![\"Line](\"https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/marathon-record.svg\")
Eliud Kipchoge won the Melbourne Marathon on Sunday in a course record of 2 hours 9 minutes 10 seconds, two seconds faster than the previous best on the course. It was the 41-year-old’s first marathon victory since 2023.
\nThe two-time Olympic champion and former world record holder pulled clear inside the final 10 kilometres of the 42.2 km race and finished inside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, ABC News reported. Australia’s Thomas Do Canto was second in 2:10:35 and his compatriot Reece Edwards was third.
\nNew Zealand’s Camille French won the women’s race in 2:28:25. Australia’s Sinead Diver was second, 23 seconds behind, and Ireland’s Nichola Sheridan was third, a further 24 seconds back.
\nKipchoge is running a marathon on every continent, Antarctica included. Melbourne was the third stop on that tour, according to Marathon Handbook, and his first appearance in the race. In May, in Cape Town, he finished 16th in 2:13:29.
\nMelbourne’s organisers redesigned the course this year to make it flatter and faster. It now runs down St Kilda Road, past Flinders Street Station and around Albert Park Lake before finishing at the MCG, which hosted the start and finish of the 1956 Olympic marathon 70 years ago.
\nKipchoge called the day “a beautiful time for me”, ABC News reported.
\n\nA 2:09 marathon is a long way from the 2:01:09 Kipchoge ran in Berlin in 2022, which was then the world record. The marathon has since moved on: Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London in April, and Amos Kipruto matched Kipchoge’s Berlin time in Chicago on the same day as this race.
\nBut course records depend on the course and the field. On a redesigned route, Kipchoge ran the closing kilometres alone and still lowered the mark.
\n\nFor athletes in their 40s, the result carries a quieter message. At 41, Kipchoge is no longer chasing world records. He is choosing races for the experience and still winning them.
\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/01/Eliud_Kipchoge_in_Berlin.jpg/1920px-Eliud_Kipchoge_in_Berlin.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:34:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:34:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "Eliud Kipchoge", "Melbourne Marathon", "marathon", "course record" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/paul-seixas-il-lombardia-2026-youngest-winner/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/paul-seixas-il-lombardia-2026-youngest-winner/", "title": "Paul Seixas, 20, becomes the youngest winner of Il Lombardia", "summary": "With Tadej Pogačar absent after five straight victories, the French rider soloed into Como for his first Monument, ahead of Enric Mas and Giulio Ciccone.", "content_html": "Paul Seixas won Il Lombardia on Saturday with a solo attack, becoming the youngest winner in the history of cycling’s final Monument of the season. The 20-year-old Frenchman, who rides for Decathlon CMA CGM, crossed the line alone in Como for his first win in one of the sport’s five Monuments.
\nSpain’s Enric Mas, who won the Vuelta a España last month, finished second and Italy’s Giulio Ciccone third. Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel, the time-trial world champion, was fourth and Britain’s Tom Pidcock sixth, Cyclingnews reported.
\nThe 120th edition, from Bergamo to Como, was the first since 2020 not won by Tadej Pogačar. The Slovenian won the race five years in a row from 2021 to 2025, but his season ended when he crashed out of the Vuelta in August with a broken collarbone and a fractured vertebra.
\nWith no clear favourite, the race was open. Seixas went clear on the last circuit around Como, the course that includes the climbs of San Fermo della Battaglia and Civiglio, and none of the chasers could bring him back. Pidcock, who tried to follow the move, said afterwards: “I just went into the red and that was it.”
\nSeixas spoke afterwards about the rider he had not been able to race. “It’s a great dream to really be able to compete against Tadej Pogačar,” he said, according to Cyclingnews.
\n\nSeixas is one of the most-watched young riders in the sport. According to Olympics.com, his 2026 season already included wins at the Tour of the Basque Country and La Flèche Wallonne and second place at Liège–Bastogne–Liège. In February he won the Faun-Ardèche Classic alone, much as he did in Como.
\nEvenepoel, who had been expected to contend, said his form had faded: “I haven’t found my top form since the Tour de France.”
\n\nPogačar, who has extended his contract with UAE Team Emirates XRG until 2032, is expected back next season. When the two finally meet in Lombardy, both will be past winners of the race.
\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/77/Paul_Seixas_-_Vainqueur_en_solitaire_-_Faun_Ard%C3%A8che_Classic_2026.jpg/1920px-Paul_Seixas_-_Vainqueur_en_solitaire_-_Faun_Ard%C3%A8che_Classic_2026.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:33:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:33:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Cycling", "Il Lombardia", "Paul Seixas", "Monuments", "Decathlon CMA CGM", "Remco Evenepoel" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/half-marathon-records-almgren-kejelcha-ngetich-2026/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/half-marathon-records-almgren-kejelcha-ngetich-2026/", "title": "56:51, a European record and a women-only world record: the half marathon’s four fastest weeks", "summary": "Yomif Kejelcha ran 56:51 in Buenos Aires. Four weeks later in Copenhagen, Sweden’s Andreas Almgren beat the Kenyans to the world title in a European record, and Agnes Ngetich set a women-only world record.", "content_html": "For most of its history the half marathon has been the marathon’s warm-up act. Between late August and late September it produced a new world record, a European record and a women-only world record.
\nOn 23 August, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha ran 56 minutes 51 seconds at the Buenos Aires half marathon, a World Athletics Label road race. That took 29 seconds off the world record of 57:20 set by Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo in Lisbon in March, according to AIMS, the association of distance races.
\nThe two men have traded the record before. Kejelcha set it at 57:30 in Valencia in October 2024; Kiplimo took it back in Lisbon. Kiplimo’s 57:20 was formally ratified by World Athletics on 3 September. Kejelcha’s 56:51 is subject to the usual ratification procedure. A faster run by Kiplimo, 56:42 in Barcelona in 2025, was never ratified because conditions on the course did not fully comply with the rules.
\nEthiopia’s Fotyen Tesfay won the women’s race in Buenos Aires in 1:03:57.
\nAt the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen on 20 September, Sweden’s Andreas Almgren won the men’s world half marathon title in 58:06, a European record. He beat Kenya’s Nicholas Kipkorir by five seconds; Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei, the Olympic 10,000 m champion, was third in a personal best of 58:26.
\nWorld Athletics’ report describes a race that broke up after 10 km, reached in 27:53. Four men (Kipkorir, Almgren, Cheptegei and Worku) went clear and passed 15 km in 41:47. Cheptegei fell away before the final 600 metres, and Almgren surged past Kipkorir with the finish in sight.
\n“This gold medal means so much to me,” Almgren said. “I did not only have one or two gears left, I had three or four.”
\nThe time improved his own European record by 35 seconds and moved him to ninth on the world all-time list. Almgren makes his marathon debut in New York in November.
\n\nIn the women’s race, Kenya’s Agnes Ngetich won her first world half marathon title in 1:05:15, a women-only world record by a second, beating the 1:05:16 Peres Jepchirchir ran at the 2020 championships in Gdynia. Women-only records are kept separately because they are set without male pacemakers. Ngetich finished 50 seconds clear of her compatriot Veronica Loleo, Watch Athletics reported.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Andreas_Almgren_in_2023.jpg/1920px-Andreas_Almgren_in_2023.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:32:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:32:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "half marathon", "Andreas Almgren", "Yomif Kejelcha", "Agnes Ngetich", "world record" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/swimming/english-channel-relay-british-record-tom-dean/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/swimming/english-channel-relay-british-record-tom-dean/", "title": "Tom Dean’s relay team sets a British Channel record: three minutes short of the world mark", "summary": "Six British swimmers crossed from Dover to Cap Gris Nez in 6 hours 55 minutes, beating the national relay record by 22 minutes. The world record, set by an American team, has stood for 36 years.", "content_html": "A British relay team including Olympic champion Tom Dean has crossed the English Channel in 6 hours 55 minutes, setting a new British record and finishing three minutes outside a world record that has stood for 36 years.
\nThe six swimmers, racing as “Spirit of Great Britain”, started at Shakespeare Beach near Dover and finished at Cap Gris Nez in France. Their time beat the previous British relay record by 22 minutes, Swimming World reported. The world record of 6 hours 52 minutes is held by a team from the United States.
\nThe team was Dean, Hector Pardoe, George Taplin, Toby Robinson, Dan Jervis and Josh Gammon. Pardoe, an open-water specialist, swam the first leg and returned for the last, taking the team to the French shore. In between, Taplin held a pace of about 1 minute 7 seconds per 100 metres, Robinson took the team past halfway, and Jervis swam his leg after losing his cap.
\nConditions were not straightforward. The water was 18°C, there were jellyfish, and the team faced a strong incoming tide, according to Swimming World.
\n“British record secured, world record coming soon…” Dean wrote afterwards. “Tantalising to be three minutes off the record.”
\n\nThe Strait of Dover is only about 33 km wide at its narrowest, but tides, shipping lanes, cold water and weather make it one of the hardest open-water swims in the world. Under Channel swimming rules, swimmers wear a standard costume, cap and goggles, no wetsuits, and relay swimmers take turns in a fixed order.
\nThe attempt raised more than £8,000 for the Royal Life Saving Society UK’s water safety education programmes for children.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/71/The_English_Channel_%28MODIS_2019-02-19%29.jpg/1920px-The_English_Channel_%28MODIS_2019-02-19%29.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:31:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:31:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Swimming", "English Channel", "open water swimming", "Tom Dean", "relay", "Royal Life Saving Society" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/uci-gear-limit-sram-court-2026-equipment-rules/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/uci-gear-limit-sram-court-2026-equipment-rules/", "title": "How SRAM beat the UCI over gear limits, and what did change on pro bikes in 2026", "summary": "A Brussels court has upheld the suspension of cycling’s proposed cap on gear size, saying the governing body had not shown it was needed or fairly made. Other safety rules on rims, handlebars and forks are already in force.", "content_html": "Professional road racing was supposed to test a limit on how big a gear a rider could push. Instead, the proposal is stuck in the Belgian courts, and the case has become a warning to sports governing bodies about how they write technical rules.
\nIn 2025, as part of its SafeR programme to reduce crashes, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) approved a trial capping the largest gear at 54×11, a gear that moves a bike 10.46 metres for every turn of the pedals. The test was planned for a stage race in the second half of 2025, the Tour of Guangxi.
\nThe reasoning was speed. Bigger gears allow higher top speeds, and higher speeds make crashes worse.
\nThe problem was who it affected. Shimano and Campagnolo groupsets could be set up within the limit. SRAM’s, which use a 10-tooth smallest sprocket, could not. SRAM complained to the Belgian Competition Authority, which suspended the test with interim measures days before it was due to start.
\nThe UCI appealed. In May 2026 the Brussels Court of Appeal rejected all six of its grounds, according to Escape Collective. The court found that the UCI had written the rule without properly consulting the manufacturers it affected, had not documented its reasoning and had, in effect, singled out one company. It also found the case belonged in Belgium, where teams using SRAM equipment were already considering switching suppliers.
\nImportantly, the ruling concerned the process, not the idea. The court did not decide whether a gear limit would make racing safer. The UCI could try again with a process the courts consider transparent, objective and non-discriminatory. A separate investigation into whether the UCI broke competition law is continuing. For now, no gear limit applies to races on the UCI calendar.
\n\nOther SafeR rules approved alongside the gear trial are already in force on the road, according to the UCI:
\nThe UCI says the changes respond to rapid technological advances and higher racing speeds, with the aim of “ever safer and fairer competition conditions”.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/SRAM_Red_AXS_Quarq_power_meter_04.jpg/1920px-SRAM_Red_AXS_Quarq_power_meter_04.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:30:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:30:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "UCI", "SRAM", "gear ratio", "SafeR", "bike technology", "competition law" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/nike-alphafly-4-super-shoe-2026/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/nike-alphafly-4-super-shoe-2026/", "title": "Nike’s Alphafly 4 goes on general sale: what the new super shoe changes", "summary": "Nike says its new marathon racer returns 10 per cent more energy and is 5 per cent lighter than the last version. The shoe sold out in minutes in September; wider release follows on 29 October.", "content_html": "Nike’s newest marathon racing shoe, the Alphafly 4, goes on general sale on 29 October, after an early, limited release on 17 September that sold out in the United States in under five minutes, according to Marathon Handbook.
\nAccording to Nike:
\nNike says the design drew on feedback from athletes across several Alphafly generations, including extensive trials with women runners. Addisu Gobena wore it to win the Sydney Marathon in a course record this year, the company says.
\n“Our goal was simple: create a shoe that helps athletes feel more confident and capable deep into the race,” said Emily Farina, senior principal for running footwear at the Nike Sport Research Lab.
\n\nThe figures are Nike’s own. The company has not published the shoe’s stack height or weight in grams, and we have not yet seen independent laboratory tests of its energy return or running economy. Under World Athletics rules, road racing shoes are limited to a sole thickness of 40 mm.
\nThe shoe arrives in a year that has made the stakes of shoe technology obvious. Sabastian Sawe broke two hours for the marathon in London in April wearing Adidas’s Adizero Adios Pro Evo 3, and course records have fallen across the World Marathon Majors. Shoes are only one reason (training, pacing and the depth of competition matter too), but almost every elite marathoner now races in a carbon-plated shoe.
\nNike describes the shoe as for marathon runners “from elite athletes to everyday runners aiming for personal bests”. It has not published data on how the shoe performs at slower, recreational paces, where most marathoners run.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/HK_clothing_NIKE_brand_Vaporfly_Next_sneakers_white_n_silver_shoes_October_2022_Px3_05_%28cropped%29.jpg/1920px-HK_clothing_NIKE_brand_Vaporfly_Next_sneakers_white_n_silver_shoes_October_2022_Px3_05_%28cropped%29.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:29:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:29:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "running shoes", "super shoes", "Nike", "Alphafly", "marathon" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/apple-watch-series-12-readiness-score-hrv/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/apple-watch-series-12-readiness-score-hrv/", "title": "Apple Watch now gives you a daily readiness score. Here is what is behind it", "summary": "The Series 12 and Ultra 4 sample heart rate every five seconds and heart rate variability as often as every five minutes, and turn the data into a 0–10 score with advice to recover or go hard. Apple says it is a wellness feature, not a medical one.", "content_html": "Apple’s smartwatch now tells its owners, every morning, how ready they are to train. Apple’s Series 12 and Ultra 4, announced on 9 September and on sale since 18 September, add a daily readiness score built on much more frequent heart measurements than earlier models.
\nApple calls the new sensor array a Health Sensing System: new optical and electrical heart sensors with larger, more power-efficient green LEDs. According to Apple:
\nEach day the watch produces a single score from 0 to 10, with one of four recommendations: Recover, Pace Yourself, Ready or Go For It. Apple says the score combines recent activity, vitals and the watch’s sleep score, updates through the day (after a hard workout, for example) and shows which factors are driving it.
\nApple says the algorithm was developed by its exercise scientists and physicians using data from the Apple Heart and Movement Study. It has not published the formula, or any study showing that following the recommendations improves training or reduces injury.
\nSumbul Desai, Apple’s vice-president of health and fitness, said the features are designed to “translate complex biometric data into clear guidance for users”.
\n\nApple says a study of more than 1,000 people found its watch had the most accurate heart rate of the leading wearables. That testing was carried out by Apple itself in July and August 2026 and has not been independently published.
\nAn independent study of five earlier consumer devices found average overnight HRV errors of between 6 and 16 per cent against a medical-grade ECG, as we reported this autumn. Apple Watch was not among the devices tested, and that study looked only at overnight readings. Apple itself describes its Vitals features as being for general wellness, not medical use.
