The Science of Running
By Alex Hutchinson Whither the Marathon, Power Meter Showdown
On April 15, a few days before the Boston Marathon was to have taken place, an international team of physiologists published an analysis in the Journal of Applied Physiology of the future of marathoning. The article was accompanied by 35 responses from research teams around the world, spitballing ideas about where the next breakthroughs might emerge. Little did any of the scientists know how completely the world would have changed by the time their ideas were published.
As I write this, no one is sure what marathons and half-marathons are going to look like in the coming months. If they happen at all, there may be significant changes, such as staggered starts to facilitate social distancing along the route. Either way, that suggests that the performance-boosting magic of running in a big crowd will be hard to come by. That’s a challenge, but also an opportunity to ref lect on what you’re seeking from the race experience.
For most people, when really trying to push the limits of their capabilities, running alone is harder than running in a crowd. A recent study from researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, offers some insights into why. They asked 14 runners to complete a pair of 10k races, once solo and once in a competition against everyone else in the study, and periodically assessed their psychological state during the races.
The first result to note: the runners finished about a minute faster in the group race. Their subjective sense of effort was essentially the same throughout the two races, meaning they were able to run faster without feeling like they were pushing harder.
To understand why, the researchers also assessed the runners’ “affect,” a measure of how positive or negative they felt about the experience. On a scale of -5 to +5, they started both races with a mildly positive rating of about +2 on average. That stayed roughly constant in the group race, but declined steadily throughout the solo race, dipping below zero for the last two kilometres. In essence, the runners simply weren’t having as much fun as they battled through their solo 10k.
That f inding suggests that the seemingly extraneous details at big road races – t he cheering sect ions, t he live bands, t he kids handing out water, and, most importantly, the other runners – actually do play an important role. They make the fundamental loneliness of long-distance running more fun, and as a result , they make it faster. Some of these elements will be hard to recapt ure until social distancing rules are eliminated, but others can be faked: spark your competitive f ires by entering a virt ual race, setting specif ic goals and sharing them with friends. Enlist a few of those friends to cheer you on and perhaps help you refuel. Post t he results on St rava.
As for the physiologists’ take on the future of marathoning, it mostly focused on three key traits that describe running power: VO2 max, lactate threshold and running economy. The latter, a measure of efficiency, seems the likeliest candidate for further improvement – perhaps through harder strength training, better biomechanics, or even (this one was a little unconventional) by having runners synchronize their strides with each other. Shoes, too, could fuel further improvements, they noted. After all, before the pandemic hit, the hottest and most controversial topic in running was the wave of new carbon-fibre-plated shoes hitting the market. We’ll know the running world is back to normal when it finally seems worthwhile, once again, to argue about shoes.