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The tech that made a 2-hour marathon possible | The Vergecast

The tech that made a 2-hour marathon possible | The Vergecast

The Verge34 min2026-09-08 ▶ Watch on YouTube
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Partly verifiedA few specific details here couldn't be independently confirmed against the video. The overall summary is sound, but double-check exact numbers or names before you rely on them.
What this video is
⚡ a 34-minute video, readable in 60 seconds

This episode of The Vergecast features journalist and author Alex Hutchinson (Endure) as the guest, with the host (identified only as Lauren when Hutchinson thanks her at the close) discussing the science and technology behind marathon running's two-hour barrier. The conversation traces how carbon-plated 'super shoes,' pacing tactics, and fueling science moved the sub-two-hour marathon from a once science-fictional idea to an officially recognized feat by two runners at this year's London Marathon. Hutchinson repeatedly frames the shoes as a necessary but not sufficient condition for these performances, and describes his own stance on the technology as personally conflicted rather than settled. The source material does not present an explicit host-versus-guest disagreement, and the host's own views on the technology are not stated.

The episode centers on guest Alex Hutchinson, journalist and author of Endure, discussing how shoe technology, pacing, and fueling science pushed marathon times under two hours. [00:53]
Key takeaways
+ 40 more takeaways
  • The guest called himself 'half a century early' with that 2075 prediction. [03:57]
  • The guest's short explanation for why sub-two-hour marathons arrived sooner than expected is that 'shoes got really fast.' [04:26]
  • According to the guest, the defining feature of super shoes is a stiff carbon fiber plate embedded in a thick, light, resilient foam midsole that compresses on landing and springs back to push the runner forward. [04:41]
  • The first super shoe, Nike's Vaporfly 4%, was named after University of Colorado testing arranged by Nike found runners were on average 4% more efficient at a given pace, per the guest's reporting. [06:21]
  • Responding to criticism that super shoes are essentially springs on the feet, the guest countered that all running shoes have springs, citing 1985 shoes with EVA foam soles and Nike Air as earlier examples. [07:24]
  • The guest cited a 1991 paper by Michael Joyner arguing a 1:58 marathon should be physiologically possible based on human endurance capability. [08:29]
  • The guest noted a 2011 paper revisited that argument when the world record stood around 2:03 to 2:02:57. [08:44]
  • Nike announced in 2016 an exhibition race attempt on a Formula 1 track in Monza, Italy, chosen to control course flatness and camber. [09:11]
  • Per the guest, Nike used six or seven pacemakers in an arrowhead formation to set pace and block wind, which can save as much energy as super shoes, roughly 4-5%. [10:14]
  • The guest said Nike had secretly developed the Vaporfly shoes, providing an advantage of several percent that alone may have been enough to reach sub-two. [10:58]
  • In the 2017 Nike exhibition, Kipchoge ran 2:00:25, not recognized as an official record because pacemakers were swapped mid-race. [11:15]
  • Two years later, in 2019, Kipchoge broke two hours in Vienna under similarly artificial exhibition conditions, using a reversed pacemaker arrowhead formation chosen via computational fluid dynamic simulations and a different shoe. [11:33]
  • The guest said traditional running shoes return about 70% of impact energy, based on machine testing that squeezes foam and measures its spring-back. [13:26]
  • In the early 2010s Adidas released Boost, which returned about 80-something percent of energy, according to the guest. [13:32]
  • Nike later developed materials returning about 90% of energy, fueling a race among petrochemical foam suppliers, per the guest. [13:37]
  • World Athletics imposed a 40mm stack height limit on shoes, forcing companies to innovate within that constraint. [14:03]
  • During testing for the exhibition project, each runner tried three shoes with soft, medium, and stiff carbon fiber plates to find the right fit for their weight and force output, per the guest. [15:33]
  • After Kipchoge's 2019 sub-two performance, it took seven years, until this year, for anyone to officially break the barrier again, when two runners did it in the same race. [19:01]
  • The guest described waking at 3-4am for years to watch major marathons in Chicago, Berlin, London, and Valencia expecting a sub-two attempt, but conditions like heat, wind, rain, or injury kept preventing it. [20:00]