\nA daily number is most useful as a trend, not a verdict. A single low reading after a bad night or a hard session is expected. A score that stays low for days, alongside how you feel, is more informative. And how you feel still counts: no algorithm knows about the argument at work or the child who woke at 3am unless it shows up in your heart rate.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/Apple_Watch_Series_8.jpg/1920px-Apple_Watch_Series_8.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:28:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:28:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "Apple Watch", "wearables", "heart rate variability", "readiness", "recovery" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/garmin-enduro-4-battery-life-ultra-watch/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/garmin-enduro-4-battery-life-ultra-watch/", "title": "Garmin’s Enduro 4 promises 320 hours of GPS, with the sun’s help", "summary": "The new ultra-endurance watch keeps its predecessor’s battery figures but doubles storage, adds stamina tracking and new battery modes. The headline number depends on solar charging and a reduced-accuracy mode.", "content_html": "Garmin has launched the Enduro 4, the latest version of its watch for ultra-runners and multi-day adventurers. It was released on 6 October, priced at £799.99 in the UK and $899.99 in the US, and has been available to order since 9 October.
\nBattery life is the reason the Enduro exists, and the headline figure is up to 320 hours of GPS tracking. That number needs unpacking. According to Garmin’s published specifications, compiled by the5krunner:
\n| Mode | Without solar | With solar |
|---|---|---|
| Smartwatch | 36 days | 90 days |
| GPS, normal | 80 hours | 144 hours |
| GPS, extended battery | 120 hours | 320 hours |
| GPS, maximum accuracy | 60 hours | 90 hours |
| GPS, max battery | 210 hours | unlimited |
The 320-hour figure applies only in a power-saving extended-battery mode, and only with enough sunlight on the solar lens. In normal GPS mode, without sun, the figure is 80 hours, still enough for the slowest finishers at most 100-mile races.
\nThe battery figures are essentially unchanged from the Enduro 3, according to the5krunner. So are the 51 mm case, the 1.4-inch transflective display and the Power Sapphire solar lens.
\n\nFor owners of the Enduro 3, the changes are mostly storage, software and mapping speed rather than battery life. For runners moving from a smaller watch, the trade-off is the same as it has always been: the Enduro uses a memory-in-pixel display rather than a brighter AMOLED screen, in exchange for days of battery life.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Garmin_Fenix_6x_Pro_Solar.jpg/1920px-Garmin_Fenix_6x_Pro_Solar.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:27:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:27:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "Garmin", "GPS watches", "ultra running", "battery life", "wearables" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/sweat-sensing-watch-sodium-potassium/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/sweat-sensing-watch-sodium-potassium/", "title": "A watch that reads your sweat: what a new sensor can and cannot yet do", "summary": "Japanese researchers have built a wrist-worn device that tracks sodium and potassium in sweat continuously. It worked through a construction worker’s shift. It has not yet been shown to be accurate.", "content_html": "Anyone who has finished a hot race with salt crusted on their face knows that sweat carries more than water. How much sodium and potassium each person loses varies widely, and getting replacement wrong can matter in long events. Measuring those losses has usually meant collecting sweat in patches and sending it to a laboratory.
\nResearchers at Tokyo University of Science have built a watch that tries to do it on the wrist, continuously. The work, led by associate professor Isao Shitanda, is published in ACS Omega.
\nThe device uses printed ion-selective electrodes: sensors that “measure a voltage that changes with the concentration of a specific ion”, in this case sodium and potassium. Those sensors need a stable reference to compare against, and printed reference electrodes can take a long time to settle. The team added silica gel to theirs so it stabilises quickly.
\nA layer of fabric and super-absorbent fibre over the electrodes wicks sweat across the sensors. A custom watch processes the signals, sends them wirelessly and saves them to a memory card.
\nThe team tested the watch on one person: a construction worker, during a normal working day on an active site, including breaks, drinks and meals. It recorded signals that responded to sodium and potassium for about 2 hours 45 minutes while the worker moved around.
\nThat is a proof that the device can work outside a laboratory. It is not yet evidence that its readings are accurate. The researchers did not report how its values compared with laboratory measurements, and say quantitative sweat analysis “will require controlled sweating experiments and further validation”.
\n\nA review of sweat-sensing patches for athletes, published in Analytical Methods in June, lists the obstacles that remain: sensors drift over time, adhesion fails when people move, manufacturing at scale is difficult, and the relationship between what is in sweat and what is in blood is still debated. Its authors caution against treating sweat patches as “a mature plug-and-play platform”.
\nThe Tokyo team’s approach has one practical advantage: because the electrodes are printed, they could be cheap to make in large numbers. The authors suggest that, combined with measurements of sweat volume and drinking, such devices could eventually help manage hydration in hot conditions, for workers as well as athletes.
\n\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/sweat-watch.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:26:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:26:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "sweat sensors", "wearables", "hydration", "sodium", "heat" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/glucose-monitors-elite-athletes-without-diabetes/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/glucose-monitors-elite-athletes-without-diabetes/", "title": "Glucose monitors on elite athletes show readings far outside “normal”, and why that is not a warning sign", "summary": "Continuous glucose monitors worn through a 44-hour cycling record, an Everesting attempt and a deep free-dive produced numbers that would worry a doctor in a clinic. Researchers say athletes’ data need different rules.", "content_html": "Continuous glucose monitors, small sensors stuck to the arm that read sugar levels in the fluid under the skin every few minutes, were built for people with diabetes. Over the past few years they have become a fixture on the arms of endurance athletes too, sold as a way to see fuelling in real time.
\nA case series published in March in the journal Sensors shows what those devices record when elite athletes without diabetes push to their limits, and why the numbers need careful reading.
\nThe researchers, from Croatia, Canada, Italy and elsewhere, describe three elite athletes who wore a monitor during record-level performances:
\nLarge departures from the ranges used in diabetes care are common in elite performance, the authors write. Interpretation of the data “should therefore be performance- and context-specific rather than based on clinical glycemic thresholds”.
\nIn other words, a high reading during a hard effort can reflect the body releasing stored glucose to meet demand, rather than a problem. A low reading during a very long effort may be a signal about fuelling, or a quirk of a sensor that measures the fluid under the skin rather than blood, with a delay.
\n\nThis is a case series of three people, each doing something different, so it cannot say what is typical. Several authors were consultants for, or employed by, a company that sold glucose monitors to athletes during the data collection; one is now an adviser to another monitor manufacturer. The paper declares these interests.
\nA 2025 expert review of the evidence was more cautious still. It concluded that using these monitors in healthy elite endurance athletes is currently of limited value, because of questions about accuracy during exercise and about whether the physiological reasoning holds, and noted that genuinely low blood sugar is unlikely in athletes without diabetes who follow standard fuelling advice.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b7/Abbott_Freestyle_Libre_3_Glukosesensor_in_situ-1145.jpg/1920px-Abbott_Freestyle_Libre_3_Glukosesensor_in_situ-1145.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:25:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:25:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Tech", "continuous glucose monitors", "wearables", "fuelling", "ultra-endurance", "sports nutrition" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/chatgpt-ai-training-plans-runners-evidence/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/tech/chatgpt-ai-training-plans-runners-evidence/", "title": "Can an AI chatbot write your training plan? What the evidence says so far", "summary": "AI coaching apps are multiplying. The clearest test of a chatbot-written running plan found that coaching experts rated it poorly, until it was given much more information about the runner.", "content_html": "Ask a chatbot for a marathon plan and it will produce one in seconds. A new generation of apps goes further, reading your watch data each morning and rewriting the day’s session. Apple’s watches now offer spoken “Workout Buddy” insights generated by its AI. The question every runner should ask is simple: is the plan any good?
\nThe most direct published answer comes from a study in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine by researchers in Germany, the Netherlands and the UK, led by Peter Düking.
\nThey asked ChatGPT for three six-week running plans, each time giving it more detailed information about the runner. Coaching experts then rated each plan on 22 quality criteria drawn from the training literature, on a scale of 1 to 5.
\nThe plan generated from the least information was rated below average on 19 of the 22 criteria and above average on none. The plan generated from the most information was rated above average on 13 criteria and below average on just one. The middle plan sat in between.
\nThe authors concluded that ChatGPT’s plans were “ranked sub-optimally by coaching experts, although the quality increases when more input information are provided”, and advised runners not to follow them “without an expert coach’s feedback”.
\n\nThat study used a general-purpose chatbot, and AI tools have developed quickly. Several training apps launched in 2026 now combine language models with data from watches and recovery devices to adjust plans daily. Most of the claims made for them come from the companies themselves.
\nIndependent trials are starting. At the University of Miami, a randomised trial of an AI coaching system for indoor cycling, designed to adapt to riders’ confidence as well as their fitness, began in May 2026. Its results are not expected until 2028.
\nSleep tracking has gone mainstream. In a survey of 2,007 American adults for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), 48 per cent said they had used a sleep-tracking device such as a smartwatch, ring or app, up from 35 per cent in 2023. More than half, 55 per cent, said they were changing their behaviour based on what the tracker told them.
\nThe same survey found something less comfortable: 76 per cent of adults said they had lost sleep because of worries about sleep problems. Sleep specialists have a name for the version of that worry driven by data: orthosomnia.
\nThe term was coined in 2017 by sleep researchers in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, who described patients seeking treatment for problems they had diagnosed from their own wearable data, and whose efforts to achieve a “perfect” sleep score were making their sleep worse. It is not a formal diagnosis, but it describes a familiar loop: a poor score creates anxiety, the anxiety makes it harder to fall asleep, and the next score is worse.
\n“Sleep trackers can be valuable tools for raising awareness about sleep health,” said Dr Shalini Paruthi, an AASM spokesperson.
\n\nMany endurance athletes now train with sleep and recovery data, and those data are becoming more prominent. Apple’s newest watches turn sleep, heart rate variability and recent training into a single daily readiness score from 0 to 10. Similar scores are offered by rings, straps and other watches.
\nThese scores can be useful. But they are estimates: consumer devices infer sleep stages from movement and heart rate rather than measuring brain activity, and different devices can disagree about the same night. Sleep is also unusually vulnerable to worry: trying hard to sleep is one of the surest ways not to.
\nMental ill health is common among elite athletes, and responsibility for preventing and treating it lies with the whole of elite sport, not with athletes alone. That is the central message of a new consensus statement from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), published in August in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
\n“Elite athletes experience mental health symptoms and disorders at rates similar to, or higher than, the general population,” the statement says.
\nThe statement updates the IOC’s first consensus on athlete mental health, published in 2019. It was written by an international panel of 31 people with lived, clinical and scientific expertise, drawing together the current evidence across ten topic areas: from detection and treatment to social media, injury, cultural considerations and mental health emergencies.
\nThe panel makes ten core recommendations. Among them:
\nThe statement also calls on sport to tackle stigma, confidentiality concerns and athletes’ fear of being deselected if they ask for help.
\n\nAn accompanying editorial by Dr Brian Hainline of New York University and colleagues stresses that point: mental health in elite sport is “an ecosystem issue rather than one borne solely by athletes”. The editorial also notes a substantial mental health burden among coaches and medical staff.
\n“This consensus provides a roadmap; our hope is that leadership, accountability, and sustained investment will follow,” the editorial says.
\nThe recommendations are written for elite sport, but the ideas travel. Age-group triathletes and club runners are not screened by a national federation, yet many of the same pressures apply: injury, the loss of identity when a racing career ends, and the strain of combining hard training with work and family. The statement’s emphasis on wellbeing as a continuum (something that can change, not a fixed state) applies to anyone who trains seriously.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/02/Lausanne%2C_Maison_olympique.jpg/1920px-Lausanne%2C_Maison_olympique.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:22:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:22:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "mental health", "IOC", "elite athletes", "screening", "athlete welfare" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/mindfulness-flow-state-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/mindfulness-flow-state-meta-analysis/", "title": "Mindfulness training makes “flow” more likely, a review of trials finds", "summary": "Across eight randomised trials, people who practised mindfulness for a median of seven weeks reported more of the deep, effortless absorption athletes call being “in the zone”. The studies were small, and half had a high risk of bias.", "content_html": "Athletes describe it in similar ways: the moment when effort stops feeling like effort, time distorts, and attention narrows to the next step or the next stroke. Psychologists call it flow, a state of deep absorption in an activity, linked to better performance and wellbeing.
\nFlow is notoriously hard to summon on demand. A systematic review published this year in The Journal of Psychology asks whether mindfulness training, which teaches people to attend to the present moment without judging it, can make it more likely.
\nResearchers at the Université Libre de Bruxelles searched for randomised controlled trials in which healthy people followed a mindfulness-based programme or a control condition, and in which flow was measured with a validated questionnaire. Eight trials, with 293 participants in total, met their criteria. Just over half the participants were women, and the median programme lasted seven weeks.
\nMindfulness programmes had a clear positive effect on flow, both as a momentary state and as a general tendency. The pooled effect size was 0.78, conventionally a moderate-to-large effect, and the results were consistent across studies, with little sign that unpublished negative findings had been missed.
\nThe authors suggest how it might work: mindfulness training improves attention and present-moment awareness and reduces self-critical thinking, the inner commentary that pulls an athlete out of the moment.
\n\nHalf of the eight trials were judged to have a high risk of bias, and the samples were small. The participants were healthy volunteers rather than specifically athletes, and the review could not say how much practice is needed, or how long the effect lasts. The authors call for larger trials with longer follow-up.
\nMindfulness does not have to mean long meditation sessions. A simple way to begin is a few minutes a day of focused attention (on the breath, the body or sounds), practising the skill of noticing when the mind wanders and bringing it back without criticism.
\nFor endurance athletes there is a natural place to practise: easy sessions. Running, riding or swimming without headphones, paying attention to breathing, footfall or stroke rhythm, is a form of the same skill. When the mind drifts to splits or worries, notice it and return to the movement.
\n\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Trail_runner_at_the_Ullswater_Trail_Race_2011.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:21:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:21:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "flow", "mindfulness", "sport psychology", "attention", "meta-analysis" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heat-altitude-combined-network-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heat-altitude-combined-network-meta-analysis/", "title": "Heat, altitude or both? A review of 23 studies weighs the options for environmental training", "summary": "Training in heat, thin air or a combination of the two all reduced performance during exposure, the combination most of all. Afterwards, heat and combined exposure raised plasma volume; altitude alone did not, in the short term.", "content_html": "Endurance athletes have long used two environmental tricks to drive adaptation: altitude, where thinner air means less oxygen, and heat. Some now combine them: training at altitude in heat suits, or in chambers that control both temperature and oxygen. A review published in March in the Journal of Translational Medicine compares what each approach does.
\nThe team, from Hubei Minzu University in China, gathered 23 studies with a total of 414 healthy participants who exercised in heat, in hypoxia (low oxygen, as at altitude), or in both combined. Using a network meta-analysis (a method that compares several conditions at once, even when not every pair was tested head-to-head), they looked at performance, heart rate, temperature, perceived effort, plasma volume and lactate, both during exposure and afterwards.
\nDuring exposure, every condition made exercise harder. Low oxygen reduced performance and oxygen uptake and made effort feel harder. Heat and combined heat and hypoxia reduced performance and raised heart rate, core temperature and skin temperature. The combination produced the largest reduction in exercise capacity.
\nShortly after exposure (under 14 days), heat and combined heat-and-hypoxia significantly increased plasma volume, the liquid part of the blood, and improved lactate measures, compared both with control conditions and with hypoxia alone.
\nAfter longer acclimation (14 days or more), heat acclimation improved thermal sensation: the heat felt less severe.
\nThe authors describe the post-exposure improvements as “minor”.
\n\nThe findings fit what coaches already use heat for. Plasma volume expansion is one of the best-established effects of heat training, and it is one reason heat sessions are sometimes used to complement altitude camps. The review suggests that adding hypoxia to heat does not obviously add to that short-term benefit, while making the sessions themselves harder.
\nThe review cannot settle whether the gains translate into faster racing. The participants were healthy volunteers rather than only trained athletes, and the analysis pooled many different protocols.
\n\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/heat-hypoxia.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:20:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:20:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "heat acclimation", "altitude training", "hypoxia", "plasma volume", "environmental physiology" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/breathing-hacks-hyperventilation-nasal-breathing-studies/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/breathing-hacks-hyperventilation-nasal-breathing-studies/", "title": "Two breathing “hacks” put to the test. Neither made athletes faster", "summary": "Hyperventilating before sprints changed blood chemistry as intended but did not improve performance. Four weeks of nasal-only breathing training lengthened breath-holds but did not raise aerobic fitness.", "content_html": "Breathing techniques are among the most popular performance tips on social media: breathe hard before an effort to “buffer” acid, or breathe only through the nose to train the body to use oxygen better. Two controlled studies have tested versions of both ideas. Neither improved performance.
