How the nutrition revolution has allowed human beings to lose two hours in the marathon

“Today I had two slices of bread, honey and tea for breakfast”

This was Sabastian Sawe’s brief response to the journalist who had answered what he had had for breakfast that morning.

It wasn’t an elevator conversation. It was not pure curiosity among office colleagues before facing a day in front of the computer. Although the answer could very well have been the same.

Sawe is not just anyone. Sawe is the fastest man on the planet when it comes to covering 42,195 meters. Sawe is, as of yesterday, the winner of the London Marathon, the recordman of distance and the first person to break down the mythical barrier of two hours in distance. A barrier that was considered unattainable just a handful of years ago.

But to round off the accumulation of impossible things that were experienced yesterday in London, Sawe is not the only human to run at a sustained pace of 2’49″/km, repeating the effort up to 42 times and an agonizing and endless 195 metres. Yomif Kejelcha entered just 11 seconds later. Of course, he will have the more than deserved consolation of being the fastest debutant in the history of the distance.

Jacob Kiplimo must have been astonished when he realized that the 120 minutes and 28 seconds it took him to cover that same distance had only been enough for him to be third when just two hours earlier they would have made him the new world record holder.

All of them are the pure embodiment of a sport that has experienced a revolution in a handful of years. “Yomif didn’t have breakfast on race day,” Alfonso Beltrá, CEO of Holy mother. Beltrá is the founder of a Spanish sports nutrition company, which grew up in cycling but has pivoted to athletics. A few weeks ago, Beltrá himself defended on the Find Your Everest podcast that they were sure that they could be the ones to break the mythical barrier.

High competition is the result of research and results that put the athlete in front of a challenge that ends up being decided by details. The differences are minimal and nutrition is what has ended up tipping the balance.

A revolution to make the impossible possible

Although neither Sawe nor Kejelcha ate a copious breakfast as the most undocumented logic dictates, neither of them stood at the starting line empty. Their stomachs were, but the important thing was that their glycogen stores were bursting with energy.

“He doesn’t have breakfast at all on race day, we have a specific drink with 100 grams of carbohydrates that he finishes two hours before the race and another product that we will launch in three months. Then he warms up and six or seven minutes before leaving he drinks a gel with caffeine and 45 grams of carbohydrates,” Beltrán tells us about the Ethiopian athlete who ate 145 grams of carbohydrates before departure. “That’s why we skipped the kilometer five aid station, we couldn’t put in more,” he emphasizes.

A very similar amount would have been handled by Sawe’s team. The Kenyan athlete took, in addition to the two slices of bread with honey, a Drink Mix 320 by Maurtena company that has revolutionized sports nutrition in recent years. This is equivalent to 80 grams of carbohydrates and added a Gel 100 that provides another 25 grams of carbohydrates. The total sum between energy drinks, gel and breakfast adds up to about 140-150 grams like Kejelcha. It is a figure similar to taking 200 grams of pasta before running.

And then, the performance began.

Kejelcha uses Santamadre gels diluted in the appropriate proportion of water to take them with bottles and facilitate ingestion. Sawe, for her part, opted for Maurten’s Drink Mix 160 drink at the first three aid stations (kilometers 5, 10 and 15). In the fourth (km 20) take a little less drink, about 130 ml, but take a gel with caffeine. And from here, at kilometers 25, 30, 35 and 40, 130 ml is prescribed but of the Drink Mix 320, which has a greater carbohydrate load. It is believed, however, that a drum fell.

In total, Sawe’s intake remained at about 115 g/h of carbohydrates.

The figure is very high and unthinkable just a few years ago. And, despite this, it pales in comparison to what was planned for Kejelcha. From Santamadre they explain to us that the final objective was to move around 140 gr/h of carbohydrates in this case. “It’s about keeping your deposits full for as long as possible, being aware that you will always be in deficit, losing more than you earn,” says Beltrá.

