It's his first marathon ever, but he's a very experienced runner. It would be hard to find a better prospect for a good first marathon. He's a multiple (former) world record holder and medalist at shorter distances from the mile up to half marathon. His half marathon is still 2nd all time.
I wouldn't have predicted this out of nowhere, but if you told me a marathon debut went this well and asked me to guess whose it was, I like to think I'd have come up with Kejelcha in my top few picks.
That said, great 5000/10000 athletes don't always have great marathon careers. An example from this race is the world record holder at both those distances, Joshua Cheptegei. He's run several marathons but none spectacular by his standards. He was in this race too but 7 minutes back.
A 1:59 half marathon time is achievable for pretty much anyone who doesn't have a serious physical disability and is willing to put in the necessary training. I've done it a few times and have no particular talent for running.
That's a 9m10sec per mile for 2 hours. While I'd agree that there are millions or even billions of people who could train to do that, I think it's wrong to suggest that "pretty much anyone" could do that.
My predicted half time is under 2 hours and I was sedentary for years before starting to run 9 months ago, and I'm 40 years old.
Endurance sports are quite accessible and don't require that much time, effort, or talent to get way better than the vast majority of people, it's just consistency.
I've been an endurance athlete most of my life, running 100 miles at 17, a 5:30 mile at 50, and lots of other stuff in between. I know that a 9min/mile pace is "easily achievable" by many folks, which is why I noted that millions or billions of people could do this. Nevertheless, I think it is really important to not overstate how achievable this is - there are many more people who could not do this than could, I think.
FWIW, that now includes me, as a 62 year old. I can hit 6:30 pace for 400m, but find it almost impossible to get under 10:0x for a mile. And that's even after 6 months of training for a 50 mile trail race.
I stand by my claim that pretty much anyone could do that. In some cases this may require a significant lifestyle change. I've seen some real slobs reach that goal, it just takes a bit of sustained, consistent discipline.
Now hitting a 1:30 HM is something different and will be forever out of reach for many people.
Sometimes they have big running machines with a crash mat around them running at 2h marathon pace at running shows. I’ve o ly seen them on video - no one can keep up with it for more than 30 odd seconds. It’s INSANE they are running this fast.
Also bear in mind running a single mile under 4 mins was considered impossible for a long time.
> Very few mere mortals could run that fast for even 100m.
That works out to roughly a 16.7-second 100m. While certainly not crawling, that would be a fairly average pace for a fairly fit middle- to early-high-schooler with a bit of practice.
Yes that’s insane to maintain for a marathon, but it’s not even remotely out of reach for 100m for most relatively-fit people at some point in their lives.
I think it's even slow for high schoolers. I didn't practice that much and ran 100m in 12.5s from rest at my peak. 4s slower is snail pace. I think most in my class could run that fast (or slow).
I agree. I ran mid 16s in 8th grade, and was in the 14s in high school, with the only training being whatever we did in gym class. But I do also look at the sheer number of overweight kids these days and figured, well maybe mid-16s is actually a reasonable average point.
Here's a random high school in Northern California. Everyone on the team is beating 16.7 seconds in the 100m. For the 1600m there are six kids with times under 4m30s and another seven with times under 4m40s, all in the last month.
Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.
OK, so let's do the math. There's about 25k high schools in the USA. Let's suppose they all have a track team, and let's assume that they all have 5 team members who can break 04:30 for 1600m. Sure, at some schools that's too few, but at others it is too many.
That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.
Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.
We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.
We used to be amazed when I ran cross country in high school that these pro marathoners would best all of us in our approx 5K(3ish mile) races and then go on to repeat that distance multiple times.
The fastest 1km I ever ran was around 3m20s, I felt like I was sprinting, and was fully cooked at the finish line.
Afterwards I did some quick numbers and realised the average marathon runner was not only going a lot quicker than I was, but they were doing it for a further 41km
Pacing is a big part of endurance sport. If you're in the lead you know intellectually you want to pace for sub-2 hours, but if you're watching someone beat you maybe it gives you the extra edge?
It does sound like the course and the weather made it more likely to happen. And technical advances in shoe composition.
That's not a description of how the pacing for this race actually happened.
> The leading men went through halfway in 60 minutes and 29 seconds: fast but not exceptionally so. But it turned out that Sawe was merely warming up.