\nHard exercise makes the blood more acidic, which contributes to fatigue. Breathing rapidly before an effort blows off carbon dioxide and makes the blood slightly more alkaline, so, the theory goes, it should delay that acidity.
\nResearchers at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin tested a practical version of the idea in 36 recreational athletes aged 18 to 40. Each ran a series of three hard uphill treadmill sprints on two separate days, once after a hyperventilation protocol and once without. The order was randomised.
\nThe breathing worked as intended on the chemistry. Athletes exhaled far more carbon dioxide during hyperventilation (32.8 vs 21.5 mL per kg of body weight), and the carbon dioxide level in their exhaled breath fell sharply.
\nBut performance did not change. The total height climbed during the sprints was 83.2 m after hyperventilation and 84.3 m without it: no meaningful difference. Blood lactate and pH after the sprints were the same in both conditions. Participants found the breathing unpleasant and felt it hurt their performance. The authors, writing in Experimental Physiology in May, “discourage its application”.
\n\nA separate study, published in the journal Sports, tested a four-week “functional breathing” programme in 16 recreational runners. Eight added daily breathing exercises and breathed only through the nose during easy runs; eight followed the same running programme without them.
\nThe breathing group’s breath-hold time improved by 11.7 seconds, against 1.9 seconds in the control group. But the changes in VO2max, with normal breathing or nasal-only, did not differ between the groups. Both groups’ VO2max rose by about 3 per cent, a result of the running training itself.
\nBoth studies were small, used recreational athletes and lasted days or weeks, so they do not rule out effects in other settings. In both, the techniques changed how people breathed without changing how well they performed.
\nThere is better evidence for slow breathing as a way to influence the nervous system and relaxation, which we have covered separately. That is a different goal from running faster.
\n\n", "image": "https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/VO2_max_Toulouse.jpg/1920px-VO2_max_Toulouse.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:19:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:19:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "breathing", "breathwork", "sprint training", "VO2max", "nasal breathing" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/marathon-acute-heart-effects-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/marathon-acute-heart-effects-meta-analysis/", "title": "What running a marathon does to the heart in the hours afterwards", "summary": "A review of 69 studies and more than 3,200 runners finds that markers of heart-muscle strain rise after a marathon and heart function shifts temporarily. Whether any of it causes harm is still unknown.", "content_html": "Every autumn, hundreds of thousands of people run a marathon. A large review published in June in BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine brings together what is known about what the race does to their hearts in the hours that follow.
\nThe team, led by cardiologists at Amsterdam University Medical Center, searched three databases for studies that measured healthy adults’ hearts before and after a road marathon. From more than 9,000 articles, 69 studies met their criteria, with 3,274 participants in total. Most were aged 30 to 55, and more than 80 per cent were men. Forty-nine studies had enough data for statistical pooling.
\nBlood markers rose. After the marathon, the average levels of three markers commonly used to detect heart-muscle damage or strain all increased:
\nHeart structure and function shifted. On ultrasound, the left ventricle, the heart’s main pumping chamber, held slightly less blood and relaxed less efficiently after the race, and the right ventricle pumped less forcefully while getting larger. Cardiac MRI, by contrast, found the left ventricle ejecting a slightly larger fraction of its blood.
\nThe size of these responses varied with age, sex, training status and how fast people ran.
\nThe changes are real and measurable. But the review cannot say whether they matter. “The clinical significance and potential for harm of these changes are yet to be established,” the authors conclude.
\nThat matters because a rise in troponin is one of the main ways doctors diagnose a heart attack. In marathon runners these rises typically occur without symptoms and are generally thought to be temporary, but they could complicate the assessment of a runner who does develop chest pain after a race.
\n\nThis review looks only at the hours around one race. It sits alongside longer-term research, including a 10-year study of marathon runners’ hearts we reported earlier, which looks at what years of training do.
\n\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/marathon-biomarkers.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:18:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:18:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "marathon", "heart", "troponin", "cardiology", "endurance health" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/polarised-vs-pyramidal-training-intensity-evidence/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/polarised-vs-pyramidal-training-intensity-evidence/", "title": "Polarised or pyramidal? The best evidence says it depends on who you are", "summary": "A pooled analysis of individual athletes’ data found no overall difference between the two most popular ways of distributing training intensity. Competitive athletes may gain more from polarised training, recreational athletes from pyramidal.", "content_html": "Endurance athletes argue endlessly about how to split their training between easy, moderate and hard. Two models dominate:
\nBoth start from the same foundation: most training is easy. The question is what to do with the rest.
\nA network meta-analysis published in Sports Medicine, led by Michael Rosenblat and including the physiologist Stephen Seiler, whose observations of elite athletes popularised polarised training, went further than earlier reviews. Rather than pooling each study’s averages, the team gathered individual participant data: the actual training and results of each athlete.
\nThey included 13 studies with 348 endurance athletes (296 men and 52 women, 198 competitive and 150 recreational) and measured how much time each spent in each heart-rate zone.
\nOverall, there was no difference between polarised and pyramidal training in improvements in VO2max or time-trial performance, and no significant difference between polarised training and any other model.
\nBut the athletes’ level mattered. For VO2max, competitive athletes appeared to benefit more from polarised training and recreational athletes from pyramidal training. The authors concluded that “athletes at a more competitive level may benefit from a POL TID intervention and recreational athletes from a PYR TID intervention”.
\nAn earlier meta-analysis of 17 studies, published in 2024, reached a similar picture: a small VO2max advantage for polarised training, but only in shorter programmes of under 12 weeks and in highly trained athletes, and no difference in time-trial performance.
\n\nFew questions in sports nutrition divide athletes like carbohydrate. Mainstream guidance says endurance athletes need plenty of it. A vocal minority argues that training the body to run on fat, through low-carbohydrate or ketogenic diets, is better, especially for very long events.
\nA systematic review published in February in Nutrients by researchers at the Institute of Sport Sciences in Katowice, Poland, brings together the trials.
\nThey gathered 33 studies of trained athletes (at least six months of structured training, aged 18 to 45), who were assigned to a low-carbohydrate diet (130 g a day or less, or 25 per cent of energy or less), a ketogenic diet (under 50 g a day, or under 10 per cent of energy) or a high-carbohydrate comparison. They examined VO2max, time trials, time to exhaustion, economy and fat burning.
\nThe clearest pattern was timing. Studies that measured performance within the first seven days of the diet found impairment; those that measured after more than a week generally found performance maintained or improved. The authors describe a “1-week adaptation threshold”.
\n\nThe review shows that the body adapts: fat-burning capacity rises dramatically and fitness is largely preserved after the first week. It does not show that low-carbohydrate diets make athletes faster. Worse economy matters in endurance racing, and high-intensity efforts rely heavily on carbohydrate.
\nThe authors’ own conclusion is pragmatic: the evidence “supports periodized carbohydrate strategies balancing metabolic adaptation benefits from low-carbohydrate training phases with carbohydrate requirements during competition”. In plain terms, some lower-carbohydrate training may have a place, but fuel properly for racing.
\nA separate small study, published in July, found that taking a ketone-producing supplement with carbohydrate did not improve endurance performance in nine male athletes who were already fully adapted to a ketogenic diet.
\n\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/lowcarb-findings.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:16:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:16:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "ketogenic diet", "low-carbohydrate diet", "sports nutrition", "fat oxidation", "fuelling" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heat-suit-training-keeps-altitude-haemoglobin-gains/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heat-suit-training-keeps-altitude-haemoglobin-gains/", "title": "Why elite cyclists are training in heat suits after altitude camps", "summary": "In a Norwegian study, riders who swapped three sessions a week for heat-suit training kept the extra haemoglobin they had built at altitude. Riders on normal training lost most of it within a month.", "content_html": "Altitude camps are expensive and disruptive, and their main prize (extra haemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells) starts to fade as soon as athletes come back down. A study from Norway suggests a cheaper tool can hold on to it: training in a heat suit.
\nBent Rønnestad and colleagues at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences in Lillehammer took 18 elite male cyclists, with an average VO2max of 76 mL/kg/min, to a three-week altitude camp at about 2,100 metres.
\nAfter the camp, the riders were split into two groups for three and a half weeks at sea level:
\nTraining intensity and overall load were similar between the groups.
\nThe altitude camp raised total haemoglobin mass by 4.1 per cent across the group.
\nOver the following three and a half weeks, the heat group kept that gain: haemoglobin mass changed by just 0.2 per cent. The control group lost 3.3 per cent, most of what the camp had added.
\nThe heat group’s plasma volume also rose by 11.6 per cent and blood volume by 5.8 per cent, compared with a 5.5 per cent rise in plasma volume in the control group.
\n\nMore haemoglobin means more oxygen can be carried to working muscles, which is why altitude training is so widely used. Heat suits offer a way to extend the benefit at home, without the cost of another camp, and some professional teams now use heat training as part of their preparation for major races.
\nThis was a small study of 18 elite men, and it measured blood, not race performance. Heat training is also a stressor: it raises heart rate and core temperature and can be dangerous if overdone. In this study the heat sessions replaced normal training rather than being added to it.
\n\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/heat-suit.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T19:15:49.306Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T19:15:49.306Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "heat training", "altitude training", "haemoglobin mass", "cycling", "heat suits" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/marathon-majors-2026-season-review-records/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/marathon-majors-2026-season-review-records/", "title": "Two world records and four course records: the year the marathon got faster everywhere", "summary": "From Tokyo in March to Chicago this weekend, the 2026 World Marathon Majors produced a sub-two-hour world record, course records on four continents and record crowds. Here is the season so far, race by race, before New York.", "content_html": "With one race left, New York on 1 November, the 2026 World Marathon Majors season can already be called the fastest in the event’s history. A man has run under two hours in a record-eligible race. Course records have fallen in Tokyo, Boston, Sydney and Berlin. And more people than ever have tried to get on a start line.
\n| Race | Date | Men’s winner | Women’s winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tokyo | 1 March | Tadese Takele (ETH) 2:03:37 | Brigid Kosgei (KEN) 2:14:29: course record |
| Boston | 20 April | John Korir (KEN) 2:01:52: course record | Sharon Lokedi (KEN) 2:18:51 |
| London | 26 April | Sabastian Sawe (KEN) 1:59:30: world record | Tigst Assefa (ETH) 2:15:41: women-only world record |
| Sydney | 30 August | Addisu Gobena (ETH) 2:04:42: course record | Peres Jepchirchir (KEN) 2:18:31 |
| Berlin | 27 September | Guye Adola (ETH) 2:02:50 | Tigst Assefa (ETH) 2:11:04: course record |
| Chicago | 11 October | Amos Kipruto (KEN) 2:01:09 | Hawi Feysa (ETH) 2:13:33 |
| New York | 1 November | : | : |
Chicago results are provisional.
\nThe season opened in Tokyo, where Ethiopia’s Tadese Takele became only the second man to win back-to-back titles, after Birhanu Legese in 2019 and 2020. Brigid Kosgei won the women’s race in a course record of 2:14:29, taking a minute off the previous mark. Takele went on to finish second in Chicago this weekend.
\nIn Boston on 20 April, Kenya’s John Korir defended his title in 2:01:52, wiping 70 seconds off the course record Geoffrey Mutai set in 2011. Boston’s point-to-point, net-downhill course is not eligible for world records, and Korir had help from a tailwind. Even so, it was the first Boston in which the entire men’s podium broke 2:03: Tanzania’s Alphonce Simbu ran 2:02:47 and Kenya’s Benson Kipruto 2:02:50.
\nSharon Lokedi also defended her title, in 2:18:51, the first woman to win back-to-back in Boston since Catherine Ndereba two decades ago, and the American Jess McClain set a US course record of 2:20:49 in fifth.
\nSix days later came the run of the year. Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30 in London, with Yomif Kejelcha second in 1:59:41 on his debut. Tigst Assefa lowered her own women-only world record to 2:15:41. London also set a Guinness World Record for the largest marathon, with 59,830 finishers, after receiving more than 1.1 million ballot applications.
\nIn Sydney, only the second edition as a World Marathon Major, Ethiopia’s Addisu Gobena won in 2:04:42, the fastest marathon ever run in Australia, with seven men inside the old course record. Peres Jepchirchir won the women’s race for her fourth major title.
\nIn Berlin, Assefa was inside world-record pace at 40 km before an injury left her limping home in a course record of 2:11:04. Guye Adola won his second Berlin title.
\nAnd in Chicago on Sunday, Amos Kipruto ran 2:01:09 and Hawi Feysa defended her title in 2:13:33.
\n\nSwitzerland’s Marcel Hug won the men’s wheelchair races in Boston (his ninth title there), London, Berlin and Chicago, with Daniel Romanchuk of the United States winning in Sydney. In the women’s races, Catherine Debrunner won London, Berlin and Chicago; Britain’s Eden Rainbow-Cooper won Boston; and Manuela Schär won Sydney.
\nThere is no single explanation. The deepest generation of East African marathoners in history, carbon-plated shoes with highly resilient foams, much higher carbohydrate intake during races and races organised around fast times all play a part. Conditions mattered too: Boston’s record came with a tailwind, and course records cluster on fast, flat courses on cool mornings.
\nWhat the season shows most clearly is depth. Two men have now run under two hours in a record-eligible race. Three men broke 2:03 in a single Boston. Seven broke the old course record in Sydney. The winning times are extraordinary, but so is how many athletes are now running close to them.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/2025_Boston_Marathon_Women%27s_Elite_podium_%28Lokedi%2C_Obiri%2C_and_Yehualaw%29_in_Brighton.jpg/1920px-2025_Boston_Marathon_Women%27s_Elite_podium_%28Lokedi%2C_Obiri%2C_and_Yehualaw%29_in_Brighton.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:45:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:45:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "World Marathon Majors", "Boston Marathon", "Tokyo Marathon", "Sydney Marathon", "marathon records" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/chicago-marathon-2026-kipruto-feysa/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/chicago-marathon-2026-kipruto-feysa/", "title": "Kipruto breaks away to win Chicago in 2:01:09 as Feysa defends her title", "summary": "Kenya’s Amos Kipruto reversed last year’s result against Jacob Kiplimo with a decisive surge seven kilometres out. Ethiopia’s Hawi Feysa held off Sharon Lokedi in a race that was decided after 35 km.", "content_html": "Amos Kipruto of Kenya won the Chicago Marathon on Sunday in a personal best of 2 hours 1 minute 9 seconds, pulling clear of defending champion Jacob Kiplimo with a surge in the final seven kilometres. In the women’s race, Ethiopia’s Hawi Feysa retained her title in 2:13:33.
\nKipruto’s time matches, to the second, the world record Eliud Kipchoge set in Berlin in 2022. It is the fastest winning time in Chicago since Kelvin Kiptum’s 2:00:35 world record on the same course in 2023.
\nEthiopia’s Tadese Takele Bikila, the two-time Tokyo Marathon champion, finished second in a personal best of 2:02:56 and his compatriot Milkesa Mengesha was third in 2:03:46. Kiplimo, who beat Kipruto by 1 minute 31 seconds here last year and came into the race as the fastest man in the field, faded to fourth in 2:04:18.
\nSix men passed halfway together in 1:00:21. Kiplimo pushed the pace soon afterwards and briefly gapped Kipruto, who worked his way back on to Kiplimo’s shoulder. By 30 km only the two of them remained at the front.
\nWith roughly seven kilometres to go, Kipruto made his move. He reached 35 km in 1:39:58 with a 12-second lead and kept extending it, winning by 1 minute 47 seconds.
\nKipruto, the 2022 London Marathon champion, also improved on the personal best he set in London in April, when he was part of the lead group in the race Sabastian Sawe won in a world record of 1:59:30.
\n\nThe women’s race stayed tight for longer. Lokedi led through halfway in 1:06:06, and she and Feysa were still together at 30 km. At 35 km Feysa was one second ahead; over the final seven kilometres she opened a gap of 34 seconds on the Kenyan, who won the Boston and New York City marathons in previous seasons.
