Faster

In the last few years endurance athletes across multiple disciplines including running, triathlon and cycling have been crushing previous best times. 

Where are the gains coming from, and can recreational athletes also benefit from them?

Ultra-running records have fallen in UTMB, Comrades, Western States and Leadville. In the Tour de France it is not only Vingegaard and Pogačar that are showing incredible performances. Even the 20th-placed TDF rider has power numbers that would have won the race a decade ago. 

Of the 28 all-time fastest results in the Western States, 11 were at this year’s edition. Of the top 9 times ever, 6 were in this race. The last Leadville had the fastest men's podium ever, including the course record and the women’s 2nd fastest time. There have been records on the track for 24 hrs and 100 miles. The South African, Comrades road ultra record fell for both the men and the women.

So what is it that is making these athletes faster? And are these things available to those who are not at the front of the pack? 

There seem to be lots of drivers coming together, so let’s explore three such factors; super shoes, nutrition, and training modalities.

Super Shoes

Is it a coincidence that David Roach and Tom Evans set record times at Leadville and Western States respectively in the Adidas Agravic Speed Ultra, one of the few commercially available trail super-shoes on the market? Probably yes, but it shows that leading trail runners are looking for the same game-changing shoe performance as their road racing peers.

Due to the varied surfaces, the contribution will be less, but it all adds up. You need to also consider which shoes they are using for easy trails, or the road and track workouts. No doubt a road super-shoe. The speed benefits may be marginal on race day but if they reduce lower leg fatigue, it allows them to train more and recover better. It is more a recovery modality gain than a pure percentage pace improvement gain.

It is important to note that unless you are at the limit of your capabilities, getting “help” from your shoes may not be beneficial. For low-mileage amateurs, you may want get the proprioceptive benefits and the additional fatiguing stimulus with more minimalist shoes.

Nor are trail super shoes the main factor in the elite field. Most high-level runners are not in plated shoes. Killian’s NN shoes have no plate but he is still setting records at distances where marginal gains are even more important.

Nevertheless, this could be the start of a trail shoe revolution, like the one we have seen on the road. What I believe we are really seeing is that these shoes allow top athletes to express some of the other drivers more directly. One factor that inarguably has made a massive impact is nutrition and supplementation.

Nutrition

High carbohydrate intake has become the norm. You’d be an outlier in the pro peloton if you were not taking in 120 to 140g per hour. The rationale is simple, less fatigue and higher performance for longer. Whether you're chasing podiums or cut-offs, this is very important.

In lower metabolic cost pursuits we do not need to go that high, with 60 to 90g being a more realistic goal for most of us. Superstar ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter takes only 50 to 60g per hour. Horses for courses. But there is no doubt that the fueling products have improved and cause less GI distress. Whether you can get up to very high levels is individual, but even if it means you can only increase your intake by 20%, it is still an important net gain. 

We should not be over-focusing on race nutrition - it's less about race day (however important) - it's more about increasing the quality of your daily workouts and your ability to recover from them. More training stimulus with less recovery debt.

The fad of fasted training/fat adaption is something we hear less about.  Becoming more efficient at fat oxidation is a normal result of aerobic training. You don’t have to train in a fasted state to achieve it. There are certain individuals - I’m thinking Zach Bitter and Jeff Browning, that have been successful with carb-restricted diets, but you don’t see this in the female pro field.

I wouldn’t go down this route, but if you are male and you want to experiment, then be my guest (the margin for error is higher). For the ladies the science is clear - the impact on the endocrine system is not a good thing.

Note that in Professional cycling there are no keto athletes, I’d wager that ultra running has yet to reach the same marginal limits of human performance and therefore we see a broader range of approaches.

Some of the gains in ultra-running can be accredited to the professionalization of the sport, but we are even seeing it in mainstream athletics. Switching to the track, we saw 11 of the top 20 male 800m times run this year, none of the remaining 9 times were run in the last decade, so what else is new?

Sodium Bicarbonate has been known for decades to help reduce high-intensity acidosis but it was also notorious for creating GI distress which made it impractical. There are now modalities to take this as a supplement to avoid these issues - Maurten has been leading in this field with their Bicarb System product - and this seems to have been key for these performances. Bicarbonate is interesting and certainly key for performance gains in races where high lactate/hydrogen ion shuttling is critical, but we also see it used by ultra-stars like Killan, Evans and Roach. There is also research showing that it increases mitochondrial signaling adaptations, although the mechanisms for this are not fully known.

Another new domain is Ketone supplementation, the research on the positive effect of ketones on recovery is now well researched. The downside to these last two, is that they are currently very expensive, so they may not be the first marginal gains you go for as a non-sponsored athlete.

Training Modalities

I would argue that there has not been a dramatic change in the way elite athletes train, but everything around the way they train has changed. This can be summed up with the word professionalism. Scott Jurek in 1998, was balancing a full time job with high level racing. The 2024 athletes do it as a full-time job with a full coaching team. More people doing more of the right things, means more high-level performances.

So how does that translate to the non-pro:

• Available knowledge - getting access to the information, like the topics I explore in this newsletter, is relatively easy. Training protocols and Strava feeds on how the best train is pretty much public record.

• Structured Training - recreational athletes adopt many of the structured training principles of the fastest athletes. Joggers have become runners.

• Coaching - this is no longer limited to the elite field. The number of amateurs being coached has increased dramatically. The understanding of the importance of technique and form impact on running economy has grown even at the base of the performance pyramid.

• Strength work - even non-elites understand the holistic system of performance gains and have more rounded training systems.

We have the same physiology and the same cellular adaptations. Yes, there may be genetic or other limiters, but the path to improvement has never been clearer. Even if these factors; gear, nutrition, and training only make you 1% quicker, that makes it easier and more fun.

Every time you can run 1% faster in a training session, the training stimulus accumulates. It is less about the race day performance and more about staking training gains over the months and even years before.

It really boils down to an adaptation protocol - they (and we) are adapting better. Adaptation rates skyrocket when you fuel well, when you have less leg fatigue and when you execute with a more precise training stimulus. It’s about stacking adaptations. If we can do slightly more every day the adaptations to stimulus magnify.

We can talk about factors like shoes, nutrition, and training separately but isn’t it really all about recovery?

Stimulus + Recovery = Adaptation. Stress plus rest equals growth, without adequate recovery, we do not get the targeted adaptation. For the same recovery debt as before, we can train harder and smarter (shoes, nutrition, and structured training). 

Tomorrow’s workout has always been the most important workout. Now we are just a little better recovered to get the most out of it!