The tech that made a 2-hour marathon possible

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1:04Excludes Traffic Master and Stock Carpenter. For licenses, see homedepot.com slash license numbers. Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of superhuman speed. I'm Lauren Feiner, The Verge's senior policy reporter. Today, we're dissecting the technology that's helped enable a handful of athletes to run a full marathon in under two hours. For context, that means running at an average pace of less than 4 minutes and 35 seconds per mile for 26.2 miles. It's a milestone of human achievement that some scientists once believed to be impossible. Elliot Kipchoge became the first person to break the two-hour barrier in 2019, but under highly curated conditions that made it ineligible for an official record.

1:46Then, earlier this year, two elite marathoners finally broke the barrier on an official course, in the same exact race. As a much slower marathoner, I've always had a huge fascination with the technology that's helped advance the sport. To understand how this happened, I'm talking to Alex Hutchinson, a journalist and author of books like Indoor about the science behind human performance limits. He's chronicled the research and technology that's advanced the sport and gone inside the lab where Nike designed its iconic super shoes. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. I'm Senior Reviews Editor Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Tuesday, September 8th, 2026.

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5:56For problems worth solving, get started with Claude at claude.ai.verge. That's claude.ai.verge. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai.verge. All right, Alex Hutchinson, welcome to the VergeCast. Thanks for having me, Laura. Thanks so much for being here. Yeah, so we're here today to talk about the attempts and the recent successes in breaking the two-hour barrier in the marathon. So obviously that's a crazy fast statistic, but can you kind of contextualize for us, you know, what is the significance of that number exactly? Yeah, I mean, it's a round number.

6:42That's its biggest significance, right? So you could say, why is a two-hour marathon more significant than a two-hour and one-minute marathon? Well, that's life. Humans are wired in that way. And so people have dreamt about the idea of a two-hour marathon since, I'd say, 1991 was the first significant prediction, at which point it seemed like science fiction. for the last 15 years, I'd say people have taken it seriously and said, actually, I think this might happen someday. But I guess maybe the most useful context is in 2014, Runner's World asked me to do a big feature on the prospects for a two-hour marathon.

7:21And I spent months and talked to tons of people, wrote a big 10-page takeout. And on the last page, I said, I think a two-hour marathon will happen. And I think it'll happen in 2075. So don't count on me for betting tips, But that's how big a deal it is. It's half a century early. Wow. Wow. So, you know, when did breaking the two-hour barrier start to seem within reach far before that number that you'd predicted? Yeah. Well, actually, there's a long answer and a short answer. And the long answer is complicated and nuanced. And the short answer is shoes got really fast. It was the shoes. There was the introduction of a new design, what we now call super shoes, that started showing up in races in 2016, became available to the public in 2017.

8:09The most noticeable feature is a stiff carbon fiber plate in the sole, and they made runners a lot faster. Yeah. Can you walk us through a little bit of how exactly those super shoes work, why that carbon plate is there, and what else is significant about it? I can't give you definitive answers because nobody agrees on that. It remains, you know, 10 years after Super Shoes came out, nobody agrees exactly how they work. But the definition that shoe scientists use for what constitutes what they call advanced footwear technology is you've got a thick sole on the bottom of the shoe, a very thick sole.

8:44That sole is made out of super light, super resilient foam. So you can have a thick layer because it's not heavy, but when you press it down, like when you land, it bounces back and kind of pushes you forward. and embedded in that thick midsole is a stiff carbon fiber plate, which depending on who you listen to might be sort of springy or it adds stiffness or it's just providing stability. You can run tests and say, okay, well, what happens if we take away one of those features? Does the shoe still work? And it's like, no matter what you take away, it doesn't work as well as you expect. So nobody exactly knows how these things work together, but all the different brands have now figured out ways of combining essentially i mean i guess maybe the overall the way these things work is that when you land uh your your weight compresses the shoe and they've found a way of making it spring back in a way that pushes you forward right at the right moment to so that you can run at a given pace it takes less energy so in other words, or you can spend the same amount of energy and run faster.

9:49And the very first super shoe was called the Nike Vaporfly 4%. And it was called the 4 % because Nike arranged for external testing at the University of Colorado. And they found that pretty reliably, on average, people were 4 % more efficient. They could run at a given pace for 4 % less energy. And this was such a wild finding, such a totally out of the blue finding that they'd put it right in the name of the shoe. Wow. And I guess, can you contextualize for us just how different a super shoe is from, you know, your average trainer? Needless to say, and I'm underestimating or understating this dramatically, there was a lot of controversy when these super shoes came out.