Between 30 and 35 kilometres, Sawe and Kejelcha ran a stunning 13:54 for 5km to see off Kiplimo. Yet, staggeringly, more was to come as the pair covered kilometres 35 to 40 in 13:42. To put this into context, that time is two seconds faster than the 5km parkrun world record, set by the Irish international Nick Griggs.
It was only after a 24th mile, run in 4:12, that Kejelcha wilted. But still Sawe kept going. Astonishingly, he crossed the line having run the second half in just over 59 minutes.
“Before 41 kilometres, I’m enjoying, I’m relaxed,” said Kejelcha, who had won silver over 10,000m at last year’s world championships.
“My body is all great. At exactly 41 kilometres, my body stopped. I tried to push, but my legs were done.
Sawe, though, powered on to set the fastest official marathon time in history. For good measure, it was also 10 seconds faster than Eliud Kipchoge’s unofficial 26.2 mile best, set in Vienna in 2019.
The previous official record was Kelvin Kiptum's time of 2:00:35 in 2023. Eliud Kipchoge did 1:59:40 in 2019, but that wasn't record-eligible as it was held under controlled conditions. Source: The article.
Weather and course conditions were good but not perfect. There is potential to take a few more seconds off the world record in slightly colder conditions and on a course with fewer turns. I wouldn't be surprised to see someone run 1:58 in the next few years.
And the only place this appears on ESPN is if you click on "Olympics," which has nothing to do with this race. Where coverage should be: on the home page.
It’s certainly noteworthy and interesting but I could see how Running as sport isn’t popular enough for front page. Especially during NBA and NHL playoffs, NFL draft, and whatever else might be going on.
If this happened at Chicago, it would be front page news. Boston and NY aren’t WR eligible. Since it happened in London, place it behind soccer in the priority list.
This is the most significant record in running to fall since 1954 when a sub-4 minute mile was run. I think running can be front page news once a century
I get it and agree, but historical significance doesn’t factor into what they put on front page or what is popular at the moment. It’s not a slow news day for sports and they don’t think their viewers care enough. I’m sure if we had their data it would show us that they wouldn’t.
It’s not meant to be malicious they just don’t report on things that don’t get enough engagement. If you look at the long list of sports they cover, there’s nothing running related even mentioned. They do now have an article on it in their Olympics category as of 2 hours ago. But I feel like them not having a breaking news coverage on a Sunday in this sport is to be expected more so than your expectation of them covering it.
Stunning results at the top of the field. Some interesting takeaways on both fuelling and shoes.
Maurten spent months working with Sawe and other runners getting their gut capacity trained so they could absorb and burn 100 carbs per hour[0][1]
> The Maurten research team was embedded with Sawe’s team in Kenya for 32 days across six trips between last and this April. They were training his gut to absorb that load by mimicking race-day protocol in training. The hydrogel technology they have developed over the past 10 years now allows athletes to absorb 90–120 grams of carbs per hour without GI distress.
Second is the shoes. Adidas Adizero weigh 96 grams[2] with new foam tech and new carbon plates
Nike and INEOS spent millions over years to get Kipchoge to a sub-2 in artificial conditions, and now the elite end of the field are knocking that barrier out in race conditions. Unreal.
Running tech and training have been revolutionized in the past few years.
It’s also confusing that most nutritional labels say “calories” (Cal) when they really mean kilocalories (kcal). And those are different from regular (‘small’) calories
(a measure of energy needed to heat 1g water 1c).
1 food calorie as listed on a food label is enough to heat 1kg of water by 1c
(If the nutritional calories in the drink had been only the same number of thermodynamic calories, the drink would have been energetically negative for the body because of its low temperature.)
Because calories simply do not matter. At high intensities of working out, it's the amount of carbohydrates you can consume that allow more fuel to be burnt.
"In the aerobic exercise domain up to ~100% of maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max), CHO is the dominant fuel, as CHO-based oxidative metabolism can be activated quickly, provide all of the fuel at high aerobic power outputs (> 85-90% VO2max) and is a more efficient fuel (kcal/L O2 used) when compared to fat."
Calories do matter (obviously, as energy intake is the entire point) but as you note the specific form that the fuel takes matters. However "carbs" is a catch all that includes plenty of things that (I assume) would be of similarly minimal use in this scenario. The calories need to take a very specific chemical form for this to work.
The wording is certainly confusing here, but yes the calories don’t matter as much as the form. Eating protein and fats simply give you minimal useful calories during the race. Even most carbs won’t be useful if they are more complex.
