What will it take to run a 2-hour marathon?
rw.runnersworld.com
rw.runnersworld.com
A famous cycling reporter took drugs for a month to see just want the effect was and apparently it was like being superman. He would go out and ride 100 miles (something that normally leaves you in couch mode the next day) and be ready to do all again the next day like he hadn't even touched the bike the day before.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Doper-Next-Door-Performance-Enhanc...
HGH and EPO are the drugs we have all heard about but I'm sure there are 8 we haven't heard about yet. Also this book gives you insight into the violence we are seeing outside of the gridlines in the NFL. Apparently all of these drugs running around in you makes you crazy in a lot of cases.
Science requires us to be more careful in our thinking than we are naturally inclined towards. It does not require us to pretend we have a lobotomy, nor does it require that we pretend that we must seriously entertain the hypothesis that large doses of steroids have no effect.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/the-rate-of-domestic-viol...
You've really misrepresented the article.
I did make the comment from the comparison to the general population though.
edit: I have to say, I'm pretty ticked off you accused me of being dishonest. My one sentence blurb is a reasonable response to the context from the parent comment to mine, where the NFL players are claimed as a group that is more violent than normal. There is certainly room to point out that they have cohorts where they don't compare well, but it is not outrageous to answer an assertion about how they compare to people in general with an analysis of how they compare to people in general.
Also, as toward the 2 hour marathon, drugs that are psychoactive may be of as great a benefit as the physical ones. Not just caffeine and other placebos, but getting into the right 'head space' is just as important to breaking such records. LSD was an integral part of one of baseball's no hitters, a terrific feat of athleticism. Many feats of the mind may be broken in Washington state due to the permissive pot laws.
My wife put together a together a pretty interesting video about the "faustian bargain" which is IGF-1 (used as a proxy measure for growth hormone)... video is replete with examples of the effects of low IGF-1/GH or high IGF-1/GH both in animal models and humans.
One of the more interesting points in the video is the fact that people with polymorphisms that make their IGF-1 receptor experience some slight loss of function actually live longer (in general).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjSl4n_KdOY
The video also links to an article which has a bibliography if you're interested.
For example, reaction speed correlates with longevity: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16079205 Reaction speed needs muscle power and neural signal power, both are supported by IGF-1.
Arm grip in midlife is stronger for centenarians: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21541735
Thus, while entertaining, the video of your wife is too quick to jump to conclusions.
Number of heart beats per life of regular animal is about 1 billion. Humans average 2 billions. We use different longevity modes than rest of animal kingdom, I think.
HGH is also essentially a stress hormone that for the most part you want to keep as low as possible. It can speed healing and recovery but is tied to cancer and aging in general. Lowering growth hormone in lab animals makes them live longer. I think HGH supplementation is maybe a popular myth that in practice isn't much used. This is what the Balko guy has explained post prison release. He says it's pretty much all about the androgens and HGH isn't very useful.
I don't know anything about EPO dangers. Presumably it leads to thrombosis, strokes, and heart attacks.
Bostin Loyd is actually honest and discusses gear -- see eg [0:2].
[0] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmPI_kX3oDE
2 - if you legalize drugs then you require drugs (of anybody who wants to be competitive). Literally all professional cyclists use all the drugs they're allowed, and some they are not. On terms of caffeine this takes the form of a megadose towards the end of a race delivered via a "finishing bottle", which is a melange of caffeine, sugar, and painkillers.
2- Ewwww....
I'd expect the next generation of drugs will focus on things like improving monocarboxylate transporter throughput/efficiency.
But, as sibling answers say, decreased training recovery times is incredibly important. Steroids also protect your joints -- they are an anti-inflammatory. Runners' knees, ankles, and spines take a pounding.
If you have any question whether an athlete, model, or actor is using drugs it is safe to assume the answer is yes.
Presumably millions of people think Christian Bale, Daniel Craig, and Chris Pratt, and many, many others have been natty in recent roles. Laughably false. Look at models and actors from the 50s and 60s and note their ages to have an idea what is realistic.
Not to mention the idea of actors putting on 10-20 pounds of lean muscle in, say, 3-6 months between movies is laughable (but remotely possible) in their 20s. When you see guys doing it in their 40s you have to be actively lying to yourself to believe that possible.
Oh, and low doses of much of this stuff, under careful supervision of a doctor, makes you healthier. Your skin will be better, you'll look younger, you'll have (slightly) more muscle, etc. Aging clinics are greenwashing drugs: you pay $2k/mo and get scrips making everything nice and legal.
This is a classic one-day race, > 5000 kcal, > 6 hours.