\nBrigid Kosgei, who set the then world record of 2:14:04 on this course in 2019, finished third in 2:14:55.
\nClayton Young was the top American man, seventh in 2:05:23, with Charles Hicks eighth in 2:05:35. Emma Grace Hurley finished seventh in the women’s race in 2:20:47 on her marathon debut, the fastest debut by an American woman, according to NBC Sports.
\nConditions were mild for racing, with race-day trackers showing 67°F (19°C), clear skies and light winds.
\nIn the wheelchair races, Switzerland’s Marcel Hug and Catherine Debrunner won again, a fortnight after both won in Berlin.
\nThese results are provisional and may change when official results are confirmed by race organisers.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Amos_Kipruto_at_the_2025_Chicago_Marathon.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:44:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:44:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "Chicago Marathon", "Amos Kipruto", "Hawi Feysa", "World Marathon Majors" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/josh-kerr-mile-world-record-2026-season/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/josh-kerr-mile-world-record-2026-season/", "title": "3:42.66: how Josh Kerr took down the oldest record in middle-distance running", "summary": "Hicham El Guerrouj’s mile record had stood since 1999. Kerr announced in March that he would break it in London, built his whole season around the attempt, and then won a Commonwealth title and a new world championship for good measure.", "content_html": "Some world records are broken by accident, on a good night. The men’s mile record was not that kind of record. Hicham El Guerrouj ran 3 minutes 43.13 seconds in Rome in 1999, and for 27 years nobody came close enough to make it feel vulnerable.
\nOn 18 July, in front of a crowd of around 60,000 at the London Diamond League, Josh Kerr ran 3:42.66.
\nHe won by more than three seconds. The American Yared Nuguse, one of the finest milers of his generation, finished second in 3:45.69. Kerr’s own previous best, from 2024, was 3:45.34, meaning he took almost two and three-quarter seconds off his personal record in a single race.
\nWhat made the run unusual was that Kerr told everyone it was coming.
\nIn March, he announced that he would attempt the record in London in July. He called it Project 222, after the number of seconds he needed: 3:42 is 222 seconds. He set himself three conditions, according to an interview cited by Wikipedia: the attempt had to be a legal race rather than a time trial, it had to be in the UK, and he would commit his whole season to it, because, in his words, “this isn’t a record that you can steal.”
\nHe then built everything around that one evening. Kerr raced only two 800 m races in the months before London. He spent five weeks training at altitude in Albuquerque, New Mexico, at around 1,600 metres, and according to reporting on his preparation he converted his bedroom into an altitude chamber, sleeping at a simulated 8,200 feet. In a time trial during the build-up, he ran 1,200 m in 2:42.45.
\nOn the night, two pacemakers held him on record pace through most of the race before stepping aside. The last lap was his alone.
\n\nA world record would have made any season. Kerr’s kept going.
\nIn March, before the record attempt, he won the world indoor 3000 m title in Toruń, Poland, his second. At the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow on 1 August, he won the mile, an event restored to the Games for the first time since 1966, in 3:54.12, pulling away from Cameron Myers of Australia and his fellow Scot Jake Wightman over the final 200 metres of a slow, tactical race. Kerr described it as the championship he had circled on his calendar, run in front of a home crowd.
\nAnd in September, at the inaugural World Athletics Ultimate Championship in Budapest, a $10 million invitational for the world’s best, Kerr, invited into the 1500 m field alongside Jakob Ingebrigtsen, won that too.
\n\nThere is a useful lesson in how Kerr approached the record, beyond the physiology. He chose one target, announced it, and organised everything else around it, including racing very little in the months beforehand, when many athletes would have chased fitness through competition.
\nThat focus is not the same as doing more. Kerr’s build-up was defined as much by what he left out as by what he added: fewer races, a narrower goal, and the conditions (a home crowd, a legal race, pacemakers who knew the plan) that gave him the best possible chance on one specific night.
\nEl Guerrouj’s record survived the arrival of carbon-plated spikes, new pacing technology and more than two decades of professional track running. It took an athlete willing to stake an entire season on 222 seconds to finally move it.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2b/Josh_Kerr_winning_the_Men%27s_5000m_final_at_the_2025_UK_Athletics_Championship.jpg/1920px-Josh_Kerr_winning_the_Men%27s_5000m_final_at_the_2025_UK_Athletics_Championship.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:43:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:43:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "Josh Kerr", "mile", "world record", "London Diamond League", "Commonwealth Games" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/glasgow-2026-commonwealth-games-no-marathon/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/glasgow-2026-commonwealth-games-no-marathon/", "title": "The Commonwealth Games dropped the marathon for the first time since 1930. What that says about endurance sport", "summary": "Glasgow 2026 brought back the mile and crowned Josh Kerr in front of a home crowd. It also became the first Games without a marathon, the one athletics event anyone could watch for free.", "content_html": "When Scotland’s Duncan Wright won the marathon at the first British Empire Games in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1930, he began a tradition that ran through every edition that followed. For 22 consecutive Games, the marathon was part of the programme.
\nAt Glasgow 2026, it was not.
\nThe Games, held in the city from late July, were the first in their history without a marathon. The reason, according to reporting by Marathon Handbook, was money. Glasgow staged the event on a budget of around £150 million after the Australian state of Victoria withdrew as host in 2023, citing a projected cost of A$6.9 billion, a figure a later state audit found to be overstated. The sports programme was cut from 19 sports at Birmingham 2022 to 10.
\nIn athletics, the cuts fell on the events held outside the stadium. A marathon requires closed roads, policing and medical cover along 26.2 miles of course; all of the track and field events stayed inside Scotstoun Stadium.
\nThe decision carries a particular irony. At Birmingham 2022, the marathon, won by Uganda’s Victor Kiplangat in 2:10:55 and Australia’s Jessica Stenson in 2:27:31, was one of the few events spectators could watch without a ticket.
\nThere was an attempt to save it. In April 2025, the Glasgow MSP Paul Sweeney lodged a motion at Holyrood proposing that the marathon be reinstated as a mass-participation event: national teams would start first, and paying entrants would follow on the same course, their fees covering the costs. Seven other MSPs from three parties signed it. The motion expired without a vote, and no published figures showed whether the plan would have paid for itself.
\n\nGlasgow did restore one endurance event. The mile, last held at the Games in 1966, returned as the “Commonwealth Mile” for men and women, a change pushed by World Athletics president Sebastian Coe, who argued that the distance remains an everyday measurement across the Commonwealth.
\nIt produced the moment of the Games for the host nation. Josh Kerr, who had broken the mile world record in London that summer, won a slow, tactical race by pulling away from Australia’s Cameron Myers and Scotland’s Jake Wightman over the final 200 metres.
\nMajor championships are under financial pressure everywhere, and the events that cost the most to stage outside a stadium are the obvious candidates for cuts. Road and open-water events need host cities to close streets and coastlines; they cannot be sold by the seat.
\nBut they also offer something a stadium cannot: free access to world-class sport for anyone who turns up, and a direct connection to the mass-participation running culture that now fills marathon start lines from London to Sydney. The London Marathon received more than 1.1 million ballot applications this year.
\nThe next Games, in Ahmedabad, India, in 2030 (a century after Hamilton), will feature between 15 and 17 sports. Organisers have not said whether the marathon will return. For a sport whose popularity has never been greater, its absence from one of its oldest championships is worth noticing.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/glasgow-games.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:42:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:42:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "Commonwealth Games", "Glasgow 2026", "marathon", "Josh Kerr", "mile" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/wtcs-grand-final-pontevedra-vilaca-beaugrand-world-champions/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/wtcs-grand-final-pontevedra-vilaca-beaugrand-world-champions/", "title": "Vilaça wins the world title by finishing second as Beaugrand completes a perfect season", "summary": "In Pontevedra, Matthew Hauser won the race but Portugal’s Vasco Vilaça took the crown. Cassandre Beaugrand won her fifth race from five to reclaim the women’s title, with Britain’s Georgia Taylor-Brown and Kate Waugh behind her.", "content_html": "Portugal’s Vasco Vilaça became world triathlon champion at the World Triathlon Championship Series Grand Final in Pontevedra, Spain, on the final weekend of September, without winning the race. France’s Cassandre Beaugrand reclaimed the women’s title with a win that completed an unbeaten season.
\nIn the men’s race, Australia’s Matthew Hauser, the defending world champion, won a sprint finish against Vilaça after the two were given the same time of 1 hour 39 minutes 31 seconds. Britain’s Alex Yee was third, four seconds back, and Portugal’s Ricardo Batista fourth.
\nSecond place was enough. By covering every move in the closing stages, TRI247 reported, Vilaça made sure the overall title was his. The world championship is decided on each athlete’s three best series results plus the Grand Final.
\nThe women’s race was never in doubt. Beaugrand, the Olympic champion in Paris, won by 1 minute 5 seconds from Britain’s Georgia Taylor-Brown, with another Briton, Kate Waugh, third, 1:31 behind.
\nIt was Beaugrand’s fifth win in five Championship Series starts in 2026. It also completed a recovery from last season, when she arrived at the final as title favourite, did not finish, and watched Germany’s Lisa Tertsch take the world crown. In 2024, she won both the Olympic title and the world championship.
\n\nThe 2026 series ran over nine rounds, starting in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on 14 April. A tenth event in Abu Dhabi, originally the season opener, was postponed because of the conflict in the Middle East and bad weather; it has been rescheduled for after the Grand Final and does not count towards the world titles.
\nFor British triathlon, the Grand Final offered a mixed picture: two women on the podium and Yee, the Olympic champion in Paris, in the medals, but no world champion.
\nIn the junior races on the same weekend, Hungary’s Fanni Szalai and Switzerland’s Thibault Rivier won the world titles, Rivier by two seconds from Portugal’s Dinis Ferreira.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/20220812_European_Championships_Munich_2022_Cassandre_Beaugrand_850_0316.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:41:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:41:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Triathlon", "World Triathlon Championship Series", "Cassandre Beaugrand", "Vasco Vilaça", "Alex Yee", "Georgia Taylor-Brown" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/vuelta-2026-enric-mas-pogacar-crash/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/vuelta-2026-enric-mas-pogacar-crash/", "title": "Enric Mas finally wins a Grand Tour after Pogačar’s Vuelta ends in a crash", "summary": "Three times runner-up in Madrid, Mas inherited the red jersey when Tadej Pogačar crashed out with a broken collarbone and a fractured vertebra on stage 8, and then defended it for two weeks. Britain’s Oscar Onley made history behind him.", "content_html": "For most of a decade, Enric Mas was the nearly man of the Vuelta a España. He finished second in 2018, in 2021 and in 2022. On 13 September in Granada, at the end of the 81st edition, he finally stood on the top step.
\nMas, riding for Movistar, won by 2 minutes 15 seconds from Slovenia’s Primož Roglič, with Austria’s Felix Gall third, 2:44 back. Ecuador’s Richard Carapaz was fourth and the American Sepp Kuss, who climbed from eleventh to fifth on the final mountain stage, completed the top five. Mas is the first Spanish winner of the race since Alberto Contador in 2014, according to ProCyclingUK.
\nHis victory will always be linked to what happened on stage 8.
\nTadej Pogačar arrived at the Vuelta, which started in Monaco on 22 August, as the overwhelming favourite. A month earlier he had won his fifth Tour de France. He won three of the opening stages and built a lead of more than three minutes.
\nNear the end of stage 8 he was caught in a crash. He tried to continue but could not, and was taken to hospital. He was later found to have suffered a concussion, a broken collarbone that required surgery and a fractured C7 vertebra. It was the first time in his career that he had abandoned a Grand Tour. On 5 September his UAE Team Emirates XRG team announced that he would not race again in 2026 (ruling him out of the world championships, where he had won the road race in each of the previous two years) and that he had extended his contract until 2032.
\n\nMas was second overall at the time. He inherited the red jersey, won stage 9 the following day, and defended his lead through the final two weeks to Granada, where Norway’s Tobias Johannessen won the closing stage.
\nRoglič’s second place came three weeks after he was hit by a car while training, according to Wikipedia’s account of the race.
\nBelgium’s Wout van Aert won the points classification, two stages and the overall combativity award, while his Visma–Lease a Bike teammate Matthew Brennan won five stages, more than any other rider. Colombia’s Santiago Buitrago won the mountains classification.
\nAnd Oscar Onley of Netcompany INEOS, sixth overall, won the young rider classification, the first British rider to do so, according to ProCyclingUK.
\n\nIt is tempting to put an asterisk next to a Grand Tour won after the favourite crashed out. Cycling history does not usually do so. Three weeks of racing still have to be survived, and Mas had to defend the lead against Roglič, a four-time winner of this race, over the hardest mountains of the second and third weeks.
\nFor Mas, who has spent his career one place short, the result answers a question that had followed him for years. For Pogačar, the season that brought a record-equalling fifth Tour ended in a hospital in Spain, a reminder that in a sport this fast, a single crash can matter more than any amount of form.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Enrico_Mas_lors_du_contre_la_montre_de_Caen.jpg/1920px-Enrico_Mas_lors_du_contre_la_montre_de_Caen.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:40:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:40:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Cycling", "Vuelta a España", "Enric Mas", "Tadej Pogačar", "Oscar Onley", "Primož Roglič" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/demi-vollering-2026-season-giro-tour-world-title/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/demi-vollering-2026-season-giro-tour-world-title/", "title": "Giro, Tour, rainbow jersey: Demi Vollering’s season for the record books", "summary": "In 2026 Vollering won the Giro and became the first two-time winner of the Tour de France Femmes, before finally taking the world road title in Montreal. The same two riders finished behind her in both races.", "content_html": "For several seasons Demi Vollering has been one of the two or three best riders in women’s cycling. In 2026 she put together a year that has few equals in the modern sport.
\nShe won the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège in the spring. She won the Giro d’Italia Women. She became the first rider to win the Tour de France Femmes twice. And in Montreal at the end of September she won the world road race title for the first time.
\nVollering chose to skip the Vuelta Femenina and target the Giro, which had been moved in the calendar. Going into the final stage she trailed Anna van der Breggen by a little under a minute. She took the lead on the last day.
\nThe win made Vollering the second woman to have won all three of cycling’s Grand Tours, after Annemiek van Vleuten. She had won the Tour in 2023 and the Vuelta in 2024 and 2025.
\nAt the Tour de France Femmes, held from 1 to 9 August and finishing in Nice, Vollering built her victory steadily rather than in one blow. A strong time trial on stage 4 and a win on the hilly stage 5 put her in contention; she limited her losses on the climb of Mont Ventoux; she took an eight-second lead on the penultimate stage; and she won the final stage alone.
\nShe finished 1 minute 18 seconds ahead of Poland’s Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, with Italy’s Elisa Longo Borghini third, 4:29 back. Riding for FDJ United–Suez, Vollering became the first two-time winner of the modern race, which began in 2022.
\n\nDespite everything else she had won, Vollering had never been world road race champion. In Montreal, on the hilly Mont-Royal circuit, she finally took the rainbow jersey.
\nNiewiadoma-Phinney was second and Longo Borghini third, according to Cyclingnews’ race report, the same three riders, in the same order, as on the podium of the Tour.
\n\nGrand Tour wins, Monuments and world titles demand different things: three weeks of consistency, one-day explosiveness, and the ability to deliver on a single date chosen by the calendar. Vollering’s season combined all three.
\nIt also says something about how she raced. Her Tour was built across the whole nine days (a strong time trial, careful defence on the hardest climb and late stage wins) rather than decided in a single day.
