the morning shakeout | issue 546

It's gotta be the shoes, the tension of being a running fan in 2026, helping one another get through the damn thing, and a lot more.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming. Photo: Tahoe’s mama (aka, my wife, Christine)

Good morning! To say it’s been a crazy week in the marathon would be the understatement of the century. At this point most people are well aware of how wildly fast Boston was last Monday and, unless you spend your weekends completely offline (in which case, I envy you), you’ve probably heard by now that a pair of world records got shattered and the two-hour barrier was broken (by two people, in fact!) in London this past Sunday. Oh, and to round out this insane 7-day stretch of high performance, an unknown 25-year old with solid but not spectacular credentials ran an American debut record of 2:05:54, 15 minutes up on second place…in Toledo, Ohio of all places! What the f*ck is even happening?

In short, and at risk of sounding reductionist, it’s (gotta be) the shoes. There are other factors too, of course—improved fueling products and strategies, the performance bar consistently being raised over the past decade, instances of doping at the highest levels of the sport (which aren’t new, to be fair)—but we aren’t talking about any of this without the widespread proliferation of supercritical foams and carbon-fiber plates under peoples’ feet.

If you’ve been in this game for ten years or more then you know it’s indisputable that supershoes reduce the amount of damage your legs undergo, not just during the marathon itself, but also in the months and months of training leading up to it. Not only are they “faster” than conventional running shoes or what we used to call “racing flats,” they also let you train harder more frequently since you can bounce back quicker between sessions. And as we have known for a hundred or more years at this point, the effects of consistent training compound over time. (New knowledge and interventions around nutrition and recovery help too, no doubt, but in my opinion the shoes are the biggest factor here.)

But what about the training itself? Surely it’s a lot better now, with interventions like double-threshold workouts and marathon-specific long runs helping move the speedometer needle to the right. Eh, I’m not so sure. You can’t convince me that athletes today are training any harder than people were 10, 20, or even 40 years ago. A little smarter, maybe, but the nuts and bolts of effective training haven’t changed as much as you might think. As I’ve written and spoken about before, the wheel keeps getting reinvented, but at the end of the day it’s still a wheel. After running 1:59:30 on Sunday in London, Sabastian Sawe was asked what training session he did that made him think he could break two hours for the marathon. He answered with one word: “Mileage.” Again, this is no secret. John L. Parker Jr. wrote lyrically about the Trials of Miles in Once a Runner and legends like Bill Rodgers, Joan Benoit Samuelson, and others were running just as many (if not more) miles back in the late 70s and early 80s as Sawe and his contemporaries do today. The biggest difference? It’s not so much the exact volume totals or the specificity of the workouts or the distribution of intensity across the week, it’s the shoes on everyone’s feet. The best marathoners throughout history, from the top pros down to most competitive amateurs, have always trained hard and run a lot. Now they’re doing so with 40 millimeters of sweet, sweet supercritical foam underfoot at least a few times a week. It’s a night and day difference from the “fast shoes” of old, which were essentially a pair of slippers on a thin bed of EVA foam with a little carbon rubber for grip on the outsole. Shoe tech has only gotten better and better over the past 10 years and word on the street is that the shoes Sawe and three of the other top finishers wore at London on Sunday (the Adidas Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3) are on another level in terms of weight, checking in at less than 4 ounces without sacrificing what makes a supershoe so super in the first place.

The fact of the matter is that from the best on back, people are blowing up a lot less frequently in the marathon than they used to. Again, it’s (mostly) the shoes. It’s always been true in running that once you’ve done enough damage to your legs it becomes a lot harder, if not impossible, to maintain a steady pace. Now you can minimize the cost of doing business by spending a few hundred bucks to outfit your feet. Heck, you might even get a great return on your investment and be able to accelerate at previously thought to be impossible speeds because fatigue doesn’t accumulate in quite the same way. Not everyone is going to be able to close like Sawe, who ran 27:36 from 30 to 40K and then dropped another 10 seconds a mile over the final 2.2K to the finish, or Sharon Lokedi at Boston, who rolled a number of sub-4:50 miles late in the race, but it’s more likely than ever that you’ll get through the wall or even avoid it altogether if you’ve trained appropriately and paced (and fueled) yourself properly on race day.

