they knew exactly where to run because the car was shining lasers on the ground. He had...

• 4:10Alex Hutchinson?

  A guy on a bicycle handing him 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, or 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 has boiled into, you know, people didn't think he 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

• 4:54Alex Hutchinson?

  world is having a big massive brawl about it.

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  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, like, oh, he had rockets on his feet, but you know, he still ran it or whatever. But 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 a human with two legs and two arms and a head create a physiology which is capable of running a two hour marathon?

• 5:40Alex Hutchinson?

  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 thing we don't want to do is say, oh, Kipchoge 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. They're still not at Kipchoge's level. Kipchoge is a super special guy. He's got the physical tools and maybe just as importantly, or at least part of the package,

• 6:22Alex Hutchinson?

  he's got the mental tools. He's got, he, 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 beater runners, but you know, running back and forth from school, hugely active as a kid, accumulating more training as that, you know, as an eight-year-old than most like university age 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,

• 7:05Alex Hutchinson?

  week after week, hundreds, you know, he was running reportedly in the, 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 Kipchoge 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, 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.

• 7:48Alex Hutchinson?

  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. You know, it's just like, it's not quite mud hut, but it's, it's absolutely Spartan. He, you know, they have a roster. He takes turns, you know, mopping out the toilet, washing from, you know, getting water from the well and washing from it. You know, he could live like an absolute Sultan there, but he is a very simple guy and he's got all these aphorisms about how, you know, 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,

• 8:30Alex Hutchinson?

  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 to become the, you know, absolute running machine that he is now.

• 8:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think one of the things that fascinates me and a lot of people with Kipchoge is the fact that he has this monastic, very zen-like transcendent quality that he, how he talks about his sport, or it's not even his sport, 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

• 9:26Chris Williamson?

  have this, this beautiful kind of yin and yang of the, the real technological, cutting-edge stuff that's attached to someone who has this purity, very back-to-basics approach to running. I think that's what makes it interesting.

• 9:42Alex Hutchinson?

  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 was, I'm a science journalist. So I was like, I want to know all about the formulation of the, the drink you're using and, and, you know, how are you going to alter your, your training distribution, blah, blah, blah. And he's a smart guy. Like, he, he knows what's going on. So I don't want to make it sound like he's just like, oh, the scientists take care of it. But he knows what his job was and he knows the science was not his job. So he was able to, in the midst of this sort of massively scientific and, and let's face it, commercial enterprise.

• 10:23Alex Hutchinson?

  His job was just to to to run and to look within himself and and you know, 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 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 fattest woman in the world or whatever. It's like he gives it a purity because he really like he comes off as absolutely sincere. So what you said, I think that juxtaposition is absolutely fascinating.

• 11:08Chris Williamson?

  He's a great guy. So just before we get on to the race itself and the course, 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 feet and other bits and pieces and VO2 max and running efficiency. How does all that tie together for him?

• 11:39Alex Hutchinson?

  You've been reading the right stuff. Yeah.

• 11:41Chris Williamson?

  I've been following you on Twitter, Alex. That's what's been happening.

• 11:45Alex Hutchinson?

  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, all these things, like you said, so there's going back decades, there's been fascinating experiments where it's like, okay, let's take a lightweight, you know, a few ounces, and let's strap it on to 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, and 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,

• 12:30Alex Hutchinson?

  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, and this happens to be a sort of typical characteristic of people who grew up in the area that Kipchoge grew up in. Was Kipchoge, is Kipchoge 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, let's, they brought about more than two dozen of their best runners into the lab to say, let's, let's get out the calipers.

• 13:11Alex Hutchinson?

  Let's get out the treadmills. Let's measure all these guys and see who has the greatest endurance capacity. And Kipchoge was not at the top of the heap.

• 13:19Chris Williamson?

  Do you know who was?

• 13:19Alex Hutchinson?