Yes, it seems likely that drugs have been a factor in the increased speed of distance runners. Sadly, the testing procedures for athletics are notably worse that for cycling (especially in the offseason).
However running does have one critical difference compared to cycling that gives a small glimmer of possibility that some runners might be clean and competitive with dirty runner.
In running, "running economy"[1] is a huge factor in performance, and is quite variable and can be improved with training[2]. In cycling there isn't really a similar factor (except for a cyclists weight): the ceiling of non-doped performance over a 40+ minute timeframe seems to top out at around 6.4 Watts/kg, and that can be projected directly onto a given climb to calculate the best possible time. Yes, tactical factors, weather and measurement errors make that seem more precise than it is in practice but the point is that there does seem to be a genuine ceiling on output.
In running that ceiling hasn't been found. Running economy is measured by putting runners in a closed-system and measuring speed vs energy usage. Elite runners generally are more efficient than non-elite, but no one really knows why.
However, it has been proven that running economy can be improved by training with runners who are faster than you[!].
Two points here: some runners might be clean and be beating dirty runners through better economy (which they might have obtained by training next to doped runners), and secondly it might be possible to find methods to improve economy dramatically.
(Road cyclist, sometimes runner, eternal optimist here)
It's starting to come apart at the seams though: http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/doping-probe-spurs-kenyas-...
But there is more to Kenyan domination than just doping. For example, there are plenty of countries with a history of distance running which are known to have weak anti-doping policies, and yet they aren't competitive anymore.
Here is an actual informative documentary (unlike your article which reads like it's from TMZ):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGVSO1sg2Fk
Your article doesn't talk about any top Kenyan runners. The only Kenyans that have been caught doping in recent years (yes they do get tested) are third-tier Kenyans, usually without education, thinking (or being persuaded by doctors) that it will get them to the top level, which it never does.
I don't see any evidence that Kipsang, Kimetto, Mutai, or Makau ever used drugs, or anyone even claiming to be in the know that they used.
The real reason is more financial: see the graph of prize money referenced in the article, and also take a look at the current state of track 10,000m racing. More top talent is attracted to the marathon, away from the longer track races, than before.
Cycling has a biological passport which (at worst) limits how much a doper can improve their blood chemistry. Athletics doesn't have that, and doing point checks isn't as effective as looking at changes.
> speeds haven't really slowed down
This isn't wholly true. Have you seen a 3:26.00 1500m, a 7:20 3000m, or a sub-12:40 5000m lately?
It's also untrue that athletics doesn't have a biological passport system. There are bans being handed out now for passport violations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natallia_Kareiva
I've found reading the analysis after this story makes it an even better read:
The road is so flat and straight, you can see them coming from a mile away. Six runners flow in arrowhead formation around the Canadian city of Saskatoon. The early November air is still and dry, the sky overcast, and the temperature hovers a bit above freezing, just as predicted.
All in their early 20s, they’ve been training together for this moment for years; only in the last month did their coach select which three will go for the record. The remaining three form the front of the arrowhead, blocking the wind and enduring the mental effort of controlling the pace. Should one of them cross the finish line in two hours—or faster—all six will share equally in the $50 million jackpot promised by the heirs to the Hoka One One fortune. The pot of money is up for grabs, for any runner, anywhere in the world. The chase is on.
So, will they make it? And what year is this? We’ve cut the distance to the sub-two marathon in half since 1998, but it will get progressively harder to trim the remaining seconds. Still, the physiologists tell us that it’s not impossible, meaning it is possible. I’m saying the year is...2075—and they make it
[1] http://www.bmw-berlin-marathon.com/en/news-and-media/news/20...
curun1r: steroids are useful for the exact same reason in the tour de france: decreased training recovery times, joint protection, etc. See eg nordic skiing [2]. You don't take the same doses as bodybuilders do because your goal isn't hypertrophy, but it still helps. Or see this quote [3]
To boost their strength is not the sole reason athletes turn to steroids,
Yesalis adds. "They have been taken for at least 45 years by endurance
athletes to recover from workouts rapidly. With steroids, a marathon runner
can run longer, a swimmer can do more laps and a cyclist can spend more time
pedaling." In sports where endurance is everything, the ability to last
longer during workouts and competitions confers a definite advantage.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news71508517.html#jCp
Doping with EPO or blood transfusions is one way of boosting an already-high
VO2 max—and it’s possible that cheating may have contributed to the drop in
the marathon record, and could even be the “secret” that allows runners to
approach sub-two in the future. But Radcliffe’s numbers offer a reminder
that such tactics aren’t necessary to achieve boundary-breaking
performances: Her VO2 max was already exceptional when she was a teenager,
and it stayed at a relatively constant level throughout her career.