In this case, they do confirm that the athlete had problems at kilometers 25 and 35, where he lost the bottles. “That coincides with the decline that they experienced at kilometer 41″, laments the CEO of Santamadre who, he emphasizes, for them a debut like this shows that “we don’t know their ceiling. When he arrived he was upset for losing the race, he asked us for forgiveness for losing the two bottles… he wasn’t aware of what he had done, nor did he know it when he hugged me at the finish line.”

In this case, Kejelcha used Santamadre gels diluted in water. The limit is set, according to the Spanish company, by the athlete’s own stomach. “The protocol has to be personalized. We have controlled all the variables since we started working together, all meals, rest, body temperature, glycemic peaks… the nutritional strategy was studied to take into account the glycemic index of each moment,” Beltrá explains to us.

Kejelcha was, in fact, the only athlete among the first finishers to use a different brand than Maurten. This brand revolutionized athletics with the sponsorship of Eliud Kipchoge and has been the leader in recent years thanks to its famous Hydrogel. With this gel, the brand managed to encapsulate glucose and fructose, facilitating intake and reducing stomach problems.

Without stomach problems, the amount of carbohydrates that can be ingested skyrockets. Javi Moro has been running for decades and is the magazine’s material director Corridorspecialized in athletics. It explains in a simple way what happens when you have no problem drinking more gels or more energy drinks.

“Brands work with two types of carbohydrates They are absorbed through different routes in the intestine and stomach. Without saturating them, you can add more carbohydrates and that’s the difference. Before, athletes arrived with very low or no loads and that’s why ‘the wall’ arrived.

“The wall” is as famous as it is feared among marathoners but we are witnessing a generation that seems to have completely torn it down. Without sufficient hydration and with glycogen reserves at a minimum, the athletes fainted before reaching the finish line. These famous birds are what is known as “the wall” and used to occur between kilometers 30 and 32 when the race gets really complicated and the strength is already tight. It is a sensation that is somewhat mental but much physiological.

Now, by constantly nourishing yourself you can run at very high speeds. It was unthinkable until very recently that the second half of the race could be run faster than the first, almost perfect management was necessary. Kiptum already achieved it in Chicago in 2023. Yesterday, in London, the first 21 kilometers were completed in one hour and a half minute, the second was covered in 59 minutes nailed down.

During all these years, Maurten’s advantage has been such that he has taken podiums around the world. But that advantage has been narrowing and firms like Santamadre or Fantéboth Spanish, have investigated different glucose and fructose ratios, have added sodium to the gels and even antioxidants.

This is the case of the gel Reset from Santamadre, a product that uses antioxidants obtained through a specific processing of cherries that manages to reduce inflammation in the body when we are running. It was thought, Beltrá tells us, how a product designed for ultra-distance (more than 100 miles or 160 kilometers) but it has been seen that its results in long-distance tests such as the marathon are very good.

The incorporation of sodium into the carbohydrate stream in the gel itself is another substantial difference. One of the recurring problems when facing a challenge like a marathon was sodium. A salt deficiency causes cramps, in the best of cases, but the water and electrical imbalance can cause dizziness, extreme fatigue and even hyponatremia associated with exercise, even leading to seizures, coma and even death in the most extreme cases.

These latest investigations are key for Javi Moro because, as he explains, the key is not in the race. Just as important as reaching a plan to add 115 or 140 grams/h of carbohydrates is the advantage that is obtained by training. And keeping your stores full of glycogen not only facilitates greater performance, it also allows for better recovery.

And this is what is truly rewarded when one trains a marathon. The marathon is perseverance and the sum of kilometers. Sawe, in the award months, has reached up to 241 kilometers in a single week. The volumes are already higher than the figures that athletes managed two decades ago.

But, above all, the quality of those kilometers is better. Because they have shoes that protect the muscles more, because they recover better and because the efforts in the race always find a full tank.

Athletes always had high-performance engines. The difference is that today they also have a hose that constantly refills the tanks.

Photo | London Marathon

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