  By those measurements. There's a guy named Lysa Desisa, who actually won the world championships this year. So very good runner and he's won Boston a couple of times. So he's, he's good. And, and, and they could see in the lab that he, he was off the charts. But he has never run as fast as Kipchoge has. Kipchoge had good, like, he had the kind of VO2 max and lactate threshold and running economy that you'd need to be a world-class runner, but he didn't have the kind that makes you say, this guy's a one in a generation talent. He's a, 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.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  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, we think more and more about the quantifiable metrics and to hear that we have someone that's got this difficult to define X factor is, is so magic. He's just, he's a hero.

• 14:35Alex Hutchinson?

  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, our ability to analyze and understand the, the, the basis of success is getting better and better. But for me, the moment.

• 14:50Alex Hutchinson?

  We reached the point where you can go into a lab, measure 10 people and tell you with 99% certainty who's going to 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 sport. You know, a race becomes a plumbing contest. Who's got the biggest aorta or whatever? And that's, there has to be, there has to be some, something that we can't measure for it to be interesting. So yeah, to me, that's, that's, that's some of the magic. And you know, I'll, I'll tell you, you talk about the X factor. I guess I met Kipchoge for the first time, you know, what, three years ago, maybe?

• 15:28Alex Hutchinson?

  And it's easy to say this in hindsight, but he, he has a presence that is, that is hard to quantify. It's like, I'm not going to say, I knew that moment that, you know, he was going to break two hours. But it's like, this guy has the, you know, some people, some people just have a presence where it's like this, you know, it's not a swagger because he's very humble and very quiet. But you just, you, you feel that he's bigger than he is and, and, you know, that's, I think that's something that in some unquantifiable way that plays into his, his abilities.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  I'd love to see him at a party, talking about swagger.

• 16:03Alex Hutchinson?

  Apparently he likes to spin the tunes. He was, he was, 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, he's, he's not like a super party guy, but I think he can get down.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  After you've just run a sub two hour marathon, you've got to at least have a beer or something, right? You've got to, you've got to chill out somehow.

• 16:25Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta, you gotta unwind. He, he takes a month off after a marathon like that and just chills out. So he's not one of these obsessive people who's like, okay, I've already taken 12 hours off. I have to get my next workout in. He goes hard, then he, then he relaxes and has a good time.

• 16:38Chris Williamson?

  Talking about the way that he has presence, there's a clip. 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 Elliot 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 I was in the UK and I'd work late and blah, blah. And I watched this clip and it, it looks, I know this sounds weird and existential, but it, 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

• 17:20Chris Williamson?

  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, where he's meant to be. So getting on to, getting on to the race itself, why did they choose Vienna?

• 17:32Alex Hutchinson?

  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 flat, 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, a, a two week period. Because they didn't want to just say, we're going to run this race on October 12th or whatever. They, what they said when they, when they planned this, we're going to run it sometime between, I think it was like October 10th and 23rd or something

• 18:15Alex Hutchinson?

  like that. And they were going to decide at 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, and you know, when they, when they were originally searching for places, they, they considered all sorts of options. They considered the world's largest indoor convention center, or at least North America, 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 in the building wasn't strong enough to get it as cold as they wanted.

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 18:47Alex Hutchinson?

  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 dike with a wind blowing.

• 18:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Alex Hutchinson?

  They decided that would feel too much like cheating.

• 19:01Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 19:02Alex Hutchinson?

  So and they even considered building like ice walls along a track that would keep keep it locally cool. I mean, they were 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 Ineos race this year is Kipchoge wanted crowd support. He wanted people cheering. It was 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.

• 19:37Chris Williamson?

  It was eerie. It was eerie when they set off, wasn't it?

• 19:40Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, it was like 5:00 in the morning.

• 19:42Chris Williamson?

  It was misty.

• 19:43Alex Hutchinson?

  And they had these fluorescent lights.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  Kevin Hart there, just being loud, bouncing around.

• 19:49Alex Hutchinson?

  He was the only guy with any energy.

• 19:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he was.

• 19:52Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So Kipchoge wanted 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 20, 25 or 30 K, because the marathon is 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, relaxed, just chilling out for 25, 30 K. And then

• 20:22Chris Williamson?

  Then open the gates.

• 20:23Alex Hutchinson?

  Just when it's getting hard, then you get some some crowd for the next, yeah, for you get like medium crowd.

