When Grant Fisher left the track at the University of Boston on February 14, it was not completely a shock that the American distance corridor just broke the world record of 5,000 meters interior.
On the one hand, it was in good shape. Only six days before, Fisher, 27, who came from a season of highlighting in which he obtained two silver medals at the Paris Olympic Games, had also broken the world record of 3,000 meters in New York City. Larger trends were also at play: I was running on one of the fastest tracks in the world, with Nike peaks whose carbon plates and advanced foams helped return the energy with each step.
However, in Boston, when Fisher was asked about the factors that had led to his pair of world records, he acknowledged so surprisingly simple that he is probably in his kitchen.
He had recently begun to take sodium bicarbonate.
“I think it has an impact, and if that impact is 1%, that would be massive,” Fisher told journalists. “It is probably more like 0.1%, if there is one. And if it’s just mental, then I’ll take it too. “
Fisher is among the many professional corridors in recent years to embrace sodium bicarbonate, known within sport by scientific name, sodium bicarbonate or simply “bicarb”, as a legal means to run faster than ever. The use of a “system” of bicarbonate sold by Maurten, a Swedish company, has been generalized that in the World Athletics Championships in 2023, two thirds of all medalists from 800 to 10,000 meters used it. In the Olympic Games last summer, more than two thirds of all The execution of medalists was using it: “And in some cases, all the finalists were using it,” the company told NBC News.
In a period of eight days in February, seven of the world records of the sport in races ranging from 1,500 meters to the middle of the road marathon were crushed. The rapid rewriting of Professional Running’s record book can be traced to many reasons, from high -tech advances that lead to faster shoes and tracks, faster recovery and better training.
The combination has convinced Chris Woods, the main athletics coach of the Mississippi State University, that not only “many world records are in danger here in the very close future”, but even the times that once seemed unthinkable could now be possible, such as the record of 4:07 in the female mile.
“In my life, in his life, I think we will see a woman break 4 minutes,” Woods said.
But more and more, runners like Marco Arop, the world champion of 2023 to 800 meters from Canada, whom Woods coaches are also resorting to “Bicarb” for an advantage.
Intense exercise periods create an accumulation of hydrogen ions in the muscles, which leads to acidity that fatigue can increase and create the feeling of “ardor” that feels during hard exercise. As a base, sodium bicarbonate acts as a “buffer” that counteracts acidity. Taking sodium bicarbonate does not face the rules of the world anti -doping agency; In fact, even world athletics, the Global Government and Field organ, has described it as a “established performance supplement.”
The benefits of “Bicarb” have been known for decades, said Steve Magness, a coach and former elite runner who has written multiple books about performance. But athletes have been distrustful for a often unpleasant reason: the chances of a performance impulse had to weigh against the risk of writing gastrointestinal anguish.
“It did not work very well because there was a high percentage of people who simply could not align for the race or the time trial because it simply destroyed their stomach,” Magness said.
Fisher had heard so many “horror stories” of nausea, vomiting or diarrhea when using bicarbonate that he waited until this winter, after the important cycle of the Olympic Games, to test a mixture of “bicarbium” in training. His stomach handled it well, he said. And that may have been because in recent years, Bicarb has reached a turning point.
Maurten, the Swedish company, has found a way of giving small bicarbonate tablets in a sticky hydrogel and similar to a soup that guides them through the stomach and towards the intestine, where bicarbonate dissolves and absorbs with less potential nausea, vomiting or diarrhea, according to the company. The side effects of taking sodium include water retention and weight gain, and regularly increasing sodium intake can lead to an increase in blood pressure, says the company.
Maurten’s credibility was promoted when the famous marathon corridor Kipchoge used her products to establish multiple world records. Other Maurten users include Keely Hodgkinson, the Olympic champion at 800 meters.
However, beyond hydrogel, Bicarb may have become more tasty for elite runners recently for another reason. Just when the Paris Olympic Games began, a study at the European Journal of Applied Physiology overturned a long -time belief that sodium bicarbonate was more effective as a shock absorber in shorter competitions, which lasted up to 10 minutes.
