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

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, humans. Hope everyone is well in Podcastland. Today is an absolute treat. Unless you have had your head stuck in the sand, you will know that the last couple of weeks have been insane for distance running. Eliud Kipchoge recently broke the previously unthinkable two-hour marathon barrier. Did this in Vienna a couple of weeks ago, and I needed to get someone on who could analyze it, and who better than Runners World writer, author of Endure, and previous Modern Wisdom guest, Alex Hutchinson. Today's episode is so sick. We get a very scientific analysis, super in-depth. Alex has spent time with Eliud himself. He was in Monza for the last breaking two attempt that Nike had sponsored to do with this. We talk about the controversy to do with the shoe technology that's going on at the moment. An Ironman record was recently broken. Paula Radcliffe's 20 year female marathon record was recently broken. And we get to break down absolutely everything to do with Eliud's performance. Alex is just a hero. Enjoy this one. Please welcome the wise and wonderful Alex Hutchinson. Oh yeah, PS. While this intro music's playing, go and give us five stars wherever you're listening if you would. It would make me very happy.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. Alex Hutchinson has joined us again. Alex, welcome to the show.

**Alex Hutchinson** (1:42)
Thanks a lot, Chris, it's great to be back.

**Chris Williamson** (1:44)
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?

**Alex Hutchinson** (1:54)
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.

**Chris Williamson** (2:08)
I bet you are. So for those of you who don't already follow Alex, if you have even the slightest interest in running at Sweat Science on Twitter, ever since the podcast that we did at the start of the year, I only follow, I think I follow like 82 people or something on Twitter. So you make up more than like about 2% of probably what I see on Twitter every day. And the articles that you've been putting out recently have been fascinating. So we're going to go through Eliud Kipchoge's recent marathon performance. There's some really awesome breakdowns that you've done in the build up to that. And then afterward, then we're going to talk about some other records that have been broken. There's some controversy surrounding the shoes and the kit that people have been wearing. So we got a lot to get through today. It's going to be exciting.

**Alex Hutchinson** (2:52)
Fantastic. Yeah, it's been a busy week, so we'll have lots to talk about.

**Chris Williamson** (2:56)
Cool. So let's start with Kipchoge'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?

**Alex Hutchinson** (3:09)
Yeah, for sure. So you know, 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 was, it was not, doesn't count under the official rules. And that's where things start getting a little, a little tricky. So this was, this race was a, an exhibition race held on streets in Vienna, a park in, in a park in Vienna. Only one competitor, Eliud Kipchoge, who is the reigning Olympic champion and official world record holder. But every possible thing anyone could imagine to make him faster was done. The reported budget, this is just rumors, the reported budget was 15 million pounds for this one race by one person. And so this is what made it exciting and interesting for, for people like me who are interested in this sort of the science of endurance, but also made it controversial, made it, you know, people felt it was a bit of a stunt, a marketing stunt, maybe even a sport washing stunt for Ineos. But so they had, you know, they had an electric car driving in front of them at exactly two hour marathon pace, shining lasers on the ground so that his teams of, you know, 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 one, two, three, four, five, I think seven pacemakers at a time were trying to, you know, encompass him or cocoon him from the forces of drag. And they were, they knew exactly where to run because the car was shining lasers on the ground.