• 20:28Chris Williamson?

  Tape the crowd in.

• 20:29Alex Hutchinson?

  I meant for the last part of it, it's 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. And so that's probably the the the main difference from the last attempt.

• 20:43Chris Williamson?

  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, thin thing with a little bump at one end and then long all the way back with a longer roundabout 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? Because you've got to do 180 degrees in the space of, is that 25 metres, something like that?

• 21:13Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so the radius of curvature was actually, if you think about a standard athletics track, you know, 400 metre 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 does it 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, 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

• 21:57Alex Hutchinson?

  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 Kipchoge 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. It's in the end, 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, you know, 26.2 miles in a straight line along like the salt flats of in the Utah desert or whatever.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:42Alex Hutchinson?

  So five seconds, you know, if he had run two flat, zero and three seconds, they would have said, god damn it, we should have gone to Utah. But they decided that that was pretty close, that it wasn't, 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 he 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.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  Got you. Okay, so we've got the track, we've got Kipchoge, he's been doing his 140 miles a week, which is, I mean, that's got to be pretty extreme even for like a normal marathon prep, is it? Or is that in the the normal window?

• 23:23Alex Hutchinson?

  For a world-class marathoner, 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, if you go to the start line of the Olympic marathon and do a little survey, you'll find quite a number of people will have hit 140 miles a week for that.

• 23:37Chris Williamson?

  Such 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 pacers? Seventy pacers, did you say?

• 23:44Alex Hutchinson?

  He's got a total, total group, I think it was 41 pacers, including like Olympic champions, world champions, so some of the best runners in the world. And we're getting paid reasonably well, I think. And they were divided into teams of, I think it was seven runners.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Five in front, two behind, yeah.

• 24:02Alex Hutchinson?

  Exactly. The two behind was a, was a, was a sort of surprise. That was another difference from the last time. Because you'd say, well, who cares? Why, why is there someone behind him? They're like, push him forward if he falls down. But they ran these simulations, these wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamics simulations and determine, 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, you're at the back, the air behind you is, is kind of turbulent.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  Very messy.

• 24:33Alex Hutchinson?

  If you've got two people behind you, the, the air just keeps flowing right past you and then the turbulence is pushed back behind the last pacemaker.

• 24:39Chris Williamson?

  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, those winds start to cross over, it's really ugly. It's like a lot of, a lot of turbulence.

• 24:53Alex Hutchinson?

  That's exactly, yeah, that's, that's, that's the perfect analogy. Kipchoge wasn't going as fast as a truck, but.

• 24:59Chris Williamson?

  But no, it depends. 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, who's one of the pacemakers, great moustache, maybe been a 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 Two was heavily Kenyan African-based and it seemed like Ineos had really pulled out every athlete from everywhere that they could.

• 25:24Alex Hutchinson?

  I think they were, you know, I'm not, I'm speculating here. I suspect they were consciously trying to make it a globally appealing event. So they had, they had several American athletes. They had Australian athletes. I can't remember if they had any, they had British athletes.

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  Representative pacemakers then?

• 25:42Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah. So they, they were, they brought together, all of those guys were amazing. They're all, you know, near the top. And they had, they had Norwegian athletes, the three Norwegian brothers, the Inga Britstens, 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 weren't just saying, let's find the cheapest pacemakers we can. They were like, let's find people who are all world class, but let's also give people around the world a reason to tune in.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. I really like that idea. So we're on to the race. They've set away. They actually started off on a section of the track that they only ever ran once, didn't they? So they start off on this like ink, a decline, sorry?

• 26:20Alex Hutchinson?

  And that's free time. So they, so before they start, 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, the official IWF rules for world records on, in road races, you're allowed to have a little bit of a downhill and it's, you're allowed to have a one in 1,000 ratio descent. So that means for a 42 kilometer race, you're allowed to go down 42 meters. And that, and so, and they, they only went down, I think,

• 27:02Alex Hutchinson?

  13 meters. So they, 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 of course, the bridge, the bridge is so long.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Extend the bridge up a bit more.

• 27:18Alex Hutchinson?

  You, you want to have 41.9 meters. Like 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.