[2] http://www.steroids.info/2012/10/09/documentary-looks-at-ste...
However, If the people who break the air in front of the record contender get to jump in part way through, I don't like it. Though I'm realizing now that if the track is any kind of loop, you could stretch this rule by intentionally letting the contender lap the pacers so they could reserve energy for every nth lap when they hop back in front of him.
The Marathon record doesn't even require the course to be flat (there are limits on the elevation difference for it to be recognised as a record).
Drafting isn't massively effective in running. A Marathon in 2 hours is 21 km/h, and in cycling you wouldn't really bother drafting at that speed.
Cue complaints about scrolling behavior of this site, but the content itself is worth reading.
It sure looks that way and I'm normally pretty tolerant of design flourishes, but I find this simply unbearable.
Still, I really wanted to read this, but neither Pocket, Readability nor Instapaper are able to pull more than a few paragraphs of usable text out of it.
The design isn't just bad or annoying it's hostile.
I temporarily turned it on, and saw the annoyances.
The static view without JS is just fine: the graphs and their labels are all there; nothing moves when you scroll.
Two athletes with the same VO2max and efficiency can have vastly different performances in a marathon. The body's VO2max potential can be used by solely burning carbs, which supply is limited (about 2000 kcal) whereas fat supply is practically unlimited (1 kg has about 7000 kcal. As a marathon requires more energy than is available as stored carbs, the ability to burn fat is a major factor in marathon performance.
The body's VO2max potential can be used by solely burning carbs
Actually you mixed them both up. In aerobic (with oxygen) exercise, you mostly burn fat. In anaerobic exercise, you burn glucose and glycogen and produce lactic acid through lactic acid fermentation. The important metric for anaerobic performance is not acid production rate, but acid tolerance of the muscles, because high acid levels lead to fatigue.
Lactate can be further used to create ATP, but this process needs oxygen as well. Hence, a good VO2max helps to get rid of lactate, which was created in the anaerobic process. When measuring the lactate threshold by solely the lactate concentration, it's difficult to distinct between high production / high reduction and low production rates. Good VO2max can conceal weak fat burning abilities. Therefore often the lactate production rate by a given effort (typically maximum effort) is used as indicator for the fat burning capability.
(Hope that makes sense, English is not my native language :-) ...)
The amount of work that went into making this pretty-good layout unreadable is insane.
This site should be used in schools to teach future web developers what not to make.
I used to turn off a lot of Javascript on webpages, but I'm actually managing to read this article reasonably well despite the appalling usability it has with Javascript turned on. The article is definitely worth a read, despite the annoying default screen presentation.
Contrast this to other extreme endurance sports such as pro cycling, where there are basically no Kenyans, Ethiopians or Africans at all to be found. Theres a high cost to entry and it requires infrastructure to train.
That book is pretty eye opening read. The running culture is like nothing else - guys who come 3rd in the world 10,000m championship are hardly worth mentioning, high school races have better fields than US or European championships etc etc.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Running-Kenyans-Discovering-Secrets-Fa...
Seems unlikely to me. 100m and 200m is thoroughly dominated by New World West Africans.
Mid distance 400m to 1600m is pretty well split up between Africans, Whites, and East Asians. Whites actually seem to do well at 800m.
I don't really know, but it seems there's a ton of racial genetics at play in sport.
You see in olympic/power lifting it's dominated by nordics/baltics and persians. Considering global popularity it defies ideas about training culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_adaptation_in_hu...
You don't see many Kenyans dominating in cross country skiing or in road cycling which are both endurance sports where similar physical attributes are useful. Sports culture has a huge role.
OTOH, there have been projects to see how Kenyans do in those sports. The small Nike-supported cross country skiing project wasn't very successful[1], but the cycling project is showing some promise[2]. Genetics has a huge role.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Boit
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2013/apr/29...
I wonder if that counts as genetics or environment.
For those unfamiliar, the 2013 Tour De France winner Chris Froome was born in Kenya to British parents. He races under a British license and does not appear to share many genetic similarities to top Kenyan marathon runners. He's fairly tall (184cm), with significantly different facial features and skin tone.
OTOH, he has a pretty amazing ability to produce constantly high levels of power on long (30 minute+) climbs.
Distance running is THE sport of East Africa.
As someone who trains somewhat competitively for marathons in a group, I can tell you that having people of similar ability to train with has a huge impact. As does having soft surfaces to run on and good weather.
Genetics may be in play, but it isn't the only thing in play.
