Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

by Alex Hutchinson

The second big factor is drafting. In my 2014 analysis, I had argued that the cost of overcoming air resistance, even on a perfectly still day, might amount to 100 seconds over the course of a two-hour marathon.3 That might seem far-fetched—until you remember that the runners will be sustaining a pace of about 4:35 per mile, which for most of us is essentially a sprint. Studies dating back to the 1970s have suggested that running directly behind another runner can eliminate most of this extra effort, but in practice it’s difficult to draft that closely behind someone else.4 And to pace a two-hour marathon all the way to the finish, you’d need someone—or preferably several people—who can run a two-hour marathon themselves, since world-record rules forbid having fresh pacers jump in partway through the race. Nike’s solution: give up on the idea of setting an official world record, so that they can deploy a large team of pacemakers who will rotate in and out of the race in order to pace the chosen ones all the way to the finish.