• 27:27Chris Williamson?

  Work out how to do that. Yeah, exactly.

• 27:29Alex Hutchinson?

  You'd have to kind of get the earth movers out to build the actual perfect course.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Got you. So moving on to the race, how did you, because did you watch it live? Did you get to watch it live?

• 27:38Alex Hutchinson?

  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 3:00 in the morning. I was like, I think this is happening. I think this is gonna be something. So

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 28:01Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, you know, so I was worried about just before halfway, he started to drift back a little bit. 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 I 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 know, you don't always remember what you're thinking in the middle of the race. Or it was just he was not, you know, not paying attention or something. But so I was, I was watching for little signs like that. I was, it was interesting because

• 28:40Alex Hutchinson?

  I, so I was in, for the Nike race a couple of 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 two. So this time, I think my expectations were a little higher. I was like, take me to that special place, Elliot. I want to, you know. Exactly. And, 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

• 29:25Alex Hutchinson?

  no second place in this race. Like, if 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 that. So there was a little bit more of just kind of like, just do it already, Elliot. And I hate to say that. It was still magical, but it was just, the second time is never the same as the first.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  I agree. I think. To give Ineos, who are Ineos? They're like an engineering company, right?

• 29:50Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, they're a petrochemical company in

• 29:52Chris Williamson?

  Obviously, I mean, the tie-ins with Running make perfect sense.

• 29:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. Because if you want to fuel up, I guess, on the way home from the race.

• 30:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 30:01Alex Hutchinson?

  No, I think I think they just wanted their their name out there. Yeah.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, if you got the money. But yeah, there was something, you're right. I'll be interested to see, there'll be a after movie documentary thing coming out. Eventually, I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess. But yeah, the Nike breaking two, it really did feel very special. Like, I loved, I loved how, you know, they got Kevin. Obviously, it's Nike. Like, they've, you know, when you think about the people that they can call in, like, who the fuck's Ineos? Like, they call in like a, like a petrol pump attendant or something who's like, really wants to do a marathon. But yeah, like, the Nike one really did feel magical. And you're right, maybe the magic wasn't as optimal.

• 30:43Chris Williamson?

  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, just pulls away and that's it. And like, there was, but it was, 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 how people might have changed and stuff. So getting on to one of the more major controversies that's going on at the moment. Before we talk about some other records that have been broken recently. The shoe that Elliot had on for the first one was, was again, a new, a new iteration of a line of shoes.

• 31:27Chris Williamson?

  And then they've then taken it up a notch for this. Can you, can you talk us through how they relate?

• 31:32Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, and this is really important because I don't, 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. And by resilient, I mean, you squeeze it down and it springs back really quickly. And so Marathon flats used to be as thin as possible. You wanted to be racing in a shoe that weighed nothing. And so they're basically just a piece of rubber wrapped around your

• 32:13Alex Hutchinson?

  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.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  They look comical. If you look at the shoes that they're wearing now at the start of the race, it looks funny. Look like platform shoes.

• 32:33Alex Hutchinson?

  It's sort of taking us back to the 70s. They look like sort of running pimps or something like that. And it's, you know, initially, when Nike introduced these shoes, no one believed they worked. So they were 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 Kipchoge was two years ago was wearing the initial line of the shoe. Since then, they've had a second

• 33:16Alex Hutchinson?

  iteration. It was the Vaporfly 4%, then the Vaporfly Next%. And now Kipchoge 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 Hoka 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

• 33:59Alex Hutchinson?

  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 the shoe determining who's winning the race? Have we moved to a Formula One model where it's an engineering competition, rather than a stock car model where everyone's driving the same car?

• 34:19Chris Williamson?

  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, like, you could put me in a pair of roller blades and I'm not making it. But I wonder just how much of a difference the shoes made. I would be skeptical until reading and hearing more about it. I think, oh, it's just a pair of shoes. They can't make that much of a difference.

• 34:41Alex Hutchinson?

