The Science Behind the Sub-2 Hour Marathon: Alex Hutchinson on Sawe, Kejelcha & the New Era of Running

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The two-hour marathon barrier is gone. At the 2026 London Marathon, Sebastian Sawe became the first person ever to run under two hours on a record-eligible course — and Yomif Kejelcha did it too, in his marathon debut.

Outside columnist and Endure author Alex Hutchinson joins Michael Doyle, Alex Cyr and Katelyn Tocci to make sense of it.

We get into:

• Why Hutchinson thinks the shoes (the Adidas Adios Pro Evo 3) are still the biggest single factor — and why Nike has lost its grip on the super-shoe race
• Sawe's astonishing negative split: 60:29 out, 59:01 back, with a final 5K that put him on 1:52 marathon pace
• Whether the marathon is even the same race anymore — and whether "marathon pace" as a training concept is dying
• Norwegian-style threshold blocks vs. classic long marathon-pace work
• Resilience and durability — what they are and how (or whether) you train them
• Bicarb / sodium bicarbonate: the science of why it works, and whether marathoners should bother
• Why drafting "like a zombie" might be the most underrated tactic in distance running
• What's actually possible from here: 1:57? 1:56? Are we further from our potential than we think?
• The recreational-runner takeaways: shoes, fuel, sleep, and what to skip

A wide-ranging, occasionally contrarian conversation about an inflection point that may reshape the sport for the next decade.

📚 Books by Alex Hutchinson:Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human PerformanceThe Explorer's Gene

📰 Sweat Science Substack: alexhutchinson.net