To be clear: I’m not mad about any of this! I think modern running footwear is one of the greatest technological advancements of our time. In addition to the benefits mentioned in the preceding paragraphs, the effects of supershoes have helped to inspire possibility amongst the elites and the masses alike, allowing people to dream bigger, get more out of their training, and generally find greater enjoyment in the sport overall. I hope the bar continues to get raised across the board, whether it’s the resetting of world records or personal bests, BQs getting harder and harder to come by, or more barriers being broken in myriad ways. When you see everyone around you leveling up, you can’t help but want to level up yourself, which is what we’re seeing happen from the front of the field all the way to the back.

None of this is to say that running isn’t without its problems. At the top of the sport, doping concerns haven’t disappeared, the pay-to-play nature of race-entry fees, supershoes, and nutrition creates real equity issues, and there’s an ongoing debate about what a performance means today versus what it did ten or more years ago. These are important conversations to have and solutions that need to be explored. But right now the marathon as a competitive pursuit—and running more broadly—is booming in an unprecedented way, and it’s hard not to marvel while watching it all play out in real time.

Quick Splits

— Since Sunday I’ve gotten a bunch of texts and emails about the men’s race at London and Sabastian Sawe in particular, and the question most people are asking me is some version of: Was that legit? Unfortunately the answer is neither straightforward nor definitive. As noted above, shoe technology has changed the sport over the past 10 years and it’s only getting better with time. It’s undoubtedly the main reason people are running so fast. I also agree with everything else my friend and colleague Steve Magness wrote in this “how we got here” post. Advances in fueling, an insane depth of talent, and belief are all helping to push the sport forward at extraordinary paces. But on the other side of the coin, I also have many of the same feelings I did in the fall of 2024 when Ruth Chepng’etich shattered the women’s marathon world-record with the first sub-2:10 clocking in history. To echo what I wrote back then, with a slight edit for what we saw over the weekend, I’ll say this: “There’s part of me that’s awestruck by someone breaking 2 hours in the marathon for the first time in history. Honestly, didn’t think I’d see it in my lifetime. At the same time it’s hard not to have some reservations about it. Sawe is clearly a generational talent (he hasn’t run slower than 2:02:27 in the four marathons he’s raced), and despite the fact that he underwent 25 out-of-competition tests last year before Berlin, his association with coach Claudio Berardelli, who has had at least three high-profile athletes popped for doping under his watch, not to mention the ongoing doping crisis plaguing Kenya, is hard to ignore. (And to be fair and accurate, Berardelli himself has never been convicted of providing banned substances to athletes. That said, having multiple athletes you’ve coached test positive for using banned substances does give me pause.) Anyway, sitting with this tension sucks, but it’s the harsh and complicated reality of being a fan of the sport in 2026.”

— In the final paragraph of last week’s issue I wrote about the kindness I witnessed in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon. I hadn’t seen this story before I hit publish, but watching Aaron Beggs and Robson De Olivera help Ajay Haridasse get to his feet with just a few hundred meters to go in the race represents the best of what this sport is all about. They saw and understood his struggle in that moment, selflessly helping him to get across the finish line. It was further confirmation of my longheld belief that the main reason we’re all here is to help one another get through the damn thing.

— NPR’s Tiny Desk has been on absolute tear the last few months and this recent set from Bush is no exception. This is the music that filled high school Mario’s ears and it still hits hard today. (And here’s why that is!) Gavin Rossdale and crew kicked this one off with “Machinehead” and the slow instrumental buildup leading into it was a nice touch. Similar to what I wrote about Robert Plant and “Ramble On” a couple weeks ago, this felt like a natural maturation of the original version from 32 years ago. My favorite part though was midway through “Glycerine” when everything quieted down and Rossdale unexpectedly went a capella for the song’s main verse. The goosebumps are still there.