  So it, you know, if the goal is, you know, me and my mates are going to run a marathon in a year just as a big challenge, and we want to make it to the finish, eh, you know, doesn't really matter about the shoes. If you're, if you're racing yourself, and if you're trying to set a 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 crowdsourced analysis a year or two ago, where they, they used data from Strava, which is this online platform that, you know, where people upload their, their, their runs from GPS, including their

• 35:24Alex Hutchinson?

  races, and they, 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, to the Vaporfly, or the Vaporfly to another shoe. And what they found was more or less exactly what Nike, Nike was claiming. The runners were a couple of minutes, a couple of percent faster in the Vaporfly than they were in other shoes.

• 35:45Chris Williamson?

  That's so crazy. So what's the, what does that pod do? Have you got any idea what the, the pod, is that similar to the, is it the Joyride or the Float Ride that they've just brought out, that Nike have brought out?

• 35:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Um, yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

• 35:57Chris Williamson?

  That's the one that's got, that's a pod that's got little beads inside of the pod, like a beanbag.

• 36:02Alex Hutchinson?

  Oh, okay.

• 36:03Chris Williamson?

  So that's, they recently brought that out, but the thing that Elliot's got looks a lot more like hardcore than that.

• 36:09Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So the only, the only information we have is that there was a patent filing that someone unearthed that looks like Kipchoge's prototype. And so people are speculating that this is what's in his shoe. It's not clear that, but, but the pod itself had these sort of fibers within it that get tensed and stretched, like.

• 36:28Chris Williamson?

  This is serious space age shit, isn't it?

• 36:31Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And here's the, here's the thing. It's like.

• 36:34Alex Hutchinson?

  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 it's, and there's always this complicated plausible sounding explanation of why this is gonna be the best thing since sliced bread. And 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.

• 37:16Alex Hutchinson?

  They're still, so here's these pods, and the pods have torsion, or beads, or whatever the heck you want. My default is still to say, it probably doesn't do anything, 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 that may, the pods may just be sort of a, you know, pay no attention 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 shoe. 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 plate.

• 38:01Chris Williamson?

  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 bickerings online, what have people been saying?

• 38:12Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, well, you know, how long do you have? Because there's lots of criticism. You know, there's two, basically two basic things. One is the sort of general criticism of exhibition races like this, that this should have been done, you know, like my grandfather used to run a marathon, you know, 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, you know, 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...

• 38:53Alex Hutchinson?

  You know, 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 specially fabricated to disguise what they were. They were disguised as Zoomstreak sixes. So, they looked like old shoes, but they actually had these carbon fiber plates and 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.

• 39:25Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 39:27Alex Hutchinson?

  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 sweeping the medals. 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 IAAF, the governing body of track, changed the rules the next year to say, "Okay, any shoe that... We're not going to 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's now on the books, but it hasn't changed anything.

• 40:12Alex Hutchinson?

  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. But that's where, so that's where I think the real meat of the controversy is. First of all, is it fair to have these shoes? And that's a, I think banning the shoes, you know, 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 would be decided.

• 40:49Chris Williamson?

  What about if, what about if the shoe's available to all, but you're, as an athlete, you're with a different sponsor?

• 40:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, so that gets a little, uh, 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 their

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  New Balance or ASICS or whatever.

• 41:12Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Painting the N for New Balance onto the Vaporflies. And they get busted. People, 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 raced in Nike shoes.

• 41:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Alex Hutchinson?

  And I, and I, and you know, there's, I, there's a guy, I know a number of, you know, elite marathoners with, 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 two faster. So this is, 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, where it's like, yeah, there are differences between shoes, but it's not determining races. And there are at least three and probably more companies

• 42:08Alex Hutchinson?

  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, uh, last weekend, the Ironman World Championships, there was in Hawaii, Jan Friedino from Germany set a new course record at the Ironman World Championships. He was wearing ASICS shoes, but they had a carbon fiber plate in them. So that's maybe one way that the playing field is going to be re-leveled is that everyone else is going to catch up.

• 42:37Chris Williamson?