10:25Because there's, you know, running is like the prototypical, pure, simple sport where anyone can compete. You don't need to have fancy gear until now suddenly you do. And so there was a lot of talk about, you know, these things have springs on their feet. You're putting springs on your feet. This is like wearing roller skates. And one of the counter arguments to that is like, actually, all shoes have springs on your feet. So if you wore a standard running shoe in 1985, it had a spring. That spring was the sole, and that sole was made out of a foam called EVA, which was relatively, compared to modern foams, it was relatively heavy and not very springy, but it was springy.

11:06And that's where Nike Air shoes came in, too. They wanted something so that when you land, the difference between being barefoot and landing in a running shoe is you land, it squishes down a little bit, and then it springs back and pushes you forward. that feels better and it gives you some benefit. It saves you a little bit of energy. So it's not a difference in that we just invented something totally new. It's just that the materials and the design got radically better so that it can now do what previous shoes did, but way, way better. And so you were talking about the Vaporfly, and I know that was a big part of Nike's Breaking 2 project in 2017 that you covered.

11:48So can you tell us a little bit about what Nike was attempting to do with that attempt that was different from what had been done before? Sure. Yeah. So I'll rewind a little bit more and say, 1991, a guy named Michael Joyner wrote a paper saying, hey, if we run the numbers on what people are capable of in our understanding of endurance, someone should be able to run like a 158 marathon. And so that was the idea that this should be possible. No one took it seriously until about 2011. There was another scientific paper where we said, actually, now the world record's down to 203 or 202.57. We're actually knocking on the door.

12:22When is this going to happen and what it's going to take? And so people started to think about what are the ways that you could make people half a percent more efficient, a quarter of a percent more efficient, and could you add all those up and get to a two-hour marathon? And so that's the context in which I was like, okay, I'll run the numbers for Runner's World, than I'll say 2075. So then Nike in 2016, they announced that they were going to be putting on an exhibition race where they were going to pick some of the best runners in the world and try and break two hours. And so immediately there was a lot of speculation and questioning, like, what are they talking about?

12:58What levers can they pull that will get you from 203 to 159? And so there were a lot of levers that they were going to pull. And that's why they were holding an exhibition race, not a sort of street legal race in a major marathon. They wanted to control a bunch of factors, ranging from they didn't want to have a set start time. They wanted to wake up in the morning and say, weather looks good, let's go, or weather doesn't look good, let's delay by a day or by six hours or whatever. They held it on a Formula One track in Monza, Italy, in order to get the most perfect flat or perfectly cambered curves so that they're not wasting time going up and down.

13:38They wanted to get the temperature and all this just right. So all of these are like little details. Then you start to get to bigger details. Like they wanted to have, I can't remember six or seven pacemakers running in an arrowhead formation ahead of the actual runners to, first of all, to set the pace at a perfect way. So you're not going a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow. So you don't even have to think about the pace, just run behind these pacemakers and then they're blocking the wind. And there's controversy on this too, but there's some data that suggests even at marathon pace, running behind another runner can save you as much as super shoes can be sort of in the neighborhood of 4%, 5%.

14:14You're not really aware of when you're running on a still day that you're spending energy overcoming air resistance, but you are. So they were putting together all of these factors and then unbeknownst to anyone else, they had also developed what became the vapor flies. So they had these shoes that were going to give them several percent that might be on its own enough to get to sub two. So fast forward, they ran this big attempt, this big kind of exhibition attempt in 2017. A guy named Elliot Kipchoge, a Kenyan runner, ran two hours, zero minutes and 25 seconds. So he didn't break two hours and he also didn't break a world record because it wasn't an official race.

14:53He wasn't following his pacemakers. You're not allowed to have pacemakers who drop out halfway and then come back in. But it was close enough that everyone was like, okay, now it can be done. Two years later, they did another exhibition event. Elliot Kipchoge ran under two hours in Vienna under these same artificial conditions. So at that point, one school thought is like, hey, they've done it. It's over. The other school thought is, okay, they did this fake version. When's it going to happen in a real regular race, which is what we got to earlier this year? Yeah. So what was different between those two attempts in 2017, 2019 for Kipchoge?