Then why replace one imprecise term with another? Fiber is a carbohydrate. Humans use close to nothing from its energy. (Though it plays another important role in the digesive system.)
Try eating 100g of grass per hour during a marathon and you will see. That's the metabolic edge horses have over humans.
Horses don't eat during races (and aren't evolutionarily disposed to marathons, anyway). No edge there; it takes quite a while for their symbiotic gut flora to downconvert fodder to glucose.
burning a hundred calories an hour is trivial. Most people will burn 100 calories per mile when walking or running, and more if moving as fast as these athletes, and many, many humans can do this for far, far longer than 2 hours.
It's the absorbtion that's the challenge. Maurten is not somehow alone in the particular stuff they've developed - ultra runners are generally shifting up into the 90-120 gram/hr range (or beyond!), using a variety of different companies' products. The gut training protocols for this are widely discussed in the world of running for almost any distance above a half marathon.
GP left out the units but is clearly talking about grams ("absorb ... 100 carbs per hour"), not calories (no one needs training to absorb 25g/hr). Carbs are 4 kcal/g. 100g of carb (400 kcal) an hour isn't replacement level for even casual athletic efforts, but it does mitigate the loss of glycogen in muscle somewhat.
Wow so he was absorbing 400 calories per hour with this gel, but he was likely burning 3-4x that amount (or even more) while running 13.1 miles per hour!
In a two hour race that’s still 800 bonus calories, that’s something.
The race to tolerate lots of carbs is usually something you think of in 8 hour Ironmans. The good part is you can do most of it on the bike, which is much easier to eat as you go. As far as I know, many elite runners were doing like 50% water, 50% sports drink and consuming way under 100g.
> As far as I know, many elite runners were doing like 50% water, 50% sports drink and consuming way under 100g.
This used to be true, and is still true for many athletes up the marathon distance. Above that, however, the momentum has swung heavily to very high carb intake. Most (though not all) of the world's best ultra runners (we're talking 7:00 min/mile pace through mountainous terrain) are picking this up, with many getting to and beyond 100g/hr of carb consumption.
Where does discussion on gut training occur? All I know is you need a 5:4 ratio of glucose to fructose? Then when you train, you use the gels and the more you do it, the more capable your gut gets at absorbing without distress.
Yes but the science is actually achieving that and finding the limits. It used to be thought that 60g carbs/hour was the limit, then 100g, now it’s thought to be 120g.
It’s also about the methods of achieving that under stress without spewing it all back up. Ironman athletes would stuff their faces on the bike under the assumption that this volume of carb absorption wasn’t possible while running.
Some of the challenge in research will come from competitors not wanting to publish results to maintain an edge. It is mitigated by the visual of the race by (you can see athletes pounding carbs), as well as the nutrition companies wanting to sell more product. This will cause them to publish some information to convince us amateurs to quadruple our purchase volume ;-)
AFAIK 5:4 is just the lowest ratio they've tested. Personally I use table sugar (1:1) and can sustain rates above 100g/h. Haven't hit the ceiling yet, don't really feel the need to explore where that is yet because exceeding the absorption rate comes with the risk of diarrhoea which is bad at any time but especially when you're in the middle of a training session and who knows where the nearest toilet is.
Gut training is consuming large amounts of carbohydrate (preferably in the same form you intend to use when racing), yes.
Eating the same amount of table sugar or of a commercial gel should have pretty much the same effect on performance.
However, for many people eating so much of a very sweet food becomes very unpleasant.
It is very easy and cheap to make at home a gel by boiling in water corn starch mixed with fructose in a microwave oven, for a few minutes. Swallowing such a gel should feel much less sweet than the same amount of a sugar solution.
As far as I know, the only difference between such a gel made at home and the commercial gels for athletes is that in the latter the starch is pre-digested with some bacterial enzyme, so that the long starch molecules are broken into short molecules of dextrine and maltose.
This processing shortens the time until the absorption in the gut, but I am not sure if this is really an advantage in all cases. A slower absorption will maintain an elevated blood glucose level for a longer time after ingestion, which may be preferable if you feed periodically, because it avoids wide fluctuations in the glucose level, while a faster absorption might be useful for an immediate recovery when the glucose level has been severely depleted by not feeding for a long time.