  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, before we started, there was a screenshot that I saw is quite cool. For anyone who wants to keep up to date with the new shoes and what's going on, Protos of the Gram, P R O T O S of the Gram on Instagram is quite a cool, um, account. And they reshared a post from a guy called Ryan Hall. Now I'll read this out and then I'll let you, I'll let you take us through what's actually happening here, Alex. But so at Ryan Hall three, with all due respect to Elliot Kipchoge, as he is quite clearly the greatest

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  marathoner of all time, irregardless of the shoes he is in, when a shoe company puts multiple carbon fiber plates in a shoe 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 Athletics 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 Ryan Hall three that the new ASICS prototype, his wife ran a marathon PB in, has, as we quote, John Frodenos interview, think of it as a rocking chair. It has a carbon

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  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, ran in a prototype of the new ASICS 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.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 44:21Alex Hutchinson?

  Like I said, there's a lot of, a lot of argy-bargy going on here.

• 44:25Chris Williamson?

  So what's happening? Break that down for us.

• 44:27Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So Ryan Hall is one of the greatest American marathoners in history. He retired a few years ago. He's, he, he placed 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, in Berlin ran a 222 marathon, making her the, I think it's the fourth fastest American in history. So these are two, a couple which are, who are both among the fastest marathoners in history.

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  Both freaks.

• 44:58Alex Hutchinson?

  Both sponsored by ASICS.

• 45:02Alex Hutchinson?

  So Ryan is, is getting a little preachy here about Nike. And this is one of the sort of dynamics that makes this shoe debate so interesting is that everyone's got a vested interest. People, you know, 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 sort of principled stand against, you know, technology and running shoes and what is it like, "Hey, that's no fair. I wish I had those shoes."

• 45:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Alex Hutchinson?

  And so, so anyway, in the comments, yeah, so, you know, Ryan Hall is criticizing these spring shoes and I think that's, I think that reflects on him, it may be 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 is a spring. Every, every shoe has squishy midsoles and they act as a spring. The carbon fiber plate isn't a spring, it's a stiffening element. But anyway, that's, that's kind of beside the point. Ryan's calling out these shoes. Someone else 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

• 46:17Alex Hutchinson?

  that Jan Frodeno ran at the, at the Ironman 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 IAAF rule is crystal clear now that you can't run in shoes that aren't generally available to all. So I'm, I'm a little mystified by whether this rule is just there for decoration or whether, you know-

• 46:40Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be enforced at some point.

• 46:42Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, or they, I mean, I guess they need to give a warning because it's happening so commonly, but it's, it's pretty clear to me that that she's, she's publicly saying, "Yes, I did this thing that is against the rules." So I, 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.

• 47:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, the point, 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 that ASICS 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 contravened 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 it's, you're criticizing one thing because of its type, not because of the principle.

• 47:40Alex Hutchinson?

  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, Hailey Gabrisolasi set a marathon world record in Adidas 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 the Vaporfly. So there's a clear, the carbon fiber plate that is in the Nike shoe is a direct lineal descendant of the one in the Adidas shoe.

• 48:22Alex Hutchinson?

  And same with the foam, Nike's foam does exactly what Adidas' 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 Adidas wasn't the only one, Fila and Asics and I think Hoka all had carbon fiber.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a little list, there was a little list at the bottom of that thing. Hoka has a plate, Asics, Brooks Running has a plate, Sorkany, New Balance have plates. Get with the times.

• 48:54Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And some of those have been since the Vaporfly, but some of them were long before the Vaporfly. So people are all of a sudden 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 like, it's not the plate, it's the fact that it works.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 49:22Alex Hutchinson?

  That'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? 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, that's a, 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. Cause 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?

• 50:07Alex Hutchinson?

  And so they started wearing thicker and thicker shoes. So the ideal left said, okay, you can only have shoes this thick. Like, I don't know the exact number to do high jump, which made sense. So they should do the same for running shoes. You can, and this is what the proposal is from, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

• 50:25Chris Williamson?

  Within those dimensions, you can fit whatever technology you want. You've just got this much room that you can put it in.