  • Kelvin Kipum broke Kipchoge's official world record, less than a second per mile off sub-two pace, but he and his coach were killed in a car accident before he could attempt a sub-two run. [20:46]
  • The guest admitted he watched this year's London Marathon on replay rather than live, since no one expected a sub-two performance and there was little pre-race hype. [21:38]
  • By contrast, the guest noted Josh Kerr publicly announced seven months in advance that he would break a 27-year-old one-mile world record, generating major hype, and succeeded. [21:49]
  • Yomif Kejelcha, running his first-ever marathon, laughed off a pre-race question about a sub-two marathon happening, calling it 'not possible,' then did it two days later alongside Sebastian Sawe. [22:22]
  • The guest said the race was special because Sawe and Kejelcha stayed together until the final mile, giving a rare head-to-head sub-two competition. [22:58]
  • Shoemakers try to strip out any part of the sole or carbon fiber plate that doesn't provide propulsion, cutting anything that doesn't help elite athletes run fast for exactly 26 miles. [27:52]
  • Adidas makes its top racing shoes available to the public, for example selling them for $500 after the London Marathon, only because rules require elite shoes to be made available for public sale within a reasonable time. [28:56]
  • Those roughly 500 to 1,000 pairs of $500 shoes sold out within about five seconds and could resell for around $2,000. [29:18]
  • The guest said one of the biggest surprises of the last 10 years is that runner demand for high-tech shoes is 'bottomless' regardless of price or advanced technology. [29:40]
  • Research shows super shoes make runners a little faster, though the guest noted experiential benefits like feeling better or having less joint pain are less research-backed. [30:56]
  • The guest said he received a review pair of Vaporflies in 2016 but did not buy his own pair of super shoes until a few months before this recording. [31:40]
  • The guest said Boston Marathon qualifying times have been made about five minutes faster for everybody, twice, since super shoes came out, because widespread adoption creates a collective action problem. [33:00]
  • The guest said super shoes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for sub-two-hour marathon times, tying footwear together with separate advances in fueling as distinct contributing factors.
  • Both runners in the London Marathon published fueling plans showing roughly 120 grams of carbohydrate per hour, compared to old advice of 60 grams per hour, according to the guest.
  • Over the two-hour race at all-out pace, the runners consumed the carbohydrate equivalent of about six plates of pasta, per the guest.
  • The guest noted cyclists are also going faster than ever without super shoes, suggesting fueling technology is a separate factor from footwear.
  • New hydrogel-based sports drinks encapsulate carbohydrates so the stomach doesn't sense the sugar load, letting it pass to the intestine and absorb into the bloodstream, the guest explained.
  • In the London Marathon both runners wore the Adidas Pro Evo 3, the first competition shoe under 100 grams.
  • The guest said the Pro Evo 3 is optimized for lightness and spring rather than durability, and is likely to fall apart after about 27 miles.
  • The guest described his attitude toward super shoe technology as 'conflicted,' saying he understands the need to wear them when others do and admits they feel pretty nice, without stating a bright line for when the technology becomes 'too much.'
  • The guest said a runner who refuses to wear super shoes out of principle would need to run about 10 minutes faster than they otherwise would, since everyone else is using them.
How this brief was shaped: Discourse (interview / podcast / video essay) · confidence High

Vergecast is an interview podcast where a host questions a journalist guest about marathon shoe technology and human performance research, with quoted papers, dates, and named scientists driving a conversational exchange rather than a taught curriculum or single narrator's story arc.

The lens sets this brief's structure, never its facts — every claim is held to the same citation and fact-check standard.

Jump to a moment
0:00Marathon Sub Two Intro1:0790 Seconds on the Verge2:46Two Hour Barrier Meaning4:10How Super Shoes Work8:11Breaking2 and Kipchoge11:53Shoe Arms Race Rules14:21Inside Nike Shoe Lab18:36London Marathon Breakthrough23:10Fueling Carbolution26:48Adidas Pro Evo 328:46Do Super Shoes Actually Help You?31:19Innovation vs Cheating33:54Wrap Up and Goodbye
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