I've read that even if you absorb it all, there's some question about whether it's useful. This Alex Hutchinson article suggests, among other things, that it may spare your fat stores rather than your muscle glycogen:
> Even if you can absorb 120 grams per hour, it might not make you faster. In Podlogar’s study, cyclists burned more exogenous carbs when they consumed 120 rather than 90 grams per hour, but that didn’t reduce their rate of endogenous carb-burning—that is, they were still depleting the glycogen stores in their muscles just as quickly.
It doesn't take much. If an elite burns 1500-2000 kcal running a marathon, even ignoring glycogen and exogenous carb, that's only ~195-260g of body fat (~7.7 kcal/g). Even at an extremely lean 4% body fat, Kejelcha would have 2360g of body fat available. (He's probably in the slightly higher 5-10% range.)
(And obviously, the majority of those 1500-2000 kcal are coming from stored glycogen rather than fat.)
If we're only talking about the marginal difference between 90 and 120 g/hr of exogenous carb, then that's 60g over two hours or 240 kcal -- equating to 31g of stored body fat. That's nothing.
The last few years, cycling and triathlon have been experimenting with upto 120g carbs intake per hour. Last year, Cameron Wurf ate 200g carbs per hour when he broke the world record for fastest bike split ever in a triathlon (which was broken again a few months later).
a 2025 look at elite triathletes fueling at https://www.triathlete.com/nutrition/race-fueling/ironman-wo... shows that norwegian athletes are ingesting higher amounts of carbs (~180g/hr bike, ~120g/hr run - 2 males, ~150g/hr both run & bike - 1 female) especially for the bike portion.
Is there anything here a people who should be dieting could learn here? I’ve found when running, every 3-4km if I do t have sugars/gatorade my blood sugar gets so low I end up almost confused… running suburban streets is tough because I’ve got to cross the road when I’m midly delirious!
I guess it's the classic case of one not being able to outrun a bad diet.
If fueling during the activity stops you from overeating afterwards and possibly allows you to exercise a bit longer it is worth it, even though it seems counter productive.
How far are you running total, both per run and per week?
Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.
Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.
Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.
adidas introduces the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3 – the lightest and fastest Adizero shoe ever, weighing an average 97* grams.
The race-day shoe represents the culmination of three years of cutting-edge research. It is 30% lighter, delivers 11% greater forefoot energy return, and improves running economy by 1.6% compared to its predecessor - making it a record breaker before it’s even laced up.
The shoe will launch with a highly limited release, with ambitious runners able to sign up for the chance to get their hands on a pair from April 23. This will be followed by a wider release in the fall marathon season. The Adizero adios Pro Evo 3 will cost $500/€500.
For other marathon racing shoes, Google says:
The Nike Alphafly 3 is the lightest in the series, weighing approximately 7.0–7.7 oz (198–218g) for a men's size 9, and 6.1 oz (174g) for women's sizes.
The PUMA Deviate NITRO™ Elite 3 is exceptionally lightweight, typically weighing 194g (6.8 oz) for a men's size 8 (UK)
You don't need to be competing on the world stage to enjoy some of the benefits of Alpha flys or those pumas. 500 for the new Adidas does seem a little silly though.
London is a fast course. Let’s see what happens in Chicago and Berlin. If it was primarily tech that did it, we should see the record fall again.
In his marathon debut too.
I wouldn't have predicted this out of nowhere, but if you told me a marathon debut went this well and asked me to guess whose it was, I like to think I'd have come up with Kejelcha in my top few picks.
That said, great 5000/10000 athletes don't always have great marathon careers. An example from this race is the world record holder at both those distances, Joshua Cheptegei. He's run several marathons but none spectacular by his standards. He was in this race too but 7 minutes back.
Rough that his Marathon time is also 2nd!
Edit: I was thinking in km/h and mixed it up. Sorry.
Just yesterday I saw a learner driving at what seemed 10 mph in a 40 mph road, creating a massive queue.
Endurance sports are quite accessible and don't require that much time, effort, or talent to get way better than the vast majority of people, it's just consistency.
FWIW, that now includes me, as a 62 year old. I can hit 6:30 pace for 400m, but find it almost impossible to get under 10:0x for a mile. And that's even after 6 months of training for a 50 mile trail race.
Considering that you can still do a decent sprint over 400m and have the endurance for ultra marathon distances at lower pace, it sounds a bit odd.
Now hitting a 1:30 HM is something different and will be forever out of reach for many people.