• 50:30Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, let's say you have 31 millimeters. You can stick a carbon fiber plate, you can stick two, you can stick your fancy pods or whatever you want. But you're not going to have unlimited real estate. Cause what's happened with the, with the, the three successive versions of the Vaporfly is they've gotten thicker and thicker. They've gotten about 25% thicker to the point where it really, they really do look funny. And it's not all about, yeah, it's not all about aesthetics, but it's a point where it's like, running is supposed to be a simple sport. Let's make sure it doesn't look like you're, like it's a tech, an equipment dominated sport. So let's just put, take the simplest rule possible and at least say, you cannot wear platform shoes.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. 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 heavy, 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're like, right, people have started wearing seven inch thick soles. But how does that change your running mechanics and your running gait? How does that then add weight onto the bottom of the leg and stuff like that? So, yeah, I think whoever's 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, there was something else that you'd mentioned before. Have there been some other records that have been broken recently? There was the Ironman, there was, there was Elliot, and then what else?

• 51:48Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. So the, the women's. Record, women's world record for the marathon went down the day after Elliot Kipchoge'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 kind of knew that it could happen, even though it wasn't going to be easy. But then the next day in Chicago, Bridget Cosgay broke Paula Radcliffe's marathon world record. Paula's record was 215.25, and it had stood since 2003. And basically, no one had come within, well, not a mile, but no one had come within shouting distance of that record. Mary Catani, I think, was the second fastest, and she was like 217 something.

• 52:28Chris Williamson?

  Miles off.

• 52:29Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, yeah, like ages, ages off. And then out of nowhere, out of absolutely nowhere, you know, not completely nowhere, but very surprisingly, all of a sudden, Bridget Cosgay, this Kenyan runner, ran 214.04. 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? You know, and needless to say, the important, you know, maybe the first thing I should say is she was wearing Nike's Vaporflies. So

• 53:04Chris Williamson?

  It sucks, though. Doesn't it suck that we're, that this is the discussion that we're having now, that every performance that's good's got to be caveated with an asterisk that's talking about it was in this pair of shoes? 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.

• 53:26Alex Hutchinson?

  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 set 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. Let's, and then Because the most disorienting thing is when the standards are changing every six

• 54:07Alex Hutchinson?

  months and things are 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.

• 54:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Alex Hutchinson?

  Because we've gotten used to it in many other sports before. It's like, okay, now speed skaters have clapskates on. Everyone's faster than they were in the 90s, but we're not arguing about it every six months. 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, you know, records were just falling, falling, falling. They said, okay, here's where we're going 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.

• 54:51Chris Williamson?

  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 you were, 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?

• 55:30Alex Hutchinson?

  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 Maarten, made by a small Swedish company, which

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  Maarten.

• 55:40Alex Hutchinson?

  It has Maarten, M-A-U-R-T-E-N.

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Okay, cool.

• 55:44Alex Hutchinson?

  And the claim is that it has these two ingredients, pectin and alginate, I think made from like seaweed or something like that. And it's, other than that, it's a standard sports drink. It's got a bunch of carbohydrates in it. You swallow it and when the, when those ingredients get in your stomach, they react with the stomach acid to create a hydrogel, which kind of encapsulates the carbohydrates, effectively sort of hiding them from your stomach. Normally, if you try and take in a bunch of carbohydrate when you're exercising, you reach a point where you can't handle anymore. Your stomach rebels and you either get diarrhea or you vomit or you just, or you just feel like crap. The hydrogel hides this carbohydrate. It's in your stomach, but you don't, you're not, you're not detecting it. Then it goes into your intestines and is absorbed into your bloodstream. So the

• 56:26Alex Hutchinson?

  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. You know, but my question is always, how do we know you're not just pooping out a bunch of hydrogel, you know, six hours later or 12 hours or whatever the deal is. But Kipchoge, for example, swears by more than Eli Kipchoge does, lots of the top endurance athletes in the world. So they're, and no one is saying, ban hydrogels. This is unacceptable.

• 57:09Alex Hutchinson?

  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, it's a sort of, what does it feel like test? And, and, you know, the role of sports technology or the role of aids and technology is a tricky issue. You know, 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 strength shouldn't be banned? Caffeine.

• 57:54Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, caffeine, just taking a pill and it makes you faster or taking a coffee or whatever. So I don't think there's a, I don't, people, the people who say it's 100% obvious that X should be banned and Y shouldn't be banned, I don't agree with them. I think it's, it's always going to 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. 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

• 58:38Alex Hutchinson?