\nAt the elite end of the women’s peloton the rivalry is close: after nine days of racing at the Tour, Vollering’s margin over Niewiadoma-Phinney was 1 minute 18 seconds. This year, in every race that mattered, Vollering was the one who came out on top.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Demi_Vollering_win_-_2025_European_road_championship_-_Guilherand-Granges.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:39:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:39:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Cycling", "Demi Vollering", "Tour de France Femmes", "Giro d'Italia Women", "world championships", "women's cycling" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/marathon-runners-heart-ten-year-study-jama-cardiology/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/marathon-runners-heart-ten-year-study-jama-cardiology/", "title": "A marathon temporarily weakens the heart’s right side. Ten years of racing did not, study finds", "summary": "German researchers followed 152 recreational marathon runners for a decade. The right ventricle’s pumping dropped after a race and recovered within days, and was no worse ten years later.", "content_html": "Running a marathon puts the heart under unusual strain, and for years one of the open questions in sports cardiology has been whether that strain adds up. In particular, researchers have wondered about the right ventricle (the chamber that pumps blood to the lungs, which works especially hard during prolonged exercise) and about troponin, a protein released from heart muscle that often rises after endurance events.
\nA study published in January in JAMA Cardiology offers some of the best long-term evidence yet, and it is broadly reassuring.
\nResearchers at the Technical University of Munich and the University Hospital Zurich studied male recreational marathon runners recruited at a single centre in Germany. They measured heart function with three-dimensional echocardiography and took blood samples before a marathon, immediately afterwards, and one and three days later. Then, ten years on, in 2019, they examined the same runners again.
\nIn all, 152 men, with a reported average age of 43, were included in the analysis. In the decade between, they had continued to train and race.
\nAfter the race: the right ventricle’s ejection fraction, the share of blood it pumps out with each beat, fell significantly, from a median of 52.4 per cent before the marathon to 47.6 per cent immediately afterwards. It was still slightly lower a day later (50.7 per cent) but had returned to normal by day three (51.3 per cent).
\nTen years later: right ventricular function was no different from before the original race, at a median of 51.9 per cent.
\nTroponin: the rise in troponin T after the marathon did not predict any change in heart function a decade later.
\nThe left side: left ventricular ejection fraction did fall slightly over the ten years (from 59.6 to 57.6 per cent), and an index of left-ventricular filling pressure rose slightly. Both stayed within normal limits.
\n\nThe authors concluded that repeated strenuous training and racing did not cause long-term deterioration of right ventricular function in most recreational male endurance athletes.
\n\nFor the many recreational runners who worry that marathon training might be quietly harming their heart, this is good news. The short-term dip in right-ventricle function after a race is real, but in this group it recovered within days and did not accumulate over ten years.
\nIt is also a reminder of what the days after a marathon are for. A heart that is measurably below its normal function the day after a race is a heart in recovery. Easy days after a marathon are not lost training. They are the period in which the body restores what the race took.
\nAnyone with symptoms such as chest pain, fainting or palpitations during or after exercise should seek medical advice; this study does not change that.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/marathon-heart.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:38:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:38:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "heart health", "marathon", "endurance training", "cardiology", "troponin" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/choking-under-pressure-interventions-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/choking-under-pressure-interventions-meta-analysis/", "title": "Choking under pressure is not a character flaw. A review of 21 studies shows it can be trained against", "summary": "Quiet-eye training, pre-performance routines, mindfulness and self-talk all reduced the drop in skilled performance under pressure, most reliably in sports where the athlete controls the timing.", "content_html": "Every athlete has seen it happen, and many have felt it: the putt missed from three feet, the penalty skied over the bar, the transition that goes to pieces when it matters most. Psychologists call it choking under pressure: a drop in performance, below what an athlete is capable of, caused by the pressure of the moment.
\nIt is often treated as a matter of temperament: some people are “clutch”, others are not. A meta-analysis published this year in Psychology of Sport and Exercise suggests a more useful view. Choking can be trained against.
\nResearchers at Henan University in China and Universiti Putra Malaysia, with colleagues elsewhere, pooled 21 studies that tested interventions designed to protect sport-specific performance under pressure. The most common were:
\nThe interventions reduced the decline in performance under pressure across every outcome measured:
\nThe effects were larger and more consistent in closed-skill sports, where the athlete controls the timing: golf putts, free throws, penalty kicks (0.46). In open-skill situations, where the athlete must react to a changing environment, the benefits were smaller and less robust once the researchers adjusted for publication bias.
\n\n\nEndurance sport may not look like a world of closed skills, but it is full of them: the swim start, the mount and dismount in transition, the bottle exchange, the corner on a technical descent, the decision to respond to an attack. They are also exactly the moments in which pressure tends to show.
\nTwo techniques in the review translate directly. A pre-performance routine (the same breath, the same cue words, the same physical sequence before each start or transition) gives the mind something to do other than worry. And mindfulness, practised in training, builds the habit of returning attention to the task rather than to the stakes.
\nThe broader lesson is that composure is a skill. Like any skill, it improves with practice, and it is far better practised in training than discovered on race day.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/choking-interventions.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:37:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:37:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "choking", "pressure", "sport psychology", "mindfulness", "self-talk", "pre-performance routine" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/exercise-snacks-fitness-meta-analysis-bjsm/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/exercise-snacks-fitness-meta-analysis-bjsm/", "title": "Five-minute “exercise snacks” improved fitness in inactive people, review finds", "summary": "Short bouts of vigorous movement spread through the day produced a large gain in aerobic fitness across 11 randomised trials. They did not move blood pressure, cholesterol or body composition.", "content_html": "The most common reason people give for not exercising is time. A growing body of research has asked what happens if exercise is broken into pieces so small that time stops being an excuse: a few minutes of stair climbing, cycling or bodyweight exercise, done several times a day. Researchers call them “exercise snacks”.
\nA meta-analysis published in January in the British Journal of Sports Medicine pulls the randomised evidence together for the people who stand to gain most: adults who do little or no exercise.
\nThe team, from the University of Oviedo in Spain with collaborators in France, Denmark and the UK, searched seven databases for randomised controlled trials comparing exercise snacks with no exercise in physically inactive adults and adults over 65.
\nThey defined an exercise snack as a structured bout lasting five minutes or less, done at least twice a day, at least three days a week, for at least two weeks. Eleven trials, with 414 participants, met the criteria. Programmes lasted between four and twelve weeks, and intensity ranged from moderate to near-maximal.
\nAerobic fitness improved substantially. In inactive adults, exercise snacks raised cardiorespiratory fitness with a large pooled effect size of 1.37, rated as moderate-certainty evidence, based on six trials.
\nMuscular endurance improved modestly in older adults (effect size 0.40), though the certainty of that evidence was very low.
\nOther markers did not change. There were no significant effects on leg strength, body composition, blood pressure or blood lipids.
\nPeople stuck with it. Compliance averaged 91 per cent and adherence 83 per cent: high figures for exercise research.
\n\n\nFor people who do not exercise, the message is encouraging and specific: brief, repeated bouts of hard effort spread through the day can build aerobic fitness, and people seem able to keep doing them. Fitness itself is one of the strongest predictors of long-term health.
\nFor trained athletes, exercise snacks are not a substitute for a training plan: the trials were in inactive people, and the review found no change in strength or body composition. But the principle is useful for anyone whose days are fragmented. On the busiest days, a few short bouts of movement are better than nothing, and the research suggests they are not merely symbolic.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/exercise-snacks.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:36:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:36:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "exercise snacks", "aerobic fitness", "VO2max", "time-efficient training", "meta-analysis" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heavy-strength-training-cyclists-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/heavy-strength-training-cyclists-meta-analysis/", "title": "Heavy lifting made endurance cyclists faster, without raising their VO2max", "summary": "Across 17 studies, adding heavy strength training to cycling improved time-trial performance, efficiency and anaerobic power. The engine stayed the same size. It just wasted less.", "content_html": "Endurance athletes have long been wary of the weights room. Lifting heavy, the argument goes, adds muscle that has to be carried, and steals time and energy from the riding that actually builds endurance.
\nA meta-analysis published in the January issue of the European Journal of Applied Physiology adds to the evidence that, for cyclists at least, the argument is wrong.
\nResearchers at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and Universidad Andrés Bello in Chile pooled 17 studies of endurance cyclists: 262 riders, 60 of them women, with an average starting VO2max of 61 ml/kg/min, the range of well-trained amateurs. In each study, one group added heavy strength training, loads of at least 80 per cent of the most they could lift once, to their cycling for between 5 and 25 weeks, one to three sessions a week. A comparison group did the cycling alone.
\nCompared with cycling alone, adding heavy strength training improved:
\nIt did not change VO2max, power at VO2max, the maximal metabolic steady state (roughly, threshold) or anaerobic capacity. And the benefits did not depend on sex, body size, performance level, strength-training experience, or how long or often the programme ran.
\n\nThe pattern is telling. Heavy lifting did not make the cyclists’ engines bigger: VO2max and threshold were unchanged. What it changed was efficiency and top-end power, and that was enough to make them faster.
\nThat fits the leading explanation for strength training’s benefits in endurance sport: stronger muscles can produce each pedal stroke using a smaller fraction of their maximum force, which may delay fatigue and allow the same power with less effort. Strength training also changes how the nervous system recruits muscle: neural adaptations that can occur without large gains in muscle size.
\n\nFor cyclists (and plausibly for runners and triathletes, where similar findings have been reported), heavy strength training appears to be a performance tool rather than a distraction. One or two sessions a week, focused on heavy, low-repetition lifts, fit easily into most training weeks.
\nThe details still matter. Heavy lifting is a skill and a load in its own right, best introduced gradually, in the off-season or base period, and scheduled so it does not compromise the key endurance sessions. The minimum effective dose here is small. The research suggests it is worth finding.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/strength-cycling.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:35:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:35:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "strength training", "cycling", "endurance performance", "efficiency", "VO2max" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/reds-energy-deficiency-female-endurance-athletes-finland/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/reds-energy-deficiency-female-endurance-athletes-finland/", "title": "Four in five elite female endurance athletes at risk of energy deficiency, Finnish study finds", "summary": "Using the latest clinical assessment tool, researchers found signs of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport in 82 per cent of national- and international-level endurance athletes, including missing periods, low thyroid hormone and bone stress injuries.", "content_html": "Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, REDs, describes what happens when athletes do not eat enough to cover both their training and the rest of what their bodies need to function. Over time, low energy availability can disrupt hormones, menstrual cycles, metabolism, bone health and performance.
\nA study published in September in the Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport suggests the problem is common among Finland’s top female athletes, and most common in endurance sport.
\nThe team, from the University of Eastern Finland, the University of Jyväskylä and partner institutions, studied 157 women: 50 endurance athletes, 50 speed and power athletes, 37 team and interval-sport athletes, all competing at national or international level, plus 20 active women who were not athletes.
\nThey assessed REDs risk using the International Olympic Committee’s REDs Clinical Assessment Tool, version 2, which combines clinical, hormonal, metabolic and bone-health indicators into four levels of risk.
\nThe endurance athletes also showed the least favourable profile on individual markers:
\nREDs is not only a performance problem. Missing periods and low energy availability are linked to lower bone density, and bone stress injuries can end seasons and, in young athletes, affect bone health for life.
\nEndurance sports carry particular risk because training volumes are high, and because cultures in some sports still associate lightness with speed. The study’s finding that the problem was most common in the most accomplished endurance athletes (national and international level) is a reminder that being successful is no guarantee of being healthy.
\nThe signs listed in the study are a useful checklist. A missing or irregular period is not a normal consequence of hard training; it is a signal to talk to a doctor. Recurrent bone stress injuries, persistent fatigue and stalled progress despite good training are others.
\nFuelling is part of training, not separate from it. For athletes who train a lot, eating enough (before, during and after sessions, and on rest days) is one of the foundations that makes everything else possible.
\nThis article is for general information. Anyone concerned about REDs should speak to a doctor or registered sports dietitian.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/reds-risk.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:34:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:34:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "REDs", "energy availability", "female athletes", "bone health", "menstrual health" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/caffeine-heat-core-temperature-study/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/caffeine-heat-core-temperature-study/", "title": "Caffeine before work in the heat raised core temperature and heart rate, trial finds", "summary": "In a double-blind trial, a typical pre-race caffeine dose made people run hotter during two hours of exertion at 35°C. It did not damage their kidneys or gut, but it is a consideration for anyone racing in the heat.", "content_html": "Caffeine is one of the few supplements with strong evidence of improving endurance performance, and many athletes take it before racing as a matter of routine. A trial published this year in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise looked at a less-studied question: what does it do to the body in the heat?
\nResearchers at the University of New Mexico and the University of Northern Iowa, with colleagues in Arkansas and Indiana, recruited 14 active adults, eight women and six men, who were regular caffeine users. In a double-blind crossover design, each took either caffeine (5 mg per kilogram of body weight, up to 400 mg) or a placebo 30 minutes before two hours of physical work in a heat chamber at 35°C and 50 per cent humidity. The work combined walking at a moderate intensity with lifting boxes, and each participant did both conditions.
\nThe researchers tracked core temperature and heart rate throughout, weighed participants before and after, and measured blood and urine markers of kidney injury, gut injury and endotoxaemia (bacterial toxins leaking from the gut into the blood, a known risk in heat stress).
\nWith caffeine, compared with placebo:
\nThere were no differences in the main markers of acute kidney injury or gut injury. One kidney marker, serum cystatin C, rose after the caffeine trial but not the placebo trial, which the authors interpret as a sign of reduced kidney filtration during the work.
\n\nThe authors concluded that caffeine taken before work in the heat speeds the rise in core temperature, without affecting markers of kidney or gut injury.
\n\nThe study does not show that caffeine is dangerous, and it does not undermine the well-established performance benefits of caffeine for endurance athletes. What it adds is a reminder that caffeine is not neutral in the heat: in this trial it made the body work a little harder to manage temperature, and slightly increased fluid losses.
\nFor athletes heading to hot races such as Kona, Nice or a summer marathon, that is worth folding into the plan. The international consensus on competing in the heat puts acclimatisation, individual hydration plans and cooling strategies first. Within that plan, athletes who use caffeine may want to rehearse their race-day dose in hot training sessions, rather than discovering its effects for the first time in competition.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/caffeine-heat.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:33:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:33:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "caffeine", "heat", "core temperature", "hydration", "kidney health" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/kona-2026-knibb-luis-world-champions/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/kona-2026-knibb-luis-world-champions/", "title": "Knibb snatches Kona title in the final mile as Luis wins on debut", "summary": "Taylor Knibb passed defending champion Solveig Løvseth inside the last mile of the marathon, a year after the same stretch of road ended her own race. Vincent Luis won the men’s title at his first attempt.", "content_html": "Taylor Knibb of the United States won the Ironman World Championship on Saturday, overtaking defending champion Solveig Løvseth of Norway in the final mile of the marathon on the Big Island of Hawaii. France’s Vincent Luis won the men’s race on his first appearance at the championship.
\nKnibb finished in an unofficial 8 hours 36 minutes 29 seconds. Germany’s Laura Philipp was second, 3 minutes 5 seconds behind, and Switzerland’s Julie Derron took third on her Kona debut despite serving a three-minute drafting penalty. Britain’s Kat Matthews was fourth.
\nLuis, 37, crossed the line in an unofficial 7:47:27, about a minute and a half ahead of Norway’s Gustav Iden, the 2022 champion, who was slowed by a three-minute penalty for drafting on the bike. Matthew Marquardt of the United States was third.
\nThis was the first time since 2022 that both championship races were held in Kailua-Kona. From 2023 to 2025 the men’s and women’s titles were decided at separate venues, with the race alternating between Kona and Nice, France.
\nThe women’s race turned on the same stretch of road that decided it a year ago.
\nLøvseth passed Knibb with just under five miles of the marathon remaining and appeared set to retain her title. With about a mile to go she began to wobble, NBC Sports reported, and she was seated on the pavement when Knibb ran past her with seven-tenths of a mile left.
\nIn 2025 the roles were reversed: Knibb, struggling in the heat, was sitting by the roadside when Løvseth passed her with two miles to go on the way to the title. Knibb did not finish that race.
\n“I’m stunned,” Knibb told NBC Sports. She said there had been many moments on the course when she wanted to stop, and that she “had to learn from last year.”
\nReports from the finish did not give a medical explanation for Løvseth’s difficulties. She recovered to finish eighth, in 9:02:09, according to NBC Sports’ results.