15:27Was it just a better day for him, or were there other factors that played into that? Yeah, that's a good question. There wasn't a lot of obvious difference. You could look at the race and say, oh, in 2017, they had an arrowhead pointing forward. In 2019, they'd run a bunch of computational fluid dynamic simulations and decided that actually an arrowhead pointing backwards towards Kipchoge would minimize the amount of drag on him. So there were some subtle things like that. He had a different shoe. um so what everyone including me thought would happen in in 2016 2017 was like oh they invented this new kind of shoe now so there's going to be like a step change uh like what this is what happened in speed skating for example in the late 90s they invented what's called the clap skate which has a hinge on the on the skate blade all of a sudden speed skaters got like two percent faster uh and so you had to get the new skates but then it changed and then nothing nothing changed after that.

16:20It was like one single change and then equilibrium again. What has happened with running shoes is that they keep getting faster. Because no one really understands exactly how they work, people keep stumbling onto new ways of getting slightly faster. So the soles were getting thicker. There were different designs of carbon fiber plate instead of changing the curvature, changing the angles. The materials kept getting faster. So you can just take a chunk of the the foam that they use in the midsoles, and you can put it in a machine and squeeze it and see how much it springs back. And traditional running shoes might give you back like 70 % of the energy.

16:59And then Adidas had come out with something in the early 2010s, Adidas Boost, that gave back like 80-something percent. And then Nike was getting materials that were giving you back like 90%. And then so there was a bit of an arms race. People were locking up these obscure petrochemical suppliers who could produce these foams that would give you one or two percent more energy. So by 2019, Kipchoge had shoes that were personally optimized for him and that worked better. And it got to the point then where shortly after that, the governing body for running world athletics imposed a stack height limit.

17:35They said, your shoe cannot be thicker than 40 millimeters because it's getting ridiculous. It looks like you're running around on pogo sticks. And we don't want every year there to be a new shoe. So at least you're going to have to innovate within the envelope of you only have 40 millimeters to play with. Wow. And I know you got to kind of get a look at Nike's process up close during the breaking two attempt. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like kind of being in the lab where they were developing these shoes and, you know, just measuring everything they could about these runners?

18:07Yeah, I mean, it's pretty neat. And I think, you know, Nike is certainly a leader. Adidas was doing the same in the lead up to this sub two. And all the shoe companies do to some degree, but it's like these runners are not going to the store to buy their shoes. They're not just filling out a form for the Nike central deposit saying send me 10 pairs of these shoes. They're going in and they're being tested in a very careful systematic way, a very personalized way with rapid turnaround. So when I visited Nike, and this was like, gosh, 10 years ago, Um, they had a rapid prototyper. So they could, they could make a pair of shoes, uh, stick it on a runner's foot, go up to the treadmill, test it, say, ah, it's not quite right.

18:52Let's build another shoe with slightly different parameters and come back tomorrow and test that. And so I was there when they were testing the stiffness rather of the carbon fiber plate. So they were having each runner do a series of tests in three different shoes with a sort of soft, medium, and stiff plate to try and zero in on. Every runner's different. Every runner weighs, you know, it depends how much you weigh, how much force you put into the ground when you run. And so not every Nike athlete gets this level of attention. But for this sub two or breaking two project, which they must have spent certainly millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars on, they were pulling out all the stops.

19:29And so it was really interesting to see, like, you know, right down to every thread of every piece of garment. They were trying to think about how does this help or hurt the runner.

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20:34Head to Sierra or Sierra.com for the brands you want at the prices that let you do it all. From athletic to athletic-ish, Sierra's got it. So then, you know, fast forward after Kipchoge's 2019 success, then it was seven years we went without anyone breaking the two-hour barrier. in this controlled setting or in an official race until this year where we had two runners break the two-hour barrier in the same race. So, you know, how did that happen? Why did it take those seven years for this to happen on an official course? And what was so special about the London Marathon this year? Yeah. So first of all, this sort of phony war that happened after Kipchoge broke 2019 is interesting because as much as I, like I, I write about sports science and I'm very interested in the biomechanics and the physiology, but I also think psychology is, is super important in, in performance, right?

