On a sunny Sunday morning in London, Sabastian Sawe made history by running the first ever sub-two-hour marathon. And somewhere in the long list of explanations for how he did it, one detail stands out for being comically simple: bread and honey. This, we are told, was his pre-race breakfast. Bread and honey, followed by the now-standard drip-feed of carbohydrate gels as the race unfolded – those small, viscous pouches of engineered sugar that have become the unofficial and ubiquitous currency of modern endurance sport.
It is a neat image as it contains the whole story in miniature. On the one hand, something ancient and obvious, a Roman-evoking panem et. On the other, something highly processed, lab-made, optimised to within an inch of its life. Between them, a man running faster than anyone has ever run before. The temptation, watching this from the outside, is to focus on the latter. The gels, the are-they-cheating shoes, the marginal gains. These are the bits that feel extractable, the bits, crucially, that you can be sold.
And this is more or less what has happened. Because if elite runners operate at the edge of human performance, they also operate more and more as a kind of advertising campaign for the rest of us, their habits filtering down into the parks and pavements of Britain. Around Clapham Common, and its equivalents across the country, the amateur version of this now plays out every weekend. Red-knee'd, hungover joggers pounding the pavement in preparation for something that, if we are quite honest, is a pointless exercise in sporty vanity.
It is not just running in the park; it is a show and tell of expensive gadgets. Watches, large and authoritative, pulsing with information to be boasted about later on social media. The vests, clipped with small, soft bottles that slosh quietly as their owners move. The gels, always the gels, extracted from pockets, torn open with a practised flick of the teeth, consumed mid-stride with a seriousness that would suggest something closer to medicine than to food. Following the champions' lead, we huff down pouches designed for Olympic athletes, as though the fate of the free world depends on maintaining a steady intake of strawberry-flavoured glucose between mile seven and mile eight.
Marathon running has become, among other things, another form of capitalistic kit acquisition. Not just shoes, but entire programmes, a whole ecosystem of products designed to promise control over something that is, at its core, quite uncontrollable. You can train, you can prepare, but you are still asking your body to do something fundamentally unreasonable for, oh, 96 per cent of us. So you buy the gels, you follow the plan, you try to eliminate uncertainty. And in doing so, you adopt the language of elite sport.
You can hear it in the smug conversations over post-run flat whites. The grams of carbohydrate per hour, the timing of intake, the brand of gel that works best. Fuelling strategies discussed with a level of detail that would once have been, and perhaps still should be, reserved for professionals. What we are seeing is not just people running, but people attempting to align themselves with an idea of performance that has been handed down to them in fragments – the visible, purchasable parts of a system that, at the top end, is far more coherent than it appears from below.
Again, none of this is wrong. It does work. People run better when they fuel properly. The science is irrefutable. But there is a mismatch between what gets attention and what does not. Because while enormous care is taken over the gels, the lab-made, optimised, precisely dosed elements of performance, far less attention is paid to the foundation underneath. Your daily diet, your ordinary non-race meals, the slow, unglamorous eating habits that actually support the body over time.
It is easier, after all, to buy a gel than to cook a meal. Easier to schedule a long run than to establish a pattern of eating that holds, day after day, without the need for constant correction. What we see is a kind of whiplash oscillation. For most of the people standing in the park at nine in the morning, the body they are so carefully fuelling for a two-hour or three-hour effort has been, for the rest of the week, treated with a kind of indifference. Meals assembled quickly, often from things that arrive already assembled and processed, eaten in transit or at desks, the primary objective not nourishment but convenience, the steady drift towards food that is more product than ingredient.
Then, come the weekend, a sudden and preposterous shift into performance mode, complete with wraparound Oakley sunglasses. Long runs are fuelled with precision. Electrolytes, carbohydrate loading, recovery shakes. The body treated, no matter how hungover, like a high-performance machine. Strava and its like fill up with evidence of this. Splits, heart rates, routes mapped out in clean lines. A record of effort and discipline, a record of something that looks to the rest of us like control. But control, in this context, is partial. The body does not distinguish between the miles you run on Sunday and the food you eat on Wednesday. It responds to the totality of what it is given.
And so, we end up with a peculiar inversion. The most sophisticated elements of endurance sport are applied with great care and expense to bodies that are otherwise managed, for most of the week, with a kind of benign neglect. The lab intrudes at the edges, while the centre remains approximate. There is a seriousness to it that is both admirable and misplaced, because it focuses attention on the final few percentage points of performance while leaving the much larger, much more consequential territory of everyday behaviour relatively untouched.
Sabastian Sawe does not run sub-two because he found the right gel. He runs sub-two because everything else is already in place. The miles, the consistency, the underlying diet, so typified by bread and honey, that does not need to be interfered with because it is already doing its job. The gels come later. For the rest of us, the order is often reversed. We take the parts that can be easily extracted, the gels, the shoes, the language, and we apply them to lives whose core remains unchanged. And then, come Sunday morning, we run. And we wonder, somewhere around mile 20, why it still feels so hard.