\n\nKnibb, 28, becomes the first American to pair an Olympic medal with a Kona title, according to NBC Sports. She won silver in the mixed relay at both the Tokyo and Paris Games, and four weeks ago in Nice she won her fourth Ironman 70.3 world title in a course record.
\nThe men’s race looked to belong to Denmark’s Magnus Ditlev, who started the marathon with a lead of 5 minutes 34 seconds over Luis.
\nLuis, a two-time world champion over the Olympic distance and a bronze medallist in the mixed relay at the Tokyo Olympics, cut that to 3:31 with 7.7 miles left. Ditlev began intermittently walking, and Luis passed him with just under five miles to go: close to the point where Løvseth would later take the lead in the women’s race. Ditlev did not finish.
\nIden finished about a minute and a half behind Luis after spending three minutes in the penalty box, a sanction that TRI247 said ultimately cost him the win. Gregory Barnaby was fourth, France’s Pierre Le Corre fifth and Sam Long of the United States sixth. Tokyo Olympic champion Kristian Blummenfelt finished eighth.
\nLuis said afterwards that he had gone through “some dark places” in the final kilometres.
\nAll three of the day’s most significant performers (Knibb, Luis and Iden) built their careers over the Olympic distance before moving up to Ironman.
\nTimes and placings are unofficial until confirmed by Ironman. We will update this report if they change.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Paris2024_-_Triathlon_-_10_-_Taylor_Knibb.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:32:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:32:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Triathlon", "Ironman World Championship", "Kona", "Taylor Knibb", "Vincent Luis", "Solveig Løvseth" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/kona-last-mile-heat-collapse-science/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/kona-last-mile-heat-collapse-science/", "title": "Two years, two champions on the roadside. What Kona’s last mile does to the human body", "summary": "For the second year running, the women’s Ironman world title was decided by an athlete who could no longer run within sight of the finish. The science of late-race collapse explains why it happens, and why nobody should guess at the cause from the roadside.", "content_html": "On Saturday, less than a mile from the finish of the Ironman World Championship, Solveig Løvseth was sitting on the pavement. She had led the race moments earlier. Taylor Knibb ran past her and on to the title.
\nTwelve months ago, on the same road, the positions were reversed. It was Knibb who sat by the roadside in the heat, and Løvseth who passed her to become world champion.
\nThe symmetry is striking, but the experience is not unusual at this race. The defining image of the event’s early years is Julie Moss crawling towards the Kona finish line in 1982, her legs no longer able to carry her, as Kathleen McCartney passed to win. More than four decades on, the final miles on the Big Island still find the limits of the best-prepared athletes in the world.
\nSo what is happening when a world-class athlete, hours into a race and minutes from victory, suddenly cannot run?
\nThe honest answer for any individual athlete is: we do not know, and neither does anyone watching on a screen. The reports we reviewed from Saturday’s race gave no medical explanation for Løvseth’s difficulties, and none was given publicly for Knibb’s in 2025. Diagnosis requires a medical assessment, not a camera angle. What follows is what the research says about late-race collapse in general, not an explanation of either case.
\nDoctors who work at endurance events have a name for it: exercise-associated collapse. In a widely cited review in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, the sports physicians Chad Asplund, Francis O’Connor and Tim Noakes described how most collapses in endurance events happen after athletes cross the line.
\nThe usual mechanism is surprisingly mechanical. While you run, the contracting muscles of the legs act as a pump that pushes blood back towards the heart. Stop abruptly and that pump stops too. Blood pools in the legs, blood pressure drops, and the athlete feels faint or falls. Lying down with the legs raised usually resolves it quickly.
\nThe same review draws a sharp line: an athlete who collapses while still racing needs to be assessed for more serious causes. The list clinicians work through includes exertional heat stroke, low blood sodium (exercise-associated hyponatraemia), low blood sugar and, rarely, cardiac problems. Many athletes who struggle late in a race turn out to have none of these, but the distinction is why medical teams take a mid-race collapse seriously and why spectators should not draw conclusions.
\n\nKona combines the factors that make heat dangerous. Racing lasts eight to nine hours for the professional women and longer for most age-groupers. Much of the bike and run takes place on the Queen Ka’ahumanu Highway, across black lava fields that radiate heat. Humidity limits how well sweat can cool the body.
\nA 2021 review in Physiological Reviews by Julien Périard and colleagues sets out the chain of events: as core temperature rises, more blood is sent to the skin to shed heat, leaving less for the working muscles; sweat losses reduce blood volume; heart rate climbs to compensate. Performance falls long before an athlete is in danger, the body and brain appear to protect themselves by forcing a slowdown.
\nAdd the length of an Ironman, with the fuelling and fluid decisions an athlete must get right for hours on end, and the final miles become a test of whether all of those systems still have something left.
\nThe 2015 consensus on training and competing in the heat, led by Sébastien Racinais and published simultaneously in three leading sports-science journals, is clear that heat acclimatisation, repeated training in hot conditions over one to two weeks, is the most important protective strategy. A companion review by Périard, Racinais and Michael Sawka describes the adaptations: a larger plasma volume, earlier and more efficient sweating, a lower heart rate and core temperature at the same workload.
\nThe consensus also recommends individual hydration plans based on sweat testing in training, and cooling strategies before and during competition.
\nNone of this guarantees a good day in Kona. But it explains why the athletes who arrive best adapted to the heat, and who pace the early hours with the final hour in mind, tend to be the ones still running on Ali’i Drive.
\nAfter her win, Knibb said simply that she “had to learn from last year”. In a race that punishes any error at the very end, that may be the most important preparation of all.
\nThis article is for general information and is not medical advice. Anyone who collapses during exercise should be assessed by a medical professional.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Iron_man_finish_Alii_drive_course_Kailua_Kona_Big_island_Hawaii_%2846276765411%29.jpg/1920px-Iron_man_finish_Alii_drive_course_Kailua_Kona_Big_island_Hawaii_%2846276765411%29.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:31:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:31:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Triathlon", "Ironman World Championship", "Kona", "heat", "exercise-associated collapse", "pacing" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/recovery-tools-no-better-than-passive-rest-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/recovery-tools-no-better-than-passive-rest-meta-analysis/", "title": "No recovery method beat simply resting, new analysis of endurance trials finds", "summary": "A network meta-analysis of every randomised trial in competitive endurance athletes found that no physical recovery method outperformed passive rest on any outcome measured. A fake treatment did as well as the real ones.", "content_html": "Endurance athletes spend a great deal of time and money on recovery: ice baths, compression garments, massage, electrical muscle stimulation, active cool-downs. A new analysis of the randomised trials of physical recovery methods in endurance athletes has reached a blunt conclusion: none has been shown to beat simply resting.
\nThe study, published in August in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living by researchers in Chongqing and Shanghai, is a network meta-analysis, a method that pools trials comparing different treatments so that they can all be ranked against a common reference. Here the reference was passive recovery: doing nothing in particular.
\nThe authors searched four major databases up to 1 April 2026 for randomised controlled trials of physical recovery methods in competitive endurance athletes. Sixteen trials, involving 273 participants, met their criteria.
\nAcross eight outcomes, including muscle soreness, creatine kinase (a blood marker of muscle damage) and sport-specific performance, the analysis made 47 comparisons between a recovery method and passive rest.
\nOnly three of those 47 comparisons showed any statistically detectable difference, and the authors judged that none of the three was robust: two rested on a single trial, and all three came from networks that pooled measurements that were not really comparable.
\nThe single finding rated as moderate certainty was that compression garments do not improve performance.
\n\nThe most striking detail involves a placebo. The network included a sham treatment: immersion in water at a neutral temperature, designed to feel like a treatment without having the physiological effects of cold or heat. In the network, that sham ranked at or above every active recovery method on all three main outcomes.
\nThat matters because athletes in recovery trials almost always know which treatment they are getting. The authors argue that, in this literature, it is impossible to separate expectation (believing a treatment helps) from any genuine physiological effect.
\nNot very, and that is the point. Using a formal rating system, the authors judged certainty to be very low for 31 of the 47 comparisons and low for 15. The evidence base was also thinner than the trial count suggests: 35 of the 55 treatment points in the networks (64 per cent) rested on a single trial, and when the analysis was restricted to confirmed elite athletes, half of the outcomes could not be analysed at all.
\nThis is consistent with a 2024 umbrella review of recovery strategies in endurance athletes, which also found no strategy with consistent benefits.
\n\nThe study does not say recovery is unimportant: quite the opposite. Passive recovery, the method everything was compared against, is recovery: time, rest and, by implication, the sleep, food and lower training stress that allow the body to adapt.
\nWhat the evidence does not support is the idea that a gadget or protocol layered on top of that rest reliably speeds the process. For athletes with limited time and money, the practical implication is to protect the basics first, and to treat any additional recovery tool as a matter of preference rather than proven performance gain.
\nThe authors declared no commercial or financial conflicts of interest.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/recovery-evidence.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:30:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:30:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "recovery", "cold water immersion", "compression garments", "massage", "meta-analysis" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/sub-two-hour-marathon-sawe-six-months-on/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/sub-two-hour-marathon-sawe-six-months-on/", "title": "1:59:30, six months on: how the two-hour marathon finally fell, and what it changed", "summary": "In April, Sabastian Sawe became the first person to run a marathon under two hours in a race that counts. The details of that run, and of the season since, explain why it happened when it did.", "content_html": "For most of the past decade the two-hour marathon was an argument rather than a time. Eliud Kipchoge ran 1:59:40 in Vienna in 2019, but in a staged event with rotating pacemakers and a pace car that could never count as a record. In a real race, the record crept downwards a few seconds at a time.
\nThen, on 26 April in London, Sabastian Sawe ran 1:59:30.
\nHe did not just break the barrier. The man who chased him, Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha, ran 1:59:41, in his first marathon. Uganda’s Jacob Kiplimo, in third, ran 2:00:28, also inside the old world record. According to the race’s own data, all of the top five set personal bests.
\nSix months later, with the record ratified and the autumn marathons run, it is possible to see the run more clearly: not as a freak, but as the end point of a long slope.
\n
The first half was fast but controlled. A group of six (Sawe, Kejelcha, Kiplimo, Olympic champion Tamirat Tola, Deresa Geleta and Amos Kipruto) followed the pacemakers through halfway in 1:00:29, close to the planned 60:30.
\nThe pacemakers sheltered the group from the wind until about 25 km. Then Sawe, rather than waiting, began to press. By 29 km only Kejelcha could stay with him, with Kiplimo dropping back.
\nAt 30 km the pair were still only on course for roughly 2:01. What changed the race was the next five kilometres: Sawe covered 30 to 35 km in 13 minutes 54 seconds, bringing the projection down to around 2:00:30. Kejelcha held on until the 25th mile. Sawe ran the final 2.195 km alone, in 5 minutes 51 seconds.
\n\nOne detail from that day shows how scrutinised such a run now is. Timing data initially credited Sawe with a 4:12 24th mile, which would have been the fastest mile split recorded in any marathon. Within a week, analysis showed the split had probably been mismeasured, and the race’s timing company removed it from the record.
\nSawe was not an unknown. He won on his debut in Valencia in 2024 in 2:02:05, then took the London and Berlin titles in 2025. According to reporting on his build-up, he averaged around 200 km a week in the six weeks before London, and he raced in a lightweight version of Adidas’s super-shoe.
\nCredibility was part of the preparation too. In the doping-scarred climate of Kenyan distance running, Sawe had volunteered for an unusually heavy programme of out-of-competition testing before his 2025 Berlin win (25 tests from the Athletics Integrity Unit) and additional testing funded by his sponsor before London. World Athletics ratified the record in July, according to Kenyan media reports.
\nRecords rarely stand alone, and the autumn has shown how far the event has moved.
\nIn Chicago on Sunday, Amos Kipruto, one of the six men in the London lead group, won in 2:01:09, the same time as Kipchoge’s world record of only four years ago. In Berlin last month, Guye Adola ran 2:02:50. Kejelcha’s 1:59:41 means two men have now run under two hours in a record-eligible race, and neither did it in a staged attempt.
\nThe women’s event is moving too. On the same day in London, Tigst Assefa set a women-only world record of 2:15:41, the first time three women had run under 2:16 in one race. In Berlin she reached 40 km inside world-record pace before injury slowed her.
\nSawe himself withdrew from Berlin, where he was the defending champion, with an injury a month before the race, a reminder that the bodies producing these times are being asked to absorb extraordinary training loads.
\nThere is no single answer, and anyone who offers one is selling something. The ingredients are visible, though: a deep generation of East African athletes who move up from the track and half marathon younger and faster; carbon-plated shoes with highly resilient foams; carbohydrate intakes during races that would have been unthinkable a decade ago; and courses, pacing and race organisation built around fast times.
\nWhat Sawe’s run demonstrated is that, with all of that in place, the barrier was a matter of nerve and timing as much as physiology. He ran the fastest section of his race when the conventional plan said to wait.
\nThe two-hour marathon is no longer the limit. The question is now how far below it the event will go, and whether the athletes chasing those times can stay healthy enough to keep trying.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Sabastian_Sawe_at_Berlin-Marathon_2025-09-21_01.jpg/1920px-Sabastian_Sawe_at_Berlin-Marathon_2025-09-21_01.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:29:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:29:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "marathon", "world record", "Sabastian Sawe", "Yomif Kejelcha", "London Marathon" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/mental-fatigue-decision-making-meta-analysis/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/mental-fatigue-decision-making-meta-analysis/", "title": "A tired mind makes worse decisions on the field, meta-analysis finds", "summary": "Pooling two decades of experiments, researchers found that mental fatigue hurt sport-specific decision-making more consistently than any other skill. The implications reach well beyond team sport.", "content_html": "Most athletes know the feeling: a long day of meetings, emails and decisions, and then a training session that feels harder than it should. Sport scientists call it mental fatigue, a state of tiredness brought on by prolonged demanding cognitive activity, and over the past two decades a growing body of research has examined what it does to performance.
\nA meta-analysis published in May in BMC Psychology brings that work together for the skills that decide games and races: how quickly athletes react, how well they execute technique, and how good their decisions are.
\nThe team, from Chengdu Sport University in China, searched five databases up to January 2026 for experiments in healthy people that compared a mentally fatiguing task (often a long, demanding computer task such as the Stroop colour-word test) with a control condition, before a sport-specific or sport-relevant test. Nineteen study records met their criteria. Crucially, they analysed the three skill types separately, rather than mixing them together as earlier reviews often had.
\nMental fatigue was associated with poorer performance in all three domains:
\nIn the conventional reading of these standardised effect sizes, 0.5 is “medium” and 0.8 “large”. These are meaningful effects, not marginal ones.
\n\nThe finding fits a broader picture. An influential 2017 systematic review by Jeroen Van Cutsem and colleagues found that mental fatigue impairs endurance performance, and that it does so largely by making exercise feel harder, raising the perceived effort of a given workload, rather than by limiting the heart, lungs or muscles.
\nDecision-making relies heavily on the brain’s executive functions: attention, inhibition, holding information in mind. Those are the same resources that demanding cognitive work depletes. It is plausible that when they are already taxed, sport decisions (when to pass, when to attack, how hard to push) are the first thing to degrade.
\nThe authors are careful. Like most of this field, the evidence comes from short, controlled experiments whose fatigue-inducing tasks may not resemble an athlete’s real day. The technical-skill results varied widely, and the reaction-time evidence rests on only four results. They call for future studies to define their primary outcomes in advance and report their statistics more completely.
\nEndurance sport is full of decisions: pacing, fuelling, when to respond to a move. For age-group athletes who train around demanding jobs, the research suggests that the hardest cognitive days may be the worst days for sessions that depend on judgement: threshold pacing, race simulations, technical work.
\nThe practical implication is not to avoid training after a hard day at work, but to recognise that mental load is a real training input. On the days when the mind is already spent, a simpler session may be the better one.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/mental-fatigue.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:28:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:28:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "mental fatigue", "decision-making", "sport psychology", "cognitive load" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/berlin-marathon-2026-assefa-adola/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/running/berlin-marathon-2026-assefa-adola/", "title": "Assefa limps home in a course-record 2:11:04 as Adola wins Berlin again", "summary": "Tigst Assefa was inside world-record pace at 40 km before an injury left her limping through the final two kilometres. She still won by more than five minutes and broke her own course record. Guye Adola won the men’s race in 2:02:50.", "content_html": "Tigst Assefa won the Berlin Marathon for the third time on 27 September, setting a course record of 2 hours 11 minutes 4 seconds despite an injury that left her visibly limping over the final two kilometres. Guye Adola won the men’s race in a personal best of 2:02:50.