21:36Like what, what do you believe is possible? And that's going to dictate in part what, what is possible. Um, not that you can just dream of anything and achieve it, but so after, after Kipchoge ran two flat 25, uh, and then once he actually ran sub two in these exhibition races, I was confident that this would trickle out into the real world and that people would start running faster and maybe even break two hours. By then I had revised my 2075 prediction. I knew it was coming sooner. And so we went through this phase for a few years where every time there was a major marathon, there was a few very fast marathons in the world, Chicago, Berlin, London, Valencia.

22:15Anytime there was a major marathon like that. I would get up at like 4 a.m. or 3 a.m. so that I could watch if the race was in Europe, because I was like, this could be the day. We're going to break two hours now. And the marathon is a very tricky beast. And the weather has to be just right. The wind, the training has to have gone just right. So there were a bunch of races where it was like, it could have happened, but it was just too hot today. They ran really fast, but it was too hot, or it was raining, or so-and-so got injured just two weeks before. And after a while, then the pandemic came, which kind of messed up marathoning for a while.

22:48And so I got out of the habit of getting up at 3 a.m. to watch these races. And also, there was a guy named Kelvin Kipton who came along. We thought this was going to be the age of Elliot Kipchoge. He was the best runner ever, but he was getting older. And all of a sudden, this really unheralded runner came and ran a very fast debut marathon and then ran two hours and 25 seconds. So he broke Elliot Kipchoge's official world record. And 25 seconds, that's nothing. That's less than a second per mile that he has to get off. So we're like, Kelvin Kipton is going to break the two-hour marathon next time.

23:20And then he got killed in a car accident. Extremely sad. He and his coach both got killed. And there was this sense that, oh man, we had this young guy who was going to go sub two and now we'll never know what he was capable of. And so I would say this sub two-hour watch kind of tapered off for a year or two. people people i can say for me i i kind of stopped thinking it was going to happen tomorrow um and so london i i to my eternal shame i i didn't get up at 3am and watch it i didn't i watched it on replay once i woke up because nobody really thought it was going to happen they weren't no one was making a big fuss about it so in comparison uh a guy named josh kerr just broke the world record for one mile and he announced that he was going to do it and it was it's a very It was a 27-year-old record or something like that, like a really tough record to break.

24:08He announced it last fall. He said, this is the day I'm going to do it. This is the place I'm going to do it. This is how I'm going to do it. Be ready. Be there. I'll be there seven months later. And to his credit, to his eternal credit, he did it. And so there was a lot of hype and a lot of pressure. For the marathon, for Sebastian Sawi and Yomov Kajelcha, who both went under in London this spring, nobody expected it to happen. And in fact, Yomov Kajelcha, it was his first marathon. like nobody expected him to be anywhere near someone asked him in an interview a few days before the race like is a two-hour marathon going to happen and he just laughed he was like oh yeah not going to happen anytime soon I don't think so it's not possible and then he did it two days later so there was an element of um it was a good day and obviously Sebastian Salway asked the pacemakers to go fast and so he must have thought it was possible but it it came out of the blue And I think that it was two things.

25:03It was a surprise to people, which is awesome. And it was a race. They were together until the final mile. And normally when you have a race that's that fast, you don't get the pleasure of a head-to-head competition to you. So it was a special day. Wow. Yeah. I guess, you know, seeing these two athletes go sub two hours at the same time, you know, what made you think then it's the shoes that did it? And, you know, how much of it is just having these really special athletes? Yeah. I mean, so I think this is a really important point. I said at the beginning, there's a long answer and a short answer.

25:39The short answer, which is that it's the shoes, is an oversimplification. I do think we wouldn't be having this conversation if the shoes hadn't been dramatically improved. So in that sense, the shoes are a necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition. The shoes on their own don't get you there. A few other things. One of which, like you said, is these are generational athletes. These are extremely special athletes who've been training in a way that makes this possible in a way that, you know, comparing eras is often is really hard. But what was different about the best marathoners of the 70s.

26:14I mean, they were doing a lot of things. They were training very hard, but these guys are dialing in every detail. But there's also some other technological things that are going on. There's been a revolution in fueling. Some people call it the carbolution, a carbohydrate revolution. People are taking, during the race, while they're running, they're ingesting levels of carbohydrate that would have been dismissed is absolutely insane five years ago. It's not possible. It's not physiologically possible. The advice used to be, try, if it's possible, if you can do it without puking, see if you can get in 60 grams of carbohydrate per hour during exercise.