A line of thought that's particularly interesting there is that a 2h marathon has implications for 10000m and half marathon speeds, which make it seem quite a bit further off.
It's intriguing that she suffered brain trauma and there's a part of her brain that doesn't function as expected. I expect there will be a marathon runner with a very specific brain trauma. The trauma will give him an unfair advantage to run a sub two hour marathon.
I doubt most cities have people who could run a half marathon at that pace. The best half-marathons are still around 59 minutes, now you want to double that with no performance penalty.
It is going to take an incredibly genetically gifted person with a lifetime of training to do it. Basically the Usain Bolt of marathons.
What I like is that in the half-marathon, women are only 5 minutes behind men. I am more interested when the first woman will run a one hour half-marathon.
It takes a toll on the body. It catabolizes it. Compare a marathon runner with a 100m runner.
Also, as expected, temperature plays a big factor in it, which makes me wonder why so many people "love when it's a nice day" (read: sunny and hot) to exercise.
Incredible.
Creation and destruction. Build up of tissue, and burning of energy stores.
BTW, strength-based sports also take a toll on the body. Maybe even more than long distance running. You can keep doing long races well into advanced age, whereas weight lifting after 40 is a bit sketchy.
At a competitive level, probably yes. As an exercise, very good for muscle mass, bone mass, cardio health, etc.
Second, your muscles are already somewhat warm, so you feel powerful right from the start instead of having to warm up for ages before you're ready for top performance.
Also, your training or just going for a run is not at the same intensity as running a marathon as a race. You run shorter distances or lower intensity, meaning the stable body temperature at marathon pace and distance is a cooling body at training pace at the same outside temperature.
... data graphics were mainly devices for showing the obvious to the ignorant,
which led to two fruitless paths.
The graphics had to be alive, communicatively dynamic, overdecorated and
exaggerated (otherwise, the dullards would fall asleep)
The main task of graphical analysis was to detect and denounce deception
(because the dullards could not protect themselves)
Note that even though we used to be told that we could all increase our VO2 max through trainning, it turns out that only people with a specific set of genes can do so.
but if you've never trained at elite level, then you can almost certainly improve it up to your (personal) ceiling.
1.00 atm * 8.1L = n * 0.0821 * 331.8K
n = 0.30 mol, @ 32.00 g/mol = 9.5 grams 02
There you go.
It's 2014, can't you people just detect I'm not american and put up normal Centigrade, km, kg, etc?
Since you are writing it you must know it and you can choose the correct tag or attribute for your html
If I need to pay and the price is in 'Dollar' I assume the recipient can clearly indicate if it's a USD or a AUD that he wants to receive here. Francs and Swiss Francs shared the same name, but were different things (and had different abbreviations).
The same would be possible for the units you mentioned.
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/autoconvert-auto-c...
This is not about blindly using plain SI units wherever possible. This is about writing for an international audience. Most people in the world don't use miles but kilometres in their everyday life. This especially important when reporting about an international event such as the marathon.
I suspect that Runner's World (an American magazine) knows their audience, and that they are mostly Americans (they do have some international sites [1], but I didn't see this article in a glance at the UK site).
Personally, I wish the US would just go with the metric system already, but that's another discussion.
[1] http://www.runnersworld.com/about-runners-world/internationa...
I am wondering if that's wise in such an international context, when not talking about a subject taking place only in US and affecting only US citizen.
I mean, even US citizens learn the International standard at school so why not constantly use to it when it's clearly appropriate (international sport, athletes and events places)?
Granted, they could appeal to a wider audience with this interactive presentation by supporting both SI and "American" (as you call them) units. But is it really an affront to not do that?
[1] http://rw.runnersworld.com/mediakit/international/RunnersWor...
In 4 of those cities they have no idea what a degree Fahrenheit is.
It is a good idea to be able to choose between different units. Most of the world does not use imperial units is something that lots of people forget.
Seriously. Some people are not made to run 2 hour marathons, or acquired some insuries or problems which makes reaching this goal either futile or even counterproductive, depending on why you are setting this goal.
The article also talks about drafting and the role of 'pace bunnies' in setting a record. For those reasons, I don't think someone has gone out on a 42.2k run and broken the 2 hour mark.
There's also a financial incentive to run your fast marathon in a race, especially for the runners from poor East African countries who are the only ones capable of running close to the world record. The prize money is typically several hundred thousand dollars if you include the bonuses for breaking the course record and the world record, finishing faster than certain time thresholds, etc.
EDIT: OK, now that I actually read the article, it turns out the Boston Marathon is ineligible for records for just this reason - it's overall downhill. With that attitude, why not just require galoshes while you're at it?