\nAssefa, 29, was running inside world-record pace at 40 km. She slowed sharply in the closing stretch and missed the world record of 2:09:56, set by Ruth Chepngetich in Chicago in 2024, by 68 seconds. Even so, she finished more than five minutes clear of her Ethiopian compatriots Bedatu Hirpa, second in 2:16:53, and Dera Dida, two seconds further back.
\nThe time improves on the course record of 2:11:53 Assefa set in Berlin in 2023, which was then a world record. It is among the fastest marathons ever run by a woman. Reports from Berlin did not immediately give details of the injury.
\nIn the men’s race, Ethiopia’s Guye Adola won in 2:02:50 ahead of Gemechu Dida, who ran 2:03:19, and Tanzania’s Gabriel Geay, third in 2:03:59.
\nAdola has a long history with this course. On his marathon debut in Berlin in 2017 he pushed Eliud Kipchoge deep into the race, and he returned to win the 2021 edition. This was his second Berlin title, and a personal best.
\nThe men’s race was missing its two biggest names. Defending champion Sabastian Sawe, who in April became the first man to run a record-eligible marathon under two hours, withdrew with an injury a month before the race. Kenenisa Bekele, a former Berlin champion, also withdrew, with an Achilles injury.
\n\nGermany’s Esther Pfeiffer, who had targeted Irina Mikitenko’s national record from 2008, did not finish.
\nSwitzerland’s Marcel Hug and Catherine Debrunner won the wheelchair races, as they did two weeks later in Chicago.
\nAssefa’s season has now included a women-only world record in London in April (2:15:41) and, in Berlin, the fastest marathon of her career. The question after Berlin is less about her fitness than her health: how serious the injury is, and whether it affects her plans for 2027.
\nAdola’s time of 2:02:50 is as given in World Athletics’ race report; a few early reports gave 2:02:51.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Tigst_Assefa_at_the_London_Marathon_in_2024.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:27:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:27:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Running", "Berlin Marathon", "Tigst Assefa", "Guye Adola", "World Marathon Majors" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/exercise-depression-anxiety-umbrella-review-bjsm/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/exercise-depression-anxiety-umbrella-review-bjsm/", "title": "Exercise reduces depression and anxiety across every group studied, review of 79,551 people finds", "summary": "A synthesis of more than a thousand randomised trials found moderate benefits for depression and anxiety symptoms, with group and supervised exercise doing most for depression, and shorter, gentler sessions doing most for anxiety.", "content_html": "The evidence that exercise helps mental health has been building for decades. A review published this year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine is an attempt to measure it as completely as possible, and its conclusion is that exercise reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety in every population group studied.
\nThe review, led by Neil Munro of James Cook University in Australia, is an “umbrella review”: rather than pooling individual trials, it pools the meta-analyses that have already pooled them. The team included 63 published reviews containing 81 meta-analyses, built on 1,079 randomised trials with 79,551 participants: children and adults, with diagnosed conditions and with milder symptoms. To keep the picture clean, they excluded reviews focused on people with chronic physical illnesses.
\nExercise reduced symptoms of depression with a standardised effect size of −0.61 and symptoms of anxiety with an effect size of −0.47. In the conventional reading, both are moderate effects. Aerobic exercise (running, cycling, swimming, brisk walking) showed the largest benefits for both.
\nThe details are as interesting as the headline:
\nAn effect size of around −0.6 means that, on average, people in the exercise groups ended up with noticeably lower symptom scores than those in control groups, a meaningful clinical difference, though not a cure. Press coverage of this and a related review has described exercise as comparable to medication or talking therapy for some people; the review itself is more careful, and does not test exercise directly against those treatments.
\n\nTwo findings stand out for people who already train.
\nFirst, the social element matters. The bigger benefit for depression in group and supervised settings suggests that connection and structure may be part of how exercise works: a running club or a coached session may do more than the same miles alone.
\nSecond, more is not automatically better. For anxiety, the strongest association was with shorter, lower-intensity exercise. For athletes who treat every session as a test, that is a useful reminder: some of exercise’s best effects on the mind come from the easy days.
\nThe authors concluded that exercise-based interventions “in all formats and parameters” can help reduce depression and anxiety symptoms, and that the results can help health professionals offer cost-effective support tailored to individual preferences. They declared no competing interests.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/exercise-mood.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:26:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:26:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "depression", "anxiety", "mental health", "exercise", "umbrella review" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/hrv-wearables-accuracy-oura-whoop-garmin/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/hrv-wearables-accuracy-oura-whoop-garmin/", "title": "Ring, strap or watch? What the best evidence says about your overnight HRV", "summary": "Heart rate variability has become the morning number for millions of athletes. A validation study against medical-grade ECG found the gap between devices is real, and explains why two wearables can disagree about the same night.", "content_html": "If you own a smart ring and a sports watch, you may have woken up to two different verdicts about the same night. One says you are recovered; the other says you are not. Both are usually leaning on the same signal: heart rate variability, or HRV, the small, constantly changing gaps between heartbeats that reflect, among other things, the activity of the nervous system.
\nHRV is a useful number. But how accurately consumer devices measure it has been surprisingly hard to establish. The most rigorous recent attempt, published in Physiological Reports by researchers in Columbus, Ohio, and at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, gives the clearest answer so far.
\nThirteen healthy adults slept wearing a medical-grade electrocardiogram (ECG), the reference standard for measuring heartbeats, while also wearing five consumer devices at once: the Oura ring (Generation 3 and Generation 4), the WHOOP 4.0 strap, the Garmin Fenix 6 watch and the Polar Grit X Pro watch. Across the study they collected 536 nights of data.
\nThe team then compared each device’s overnight resting heart rate and HRV with the ECG.
\nFor overnight HRV, the average error ranged widely:
\n| Device | Agreement with ECG (CCC) | Average error |
|---|---|---|
| Oura Gen 4 | 0.99 | 6.0% |
| Oura Gen 3 | 0.97 | 7.2% |
| WHOOP 4.0 | 0.94 | 8.2% |
| Garmin Fenix 6 | 0.87 | 10.5% |
| Polar Grit X Pro | 0.82 | 16.3% |
CCC: Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient, where 1.0 is perfect agreement. Error: mean absolute percentage error. Source: Dial et al., 2025.
\nThe researchers described the Oura devices as having the highest agreement, WHOOP as acceptable, and the Garmin and Polar watches as showing lower agreement. For resting heart rate, Oura again performed best; Garmin was excluded from that analysis because of methodological inconsistencies in how the data were reported.
\n\nAn average error of 6 per cent and one of 16 per cent are not the same thing in practice. Day-to-day changes in HRV that athletes use to guide training are often of a similar order. A device with a larger error can make a normal night look like a bad one, or hide a genuine drop.
\nThe results also help explain the familiar disagreement between devices. A ring worn on the finger and a watch on the wrist measure the pulse in different places, sample it differently, and apply their own processing and averaging windows. Two devices can be “accurate” by their own definitions and still report different numbers.
\n\nThree practical lessons follow.
\nCompare yourself with yourself. HRV values are highly individual and device-specific. The most reliable use of any wearable is to track your own trend on the same device over weeks, not to compare your number with someone else’s or across brands.
\nLook at trends, not single nights. Because every device has some error, a rolling average over several days is more trustworthy than any one morning’s reading.
\nPair the number with how you feel. A wearable’s readiness score is an estimate. Combined with simple self-reports (sleep quality, soreness, mood, motivation), it becomes far more useful than either on its own.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/hrv-wearables.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:25:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:25:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "HRV", "heart rate variability", "wearables", "Oura", "WHOOP", "Garmin", "recovery" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/ironman-70-3-world-championship-nice-wilde-knibb/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/triathlon/ironman-70-3-world-championship-nice-wilde-knibb/", "title": "Eighteen seconds in Nice: Wilde holds off Blummenfelt as Knibb rewrites the 70.3 record book", "summary": "Hayden Wilde ended Jelle Geens’s two-year reign with the race’s decisive run, while Taylor Knibb broke Daniela Ryf’s course record by more than three minutes, four weeks before she won in Kona.", "content_html": "Four weeks before she won the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Taylor Knibb produced the most dominant performance of the season over the half distance. Her Kona title has put that day in Nice in a new light.
\nAt the Ironman 70.3 World Championship on 12 September, Knibb won in 4 hours 19 minutes 24 seconds, breaking the course record of 4:23:04 set by Switzerland’s Daniela Ryf by 3 minutes 40 seconds. It was her fourth 70.3 world title, after victories in 2022, 2023 and 2024, and it came after she finished second in Marbella last year.
\nThe Nice course is defined by its bike leg, which climbs into the hills behind the city, including the Col de Vence. Knibb set the fastest ascent of the climb, 29:48, on her way to a bike course record of 2:32:07, according to USA Triathlon.
\nShe started the run more than four minutes ahead of France’s Marjolaine Pierré and Switzerland’s Imogen Simmonds, and with five kilometres left her lead was 5 minutes 34 seconds. Knibb ran 1:17:56 for the half marathon.
\nThe fastest run of the day belonged to Switzerland’s Julie Derron, whose 1:13:04 was a run-course record and carried her to second in 4:23:30. Alanis Siffert completed a Swiss double on the podium in 4:25:10. Norway’s Solveig Løvseth, then the reigning Ironman world champion, was fourth.
\n\nThe men’s race, held the following day, was decided in the opposite way.
\nNew Zealand’s Hayden Wilde came out of the water 22nd, 16 seconds down, and reached the top of the Col de Vence in seventh, 37 seconds off the lead. He rode the second-fastest bike split of the day and started the run second, 11 seconds behind.
\nWilde, an Olympic silver medallist in Paris and one of the fastest runners in the sport, then did what was expected of him, but only just. Norway’s Kristian Blummenfelt, the Tokyo Olympic champion, chased him all the way to the line and finished 18 seconds back in 3:51:09.
\nBelgium’s Jelle Geens, who arrived as champion after winning the previous two editions, finished third in 3:52:40. Gustav Iden was fourth, four weeks before he finished second in Kona.
\nResults over 70.3 miles do not always translate to the full Ironman distance. This year, they did. Knibb went on to win in Kona and Derron finished third there on debut. Løvseth, fourth in Nice, led in Kona until the final mile.
\nThe common thread among the season’s best performers is a background in Olympic-distance racing: speed that, increasingly, they are able to carry over roughly twice and four times the distance.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Paris2024_-_Triathlon_-_42_-_Hayden_Wilde.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:24:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:24:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Triathlon", "Ironman 70.3 World Championship", "Hayden Wilde", "Taylor Knibb", "Kristian Blummenfelt", "Nice" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/max-heart-rate-220-minus-age-endurance-athletes/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/max-heart-rate-220-minus-age-endurance-athletes/", "title": "‘220 minus your age’ gets endurance athletes wrong, survey of 4,375 finds", "summary": "Age-based formulas underestimated athletes’ real maximum heart rates by five to six beats a minute on average, and could miss by 20. If your training zones come from a formula, they may be off.", "content_html": "“Subtract your age from 220.” For decades it has been the first thing many athletes are told about heart rate, and it still sits behind the default training zones in countless apps and watches.
\nA study published in April in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living adds to the evidence that, for endurance athletes, it is not good enough.
\nThe team (Åsmund Ausland and Stephen Seiler of the University of Agder in Norway, and Bence Kelemen in Hungary) surveyed 4,375 endurance athletes from across the world between November 2022 and January 2023. Athletes reported the highest heart rate they had recorded during maximal training or racing efforts, along with their resting heart rate, training volume and history.
\nSeiler is one of the best-known researchers in endurance training, widely credited with describing the “polarised” intensity distribution of elite endurance athletes.
\nAs expected, maximum heart rate fell with age: the correlation was strong (r = −0.60). But the commonly used formulas consistently guessed too low. Both “220 minus age” (often called the Fox formula) and the more modern Tanaka formula (208 minus 0.7 × age) underestimated athletes’ self-reported maximum heart rate by five to six beats per minute on average.
\nThe averages hide the bigger problem: the spread. For any individual, the Fox formula’s prediction could be anywhere from about 20 beats too low to 9 beats too high, and Tanaka’s from about 18 too low to 9 too high.
\n\nThe study found no meaningful difference between men and women. Resting heart rate was lower in athletes who trained more hours each week, though the relationship was modest.
\nHeart-rate training zones are usually calculated as percentages of maximum heart rate, or of heart-rate reserve (the gap between resting and maximum). If the maximum is wrong, every zone built on it is wrong too.
\nFor an athlete whose true maximum is 15 beats higher than a formula predicts, “easy” runs at the formula’s zone 2 may be far easier than intended, and threshold sessions may be pitched too low. For one whose maximum is lower than predicted, the reverse happens, and easy days may quietly become moderate ones.
\n\nThe authors recommend individualised, context-specific assessment of maximum heart rate rather than reliance on age-based predictions.
\nIn practice, that can mean a supervised maximal test, or using the highest reliable value from a chest-strap heart-rate monitor during an all-out effort, such as the end of a hard race. Anyone with heart disease, symptoms or risk factors should speak to a doctor before attempting maximal efforts.
\nMany athletes now also anchor zones to other markers (lactate threshold, functional threshold power or pace, or perceived exertion), which do not depend on maximum heart rate at all. The simplest lesson of the study is that if your zones came from a formula, they are a starting point, not a measurement.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/hrmax-formula.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:23:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:23:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "heart rate", "training zones", "maximum heart rate", "Stephen Seiler" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/slow-breathing-heart-rate-variability-trials/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/slow-breathing-heart-rate-variability-trials/", "title": "How slowly should you breathe to calm down? Two 2026 trials give a more nuanced answer", "summary": "One study found that breathing at the slowest personalised rate relaxed people most. Another found that finding your exact “resonance” breathing rate made no difference over four weeks. Together they point to something simpler.", "content_html": "Breathing is the one vital function we can control directly as well as leave on autopilot. That dual control is why slow, paced breathing has become one of the most popular tools for managing stress, in clinics, in apps and in the pre-race routines of athletes.
\nBut “breathe slowly” leaves a lot unsaid. How slowly? For how long? And does the precise rate matter? Two trials published this year approach those questions from different directions.
\nResearchers at the Technical University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen asked 42 university students to complete three five-minute breathing sessions, in random order. Rather than prescribing a fixed rate, each session was set as a fraction of the person’s own natural breathing rate: 80, 60 or 40 per cent of it.
\nThe results, published in iScience, were consistent. The slower the breathing, the more relaxed participants said they felt, and their bodies agreed. At lower rates, heart rate fell, heart rate variability (HRV) rose and skin temperature at the fingertips increased, all signs of reduced physiological arousal. Brain-wave recordings over the front of the head shifted too.
\nTwo individual differences stood out. People with previous experience of relaxation techniques reported bigger benefits. And participants with more anxious or depressive symptoms reported more perceived stress after slow breathing, a reminder that a technique that calms most people does not calm everyone.
\n\nThe second trial tested a long-standing idea in HRV biofeedback: that each person has a “resonance frequency”, usually somewhere around six breaths a minute, at which heart rate and breathing rhythms reinforce each other most strongly, and that training at that individually measured rate gives the best results.
\nResearchers in Warsaw randomly assigned 88 people to four weeks of biofeedback breathing practice at either their individually measured resonance frequency, a fixed rate of 0.1 Hz (six breaths a minute), or to a control group.
\nBoth breathing groups reduced perceived stress, anxiety and depressive symptoms compared with the control group, with no meaningful difference between them. A Bayesian analysis gave weak evidence that the two methods were genuinely equivalent. Notably, four weeks of practice did not change participants’ resting HRV.