This is a nice video of the last 10 mins of the historic marathon race finish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1voTDQQQf5g
Very few mere mortals could run that fast for even 100m.
Also bear in mind running a single mile under 4 mins was considered impossible for a long time.
https://youtu.be/xkBmYQucyMs
That works out to roughly a 16.7-second 100m. While certainly not crawling, that would be a fairly average pace for a fairly fit middle- to early-high-schooler with a bit of practice.
Yes that’s insane to maintain for a marathon, but it’s not even remotely out of reach for 100m for most relatively-fit people at some point in their lives.
At my peak, I finished the NYC Marathon in the top 2%. I still finished 45 minutes behind the winner.
It feels like elite athletes aren’t even competing in the same sport.
https://www.athletic.net/team/770/track-and-field-outdoor/20...
* of course one mile is hardly comparable to the marathon that pros are able to sustain such speeds over...
https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/rankings/list/168546/...
That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.
Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.
I rest my case.
It’s totally remarkable.
Afterwards I did some quick numbers and realised the average marathon runner was not only going a lot quicker than I was, but they were doing it for a further 41km
Was there perfect conditions.or something?
Insane you could run 1:59:41 and not win!
It does sound like the course and the weather made it more likely to happen. And technical advances in shoe composition.
> The leading men went through halfway in 60 minutes and 29 seconds: fast but not exceptionally so. But it turned out that Sawe was merely warming up.
Between 30 and 35 kilometres, Sawe and Kejelcha ran a stunning 13:54 for 5km to see off Kiplimo. Yet, staggeringly, more was to come as the pair covered kilometres 35 to 40 in 13:42. To put this into context, that time is two seconds faster than the 5km parkrun world record, set by the Irish international Nick Griggs.
It was only after a 24th mile, run in 4:12, that Kejelcha wilted. But still Sawe kept going. Astonishingly, he crossed the line having run the second half in just over 59 minutes.
“Before 41 kilometres, I’m enjoying, I’m relaxed,” said Kejelcha, who had won silver over 10,000m at last year’s world championships.
“My body is all great. At exactly 41 kilometres, my body stopped. I tried to push, but my legs were done.
Sawe, though, powered on to set the fastest official marathon time in history. For good measure, it was also 10 seconds faster than Eliud Kipchoge’s unofficial 26.2 mile best, set in Vienna in 2019.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/apr/26/sabastian-sawe...
Sabastian Sawe 1:59:30
Yomif Kejelcha 1:59:41
Jacob Kiplimo 2:00:28
The previous official record was Kelvin Kiptum's time of 2:00:35 in 2023. Eliud Kipchoge did 1:59:40 in 2019, but that wasn't record-eligible as it was held under controlled conditions. Source: The article.
It’s not meant to be malicious they just don’t report on things that don’t get enough engagement. If you look at the long list of sports they cover, there’s nothing running related even mentioned. They do now have an article on it in their Olympics category as of 2 hours ago. But I feel like them not having a breaking news coverage on a Sunday in this sport is to be expected more so than your expectation of them covering it.
Maurten spent months working with Sawe and other runners getting their gut capacity trained so they could absorb and burn 100 carbs per hour[0][1]
> The Maurten research team was embedded with Sawe’s team in Kenya for 32 days across six trips between last and this April. They were training his gut to absorb that load by mimicking race-day protocol in training. The hydrogel technology they have developed over the past 10 years now allows athletes to absorb 90–120 grams of carbs per hour without GI distress.
Second is the shoes. Adidas Adizero weigh 96 grams[2] with new foam tech and new carbon plates
Nike and INEOS spent millions over years to get Kipchoge to a sub-2 in artificial conditions, and now the elite end of the field are knocking that barrier out in race conditions. Unreal.
Running tech and training have been revolutionized in the past few years.
[0] https://marathonhandbook.com/sebastian-sawe-arrives-in-londo...
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DXmvAUvkWaq/
[2] https://www.runnersworld.com/uk/gear/shoes/a71129333/sabasti...
edit: correct :s/calories/carbs thanks
It was confusing when the running industry switched from calories to grams of carbs, but that's all anyone talks about now.
1 food calorie as listed on a food label is enough to heat 1kg of water by 1c
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-diet/
(If the nutritional calories in the drink had been only the same number of thermodynamic calories, the drink would have been energetically negative for the body because of its low temperature.)