— From the archives (Issue 494, 1 year ago this week): I’m no scientist but I love experimenting with different coffee brewing methods and by far the one I enjoy the most is the pour-over, which involves pouring boiling hot water over a bed of grounds until the pot below is filled. Part of what I enjoy about it, aside from the fact that it makes a tasty cup of coffee, is that it’s something of a meditative exercise for me: it takes time to grind the beans, boil the water, and then brew the coffee. It’s intentionally inefficient and in my experimenting over the years I’ve found ways to extract even more time out of the process, mostly by going high with the kettle (i.e., eye level or so) and varying the flow of water into the mouth of the Chemex. My initial pour is right down the middle until I get a sizable bloom, and once the water works its way through the grounds, I go to work on knocking down the resulting residue on the sides of the filter. It’s not exactly the perfect approach, but turns out it’s pretty damn close. “Holding the kettle higher helped with the mixing, preventing the water from draining along the sides, between the grounds and the filter,” Katrina Miller writes for The New York Times. “This type of flow caused what the researchers described as an avalanche effect. The water eroded the center of the pile of coffee grounds, thus suspending some of the grains, which settled and built up on the sides. Eventually, the sides collapsed inward and the process started again. This increased the flavor extracted from the coffee grounds, but only as long as the water was allowed to flow continuously.”

— Aside from supershoes, the biggest revolution in the marathon in recent years has been on the fueling front. I was reminiscing last week about how at my first Boston in 2008 I carried two gels with me, planning to take the first one at halfway and the last one at 20 miles, which I can only laugh about now. I wish that back then we had access to both the knowledge (and the products!) we do today—something like this handy history of marathon fueling, put together by Chris Knight and my partners at Precision Fuel & Hydration, would have been great! Chris takes us from 1896 (a.k.a. the “pick your poison” era), through the “replace all your losses” era of the 1990s, to the “personalization era” of today. It’s a fantastic guide that shows how, and why, we got here. (And if you’re interested in trying PF&H products for yourself—they’re a longtime partner of the morning shakeout and the drinks/gels/chews I use to fuel my own training and racing—check out this link and save 15% off your first order.)

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I’ve been running in the Ellipse v1 for a couple months now and its spot in my regular shoe rotation is secure for the foreseeable future. This sweet new ride is built on a Fresh Foam X midsole and it’s super smooth underfoot. It’s solidly built, fits true to size, feels refreshingly familiar, and is aesthetically slick. There’s some good giddy-up to it, too. The only problem is that my tried-and-true 1080s are a little jealous that I like them so much! The new Ellipse v1 is now available at your favorite running speciality retail store and on newbalance.com (men’s sizes here, women’s sizes here).

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Workout of the Week: 1 mile, 9 x 400

This workout was introduced to me by coach Kevin Curtin when I was running for New Balance Boston—now Battle Road Track Club—nearly 20 years ago. We would use it early in a training block as a sort of reintroduction to track work but he’d also pull it out later in the season to sharpen us up for a goal race. The paces we tried to hit for the 400m reps differed depending on the training focus at the time. It’s been a go-to session for me and my athletes ever since. (In fact, I’ll probably do a version of it today or tomorrow since I’m racing this weekend!) Here are the details.

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The bottom line. 

“Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.”

— Zig Ziglar (And while I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about running when he said this, Ziglar is more or less summing up the best mindset to take with you into race day.)

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That’s it for Issue 546. If you’re digging what I’m doing here, it would mean a lot to me if you shared this email (or this link, either works!) with a likeminded friend and encouraged them to subscribe so future issues go straight to their inbox.

Thanks for reading,

Mario