When researchers from Edge Hill University in the United Kingdom gave the product of maurten bicarbonate to male cyclists during a much longer counterreloj, almost 40 kilometers, almost the duration of a marathon, measured a 1.4% increase in cyclists’ performance, with minimal stomach problems. In practice, it meant that cyclists who used bicarbonate were almost 1 minute faster for approximately one hour of driving, said Eli Spencer Shannon, a doctorate. candidate who directed the study.
“I would classify it as small but significant,” Shannon said.
The findings, Shannon said, should cause more research. The bicarb is not “unique size,” he said, because the stomach anguish of each person can vary and because the effectiveness of sodium bicarbonate as a shock absorber depends on how hard an athlete can push; The hardest exercise produces more hydrogen ions in the muscle than bicarbonate can eliminate.
Even so, Shannon was surprised by some of the findings of his study, such as riders who used bicarbonate could also go faster without a change in their heart rate or the maximum amount of oxygen they could use during exercise, known as Vo₂.
“What he says is that you can work harder but you have less cardiovascular tension and have a better performance improvement compared to a placebo, which was really interesting,” said Shannon. “That suggests an increase [muscle] Contractility, which has never been seen, to this duration already this intensity. “
Not all recent world record holders incorporate sodium bicarbonate as a new tool in their training. American Yared Nuguse, who broke the record of the inner mile on February 8, only for the Norwegian rival Jakob Ingebrigttsen to restore him five days later, he said he does not use bicarbonate due to his taste. But some of the fastest in the world have taken note.
Two days before last summer’s Olympic semifinal in the 800 male meters, Arop, a former basketball player who became the 800 -meter world champion for Canada, turned to Woods in France with less one question than a statement. I was determined to try Bicarb. The 800 meters were in the middle of one of the fastest years in the history of sport, and Arop knew that several of their competitors had used it successfully.
“This is the pinnacle of our sport, and I don’t think I would like to leave anything to chance,” Woods said. “And if there were a way to give a 1%advantage, that is what I was going to do. That is what he believed. And the results with which we were very happy. ”
Woods did not know much about Bicarb until Arop raised the issue in France, but said he now believes there are scientific benefits.
“Is there a mental component? I would say absolutely, ”he said. “But I don’t think this is a placebo.”
Arop went to win the silver medal in the fourth time faster in 800 meters of history, surpassed by gold for only one hundredth of a second by Emmanuel Wanyonyi of Kenya, who was also using Maurten’s bicarbonate in Paris, according to the company. The world record of 800 meters, established in 2012, could be the next to fall, with Wanyonyi only two tenths of a second behind. After the race, Arop said that he believed that his latest incorporation of sodium bicarbonate had “definitely played a factor” at his best personal moment.
“Everyone else is using it, and has been working wonderfully,” Arop said in August.
No all Use it. Bicarbonate is only a factor of many who have caused what Woods called “the golden arada era when it comes to running fast times”, an boom that compared with the NBA in the 1980s, when the talent of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, along with better technology and rules changes, promoted its popularity.
A “shoes war,” as Magness said, has exploded in a race to develop shoes that return the greatest energy using bulky but light foams and carbon fiber plates. Under the feet of the athletes, the physics of the covered slopes is also feeding faster times. The track covered at Boston University, in particular, has become a destination because its wide and deposited corners help runners bouncing in turns, and their frame on the wood and plywood soil can return energy such as a mini-trampoline rather than an outdoor track, where a rubber surface is poured on a concrete base.
When Magness was running two decades ago, an information gap left him to wonder how the competitors of East Africa were training. Social networks and the Internet have opened access to other training methods and better training that does not burn young runners and created a larger group of strong corridors, Magness said. Those young athletes are seeing fellow runs faster than ever and believing with confidence that they can too.
They are driven by avant -garde advances that Roger Bannister could only have dreamed when he was chasing the first mile of less than 4 minutes, along with a basic article of households.
“What they have done the last two years is a bit of change of mentality of, as, here is the past and this is what we could do,” said Magness. “But now the game has changed.”