"In the aerobic exercise domain up to ~100% of maximal oxygen uptake (VO2max), CHO is the dominant fuel, as CHO-based oxidative metabolism can be activated quickly, provide all of the fuel at high aerobic power outputs (> 85-90% VO2max) and is a more efficient fuel (kcal/L O2 used) when compared to fat."
https://www.gssiweb.org/sports-science-exchange/article/regu...
Try eating 100g of grass per hour during a marathon and you will see. That's the metabolic edge horses have over humans.
burning a hundred calories an hour is trivial. Most people will burn 100 calories per mile when walking or running, and more if moving as fast as these athletes, and many, many humans can do this for far, far longer than 2 hours.
It's the absorbtion that's the challenge. Maurten is not somehow alone in the particular stuff they've developed - ultra runners are generally shifting up into the 90-120 gram/hr range (or beyond!), using a variety of different companies' products. The gut training protocols for this are widely discussed in the world of running for almost any distance above a half marathon.
GP left out the units but is clearly talking about grams ("absorb ... 100 carbs per hour"), not calories (no one needs training to absorb 25g/hr). Carbs are 4 kcal/g. 100g of carb (400 kcal) an hour isn't replacement level for even casual athletic efforts, but it does mitigate the loss of glycogen in muscle somewhat.
The race to tolerate lots of carbs is usually something you think of in 8 hour Ironmans. The good part is you can do most of it on the bike, which is much easier to eat as you go. As far as I know, many elite runners were doing like 50% water, 50% sports drink and consuming way under 100g.
This used to be true, and is still true for many athletes up the marathon distance. Above that, however, the momentum has swung heavily to very high carb intake. Most (though not all) of the world's best ultra runners (we're talking 7:00 min/mile pace through mountainous terrain) are picking this up, with many getting to and beyond 100g/hr of carb consumption.
So ~2800 calories of carbs with some fat being burned.
Is that all the science to it?
It’s also about the methods of achieving that under stress without spewing it all back up. Ironman athletes would stuff their faces on the bike under the assumption that this volume of carb absorption wasn’t possible while running.
Some of the challenge in research will come from competitors not wanting to publish results to maintain an edge. It is mitigated by the visual of the race by (you can see athletes pounding carbs), as well as the nutrition companies wanting to sell more product. This will cause them to publish some information to convince us amateurs to quadruple our purchase volume ;-)
Gut training is consuming large amounts of carbohydrate (preferably in the same form you intend to use when racing), yes.
However, for many people eating so much of a very sweet food becomes very unpleasant.
It is very easy and cheap to make at home a gel by boiling in water corn starch mixed with fructose in a microwave oven, for a few minutes. Swallowing such a gel should feel much less sweet than the same amount of a sugar solution.
As far as I know, the only difference between such a gel made at home and the commercial gels for athletes is that in the latter the starch is pre-digested with some bacterial enzyme, so that the long starch molecules are broken into short molecules of dextrine and maltose.
This processing shortens the time until the absorption in the gut, but I am not sure if this is really an advantage in all cases. A slower absorption will maintain an elevated blood glucose level for a longer time after ingestion, which may be preferable if you feed periodically, because it avoids wide fluctuations in the glucose level, while a faster absorption might be useful for an immediate recovery when the glucose level has been severely depleted by not feeding for a long time.
> Even if you can absorb 120 grams per hour, it might not make you faster. In Podlogar’s study, cyclists burned more exogenous carbs when they consumed 120 rather than 90 grams per hour, but that didn’t reduce their rate of endogenous carb-burning—that is, they were still depleting the glycogen stores in their muscles just as quickly.
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/en...
https://archive.ph/Vpk0h
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9560939/
What fat stores?
(And obviously, the majority of those 1500-2000 kcal are coming from stored glycogen rather than fat.)
If we're only talking about the marginal difference between 90 and 120 g/hr of exogenous carb, then that's 60g over two hours or 240 kcal -- equating to 31g of stored body fat. That's nothing.
If fueling during the activity stops you from overeating afterwards and possibly allows you to exercise a bit longer it is worth it, even though it seems counter productive.
Dang… I was hoping for some cheat level wisdom :)
Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.
Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.
Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.
Unfortunately time hasn’t been on my side for a while now, so my daily running has slipped back to no running in the past year!
I’ll get back at it, but yes… will need to improved diet too
I’m sure someone will happily sell them to you if you enjoy wasting money.