  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, mano a mano. 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.

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  Totally right. So what I wanted to finish on was an article which I'd seen you sharing recently to do with the, is it the suicide pace that people go out at runs? And I found that, I found that really just fascinating. Can you, can you take us through that?

• 59:09Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, sure. So the, 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 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 the, for the last 15 or 20 years, the standard thing in endurance, in championship racing, not, not time trial

• 59:53Alex Hutchinson?

  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, you're, you're sort of breaking wind for everyone else. But it's, 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 the 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 these cycling pursuit races where they almost go as slow as possible.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  It's crazy when you see that, isn't it? When they're doing those big U turns up and down. Yeah, it's so hilarious.

• 1:00:33Alex Hutchinson?

  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 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 the races start compared to their average pace? And it turned out that this year was anomalous compared to the last 20 years. It was the, 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 else was like,

• 1:01:16Alex Hutchinson?

  whoa, it worked for that guy. I'm going to try that. And someone, well, 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 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 to 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, you know, 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.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Alex Hutchinson?

  And, you know, hopefully you go out faster than you usually do and you discover, oh, wait, I can maintain this.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  I can hold on. Yeah.

• 1:01:57Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah. And that's great. Then you set a new best time. Sometimes you discover, ah, no, no, it turns out I can hold that.

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Too fast.

• 1:02:03Alex Hutchinson?

  That's fine. So you gotta, you gotta chalk that up 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 and crash and burn.

• 1:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I love that. And you're right as well. There's part of me that just loves the idea of, 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 it this morning. And Jordan, who has got the same score as Khan Porter, the guy that did the announcement, Jordan, who's ex regionals athlete in Newcastle, absolute freak.

• 1:02:55Chris Williamson?

  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? It's 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 watching, I'm thinking he's gonna 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 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.

• 1:03:41Alex Hutchinson?

  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.

• 1:03:48Chris Williamson?

  Did you see that with some of the athletes?

• 1:03:50Alex Hutchinson?

  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 you when 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 I'm sure they didn't enjoy it, but it's it's fun to see because then you know, yeah, this is this is legit. This is they're stretched to their limits here. There's no.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:15Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Chris Williamson?

  I love it. Final thing, just as a parting point, the one thing that we haven't actually said, how fast was Elliot Kipchoge running during his marathon attempt?

• 1:04:26Alex Hutchinson?

  In brief, I would say faster than most people could 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 like sprint that fast for 10 seconds. Like he was doing 434 per mile, maybe 433. And that's like 249 per kilometer. So that's it's for a 200 meters. That's something like 33, 34. So 16 to 17 seconds for 100 meters.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  So is that is it about 12 miles an hour? Is that it? What is it in car pace?

• 1:05:03Alex Hutchinson?

  So so it's 13 and a bit miles an hour.

• 1:05:07Alex Hutchinson?

  And the difference between 12 and 13 is enormous when you're at that speed.

• 1:05:10Chris Williamson?

  13 in 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 going to skid for a while.

• 1:05:19Alex Hutchinson?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people would have, would be challenged to keep up with him on a bike. Certainly for longer than, you know, a brief sprint. Like it, it, it's, 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, a very serious recreational runner. And they are just absolutely pegging it, absolutely, 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's

• 1:06:02Chris Williamson?

  This is quick.

• 1:06:03Alex Hutchinson?

  Looks relaxed, just because he's gliding along as if he's, you know, floating on air, doesn't mean he's not really booking it.

• 1:06:10Chris Williamson?

  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 endure Alex's book. Absolutely fantastic. Great analysis. If you're into this. And like I said, at Sweat Science 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 can't, I want, I want there to be some more athletic stuff coming up so that I can, I can hassle you again. I can get you back on, man.

• 1:06:50Alex Hutchinson?

  It's a great thing. Every year there's something new.

• 1:06:52Chris Williamson?

  Awesome. Alex, thanks so much for your time. It's been great.

• 1:06:55Alex Hutchinson?

  Thanks, Chris. This was really fun to go into the nitty gritty.