\n\nRead together, the studies suggest that the details many people worry about matter less than the basics.
\nSlowing your breathing below its natural rate reliably shifts the body towards a calmer state in the moment, and the slowest rate in the Munich study had the biggest effect. Practised regularly over weeks, slow breathing at around six breaths a minute appears to reduce stress and anxiety symptoms, whether or not the rate is fine-tuned to the individual.
\nFor athletes, that makes slow breathing a simple tool for the moments that matter: before sleep after a late session, in the hours before a race, or after a hard day when the nervous system is still running fast. It does not require equipment or a lab test.
\nIt is not, however, a fix for everything. The finding that people with more anxious or depressive symptoms sometimes felt more stressed afterwards is a useful caution: if a breathing exercise makes you feel worse, it is reasonable to stop, and to seek support for symptoms that persist.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/slow-breathing.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:22:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:22:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "breathing", "heart rate variability", "stress", "nervous system", "HRV biofeedback" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/menstrual-cycle-strength-mood-female-athletes/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/menstrual-cycle-strength-mood-female-athletes/", "title": "Strength and mood shifted across the menstrual cycle, but no two athletes followed the same pattern", "summary": "A study tracking 18 athletes through six hormonally confirmed cycle phases found clear group-level changes in strength and mood. Its authors’ conclusion is that the template matters less than the individual.", "content_html": "Cycle-syncing, planning training around the phases of the menstrual cycle, has moved from sports-science journals into apps, social media and coaching plans. The research underneath it has been harder to pin down, partly because many studies estimated cycle phases from calendar dates rather than measuring hormones.
\nA study published in April in Scientific Reports tried to do it properly, and its findings support a more personal approach than most cycle-syncing advice.
\nA team from Hannover Medical School and partner institutions in Germany followed 18 female athletes from a range of sports, aged 18 to 30, all with regular cycles. Each was tested in six phases of the cycle, confirmed by hormone measurements rather than estimated from the calendar.
\nAt each visit the researchers measured maximal strength in the half squat, isometric grip strength, mood (using a standard questionnaire covering fatigue, depression, vigour and other states), motivation, sleep quality and perceived exertion.
\nAt the group level, several measures changed across the cycle:
\nAt the individual level, athletes whose squat strength was lower also tended to report higher depression scores on the questionnaire, a strong correlation (r = −0.60).
\n\nThe authors stress that while changes were detectable at the group level, the differences between individuals were substantial. That fits the wider literature. A 2020 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine by Kelly McNulty and colleagues concluded that performance may be trivially reduced in the early follicular phase on average, but that the effects were small, the evidence was of low quality, and a personalised approach was more appropriate than general guidelines.
\nA review of menstrual-health interventions in athletes, published in June in the journal Sports, reached a similar conclusion from a different angle: benefits were seen more consistently in how athletes felt and recovered than in objective performance, and the evidence was too limited and varied to support strong recommendations.
\n\nThe authors’ recommendation is not a phase-by-phase training template. They suggest a “pattern-oriented and individually adaptive” approach: helping athletes and coaches understand the cycle, and tracking a small number of informative markers, such as a strength measure and a simple wellbeing score, to see how each individual responds, adjusting training load accordingly.
\nFor athletes, the practical message is to treat the cycle as one more source of information about readiness, alongside sleep, stress and training load, rather than a fixed schedule. Logging how you feel and perform across a few cycles will tell you more about your own pattern than any generic plan.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/cycle-strength.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:21:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:21:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "menstrual cycle", "female athletes", "strength training", "women's health" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/sleep-activity-diet-small-changes-longer-life/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/sleep-activity-diet-small-changes-longer-life/", "title": "Five more minutes of sleep and two of brisk activity: the small changes linked to an extra year of life", "summary": "A study of 59,078 adults measured sleep and activity with wrist sensors rather than questionnaires, and asked how little people would need to change to see a difference. The answer was surprisingly little, with important caveats.", "content_html": "Most health advice asks for a lot: eight hours of sleep, 150 minutes of exercise a week, five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. For people who are a long way from those targets, the gap can feel too big to start closing.
\nA study published this year in eClinicalMedicine asked a different question: what is the smallest combined change in sleep, physical activity and diet that is linked to a meaningfully longer life?
\nThe team, led by Nicholas Koemel and Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney, used data from 59,078 people in the UK Biobank study. Between 2013 and 2015, participants wore a wrist accelerometer for seven days, which measured how long they slept and how many minutes they spent in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, the kind of activity that makes you breathe harder, such as brisk walking or running. Diet was scored from a questionnaire on a scale of 0 to 100.
\nThe researchers then followed participants for a median of 8.1 years, recording deaths and diagnoses of cardiovascular disease, cancer, type 2 diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and dementia, and used life tables to estimate lifespan and “healthspan”: years lived free of those diseases.
\nThe gap between the healthiest and least healthy habits was large. People in the most favourable group (7.2 to 8 hours of sleep a day, more than 42 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous activity a day and a good diet score) had an estimated 9.4 more years of life, and 9.5 more years free of major disease, than those in the least favourable group.
\nBut the headline finding was about small steps. Starting from the least healthy 5 per cent of participants, the minimum combined improvement associated with one extra year of life was:
\nFor healthspan, a larger combined change (24 more minutes of sleep, 3.7 more minutes of activity and a 23-point diet improvement) was associated with four extra years free of major disease, though with a wide margin of uncertainty.
\n\nThis is an observational study. It shows associations, not cause and effect. People who sleep, move and eat a little better may differ in many other ways (income, health, stress) that the researchers could adjust for only partly. People who are already unwell may sleep and move less because they are unwell. The participants were also older, median age 64 at recruitment, and UK Biobank volunteers tend to be healthier than the general population.
\nThe tiny numbers should be read in that light. The finding is not that two minutes of exercise adds a year of life. It is that, for people starting from a very low base, the combination of modest improvements across sleep, activity and diet appears to matter, and that these behaviours are best thought of together rather than one at a time.
\nThe study was funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council. Several authors disclosed relationships with companies, including makers of obesity medicines and sleep-apnoea devices and a company that promotes physical activity.
\nFor athletes, the lesson is less about the minutes and more about the combination. Sleep, training and nutrition interact: an extra session that costs sleep may not be a net gain. For anyone who feels too far from the ideal to begin, the study offers a more encouraging message than most: small, combined changes appear to be worth making.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/tiny-habits.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:20:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:20:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "sleep", "physical activity", "nutrition", "longevity", "UK Biobank" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/daily-steps-mental-health-plateau-uk-biobank/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/mind/daily-steps-mental-health-plateau-uk-biobank/", "title": "The mental-health benefit of walking levels off, and the plateau arrives earlier than you might think", "summary": "In 83,578 adults whose steps were measured by accelerometer, the link between walking and lower risk of mental disorders levelled off at about 10,000 steps a day in total, and at under 5,000 for purposeful walking.", "content_html": "Step counts are the most widely tracked health number in the world. Most of the research behind them has focused on the heart and on how long people live. A study published in April in the Journal of Affective Disorders looks instead at the mind.
\nA team at Guangzhou Medical University in China used data from 83,578 middle-aged and older adults in the UK Biobank who wore an accelerometer that counted their steps. The researchers separated steps into two kinds: purposeful steps, taken in sustained walking, and incidental steps, taken in short bouts during everyday life.
\nParticipants were followed for a median of almost seven years, and the researchers recorded new diagnoses of mental disorders from hospital records and death registries, including depressive disorders, sleep disorders, dementia and eight other conditions.
\nMore steps were associated with a lower risk of mental disorders, in a dose-response pattern: the more people walked, the lower their risk, up to a point. The benefit levelled off at around:
\nBeyond those levels, additional steps were not associated with further reductions in risk. Faster, higher-intensity walking was linked to additional benefit once people were taking enough steps.
\nThe researchers also explored possible mechanisms. Their analyses suggested that part of the association ran through blood markers related to fat metabolism and inflammation, and part through brain structure measured on MRI scans.
\n\n\nTwo things stand out.
\nFirst, the purposeful-walking plateau is modest. Around 4,800 steps, roughly 40 to 45 minutes of steady walking for many people, was the point beyond which more purposeful steps were not associated with further benefit. That is an achievable daily target, not an athletic one.
\nSecond, the mental-health picture appears to be about regular movement rather than volume for its own sake. For people who already train, the study is a reminder that the walk to the shops, the walk with the dog and the easy movement between sessions are part of the picture too, not just the training plan.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/steps-plateau.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:19:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:19:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Mind", "walking", "steps", "mental health", "depression", "dementia", "UK Biobank" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/athletes-sleep-before-and-after-competition/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/science/athletes-sleep-before-and-after-competition/", "title": "Athletes sleep well before they race. It’s the night after that goes wrong", "summary": "A review of sleep in athletes finds that disturbed sleep is widespread, especially around competition, and that the night after a race is consistently worse than the night before.", "content_html": "Ask an athlete about sleep before a big race and you will usually hear about nerves: the early alarm, the restless night. The research tells a slightly different story. The night before competition is often fine. It is the night after that tends to go wrong.
\nThat is one of the findings drawn together in a review of sleep in athletes published in July in Cureus by D. Bastock of the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital and R. Amarnani of University College Hospital, London.
\nThe review, a narrative summary of existing research rather than a new study, describes a consistent picture:
\nThe authors identify the usual suspects for that post-race disruption: late competition times, heightened physical and psychological arousal, increased caffeine intake, travel and the use of phones and other screens.
\n\nSleep is when much of the body’s recovery work happens, and the review notes that inadequate sleep may affect recovery, thinking and emotional stability. There is also evidence linking short sleep to injury: a frequently cited 2014 study by Milewski and colleagues found that adolescent athletes who slept less than eight hours a night were 1.7 times more likely to be injured than those who slept more.
\nThe irony is that the night after competition is when the body has the most to recover from, and, by this evidence, when athletes are least likely to sleep well.
\n\nThe review’s account of the causes points directly to the remedies. After a race:
\nNone of this is complicated. The value of the research is in pointing to where the problem actually is: not the night before the race, but the night after.
\n", "image": "https://unbrokenreview.com/assets/graphics/competition-sleep.png", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:18:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:18:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Science", "sleep", "recovery", "competition", "injury" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/trail-ultra/ultra-season-2026-utmb-western-states-records/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/trail-ultra/ultra-season-2026-utmb-western-states-records/", "title": "The summer 100-mile racing got faster", "summary": "Course records at Western States, the fastest UTMB ever run and the closest finish in the history of the Chamonix races. A season defined by depth, cool weather and the stars who weren’t there.", "content_html": "Two races define the 100-mile season: Western States in California in June, and the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in the Alps at the end of August. This year both produced the fastest racing in their histories, and both did so without several of the sport’s most famous names at the finish.
\nThe 2026 Western States 100, held on 27–28 June, enjoyed the third-coolest temperatures in the race’s history and, unusually, no snow in the high country, according to iRunFar. The result was a rewrite of the record book.
\nFrance’s Vincent Bouillard, the surprise UTMB champion of 2024, won the men’s race in 13 hours 46 minutes, taking more than 20 minutes off the course record of 14:09:28 that Jim Walmsley set in 2019. Behind him, Italy’s Francesco Puppi, running his first 100-miler, finished second in 13:51:08, with American Ryan Montgomery third in 13:53:55.
\nJenn Lichter of the United States won the women’s race in about 15 hours 28 minutes, just inside the course record of 15:29:33 set by Courtney Dauwalter in 2023. Riley Brady was second in 15:42:14 and Marianne Hogan third in 15:51:44.
\nThe benign conditions showed up throughout the field. The finish rate of 87 per cent was the highest in the race’s history, iRunFar reported, and 136 runners earned the silver buckle for finishing inside 24 hours.
\nWalmsley did not finish, and nor, according to race reports, did Kilian Jornet.
\nTwo months later in Chamonix, the weather pushed in the opposite direction. Organisers delayed the start of UTMB by two hours because of a forecast storm and rerouted the course to avoid the exposed, technical Pyramides Calcaires section in Italy. The race was run over 173 km with more than 9,900 metres of climbing.
\nOn that course, American Ben Dhiman ran away from the field. He took the lead at Notre-Dame de la Gorge, 36 km in, and extended it at every checkpoint: 14 minutes at Lac Combal, 22 minutes at the Grand Col Ferret, more than half an hour by Vallorcine. He finished in 18:16:29, the fastest time ever run at UTMB, though not a course record because of the reroute.
\n\nDhiman, second to Britain’s Tom Evans in 2025, became only the second American man to win UTMB, after Walmsley in 2023. France’s Baptiste Chassagne was second in 18:47:38 and American Caleb Olson third in 18:48:24, the first time three men had broken 19 hours at the race. The entire men’s top ten finished under 20.
\nFrance’s Blandine L’Hirondel won the women’s race in 21:54:49, the first sub-22-hour women’s time at UTMB. Having already won the shorter OCC and CCC races in previous years, she became only the second woman, after New Zealand’s Ruth Croft, to win all three of the Chamonix finals. American Rachel Entrekin was second and Emily Schmitz third.
\nThe shorter OCC produced what Men’s Journal called the closest finish in UTMB history: Lauren Gregory beat Naomi Lang by three seconds, 6:08:07 to 6:08:10.
\nThe season will also be remembered for who was absent. At UTMB, defending champion Tom Evans did not start; Walmsley and Jornet withdrew, citing injuries after dropping out of Western States; and Croft, the 2025 women’s champion, withdrew, saying that her heart and mind wanted to be elsewhere. Courtney Dauwalter dropped out at Lac Combal.
\nThree things stand out from this season.
\nConditions matter more than ever. The fastest-ever times at both races came when the weather was kind or the course was altered. Ultra records are increasingly a product of the day as well as the athletes, and comparisons across years need care.
\nDepth is rising. At Western States, iRunFar’s analysis of the gap between first and tenth place showed the women’s field tightening year on year: closer, in 2025 and 2026, than the men’s. At UTMB, ten men under 20 hours speaks for itself.
\nDurability is the new frontier. The winners this summer were not the athletes who ran fastest early but those who were still running well after 15 hours. Sports scientists increasingly describe this “durability”, how well an athlete’s physiology holds up as fatigue accumulates, as a performance factor in its own right, distinct from peak fitness. On this summer’s evidence, it is what wins 100-mile races.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/%C2%A9albindurand%28%40_albin_%29_-_ASICS_TRAIL_26_-_ID_00031_-_DHIMAN_Ben-892.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:17:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:17:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Trail & Ultra", "UTMB", "Western States 100", "Ben Dhiman", "Blandine L'Hirondel", "Vincent Bouillard", "Jenn Lichter" ] }, { "id": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/tour-de-france-2026-pogacar-fifth-title-heatwave/", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/cycling/tour-de-france-2026-pogacar-fifth-title-heatwave/", "title": "Pogačar’s fifth Tour was the fastest ever ridden, in a heatwave", "summary": "Tadej Pogačar joined Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Induráin as a five-time winner, at a record average speed of 43.2 km/h, in a race shortened by heat and shadowed by a debate over night-time doping controls.", "content_html": "When Tadej Pogačar rolled on to the Champs-Élysées on 26 July, he became the fifth rider in history to win the Tour de France five times, alongside Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Induráin. It was his third consecutive victory.
\nThe bare facts of the 113th Tour are remarkable on their own. Pogačar won by 6 minutes 26 seconds over Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel, at an average speed of 43.227 km/h, the fastest Tour on record. He did it in a race affected by a heatwave, in which two stages were shortened and the rules on feeding were relaxed so riders could stay hydrated.
\nThe decisive move came early. On stage 6, on the Col du Tourmalet in the Pyrenees, Pogačar attacked and established a lead over his principal rival, Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard. He extended it with mountain-stage wins in the Massif Central on stage 10, in the Vosges on stage 14 and at Alpe d’Huez on stage 19, where Reuters timed his ascent at 35 minutes 27 seconds and described it as a record, more than a minute faster than Marco Pantani’s previous mark.
\nVingegaard’s challenge ended on stage 15, when he crashed and withdrew. That left Evenepoel, riding for Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe, to claim second place. He won his first mountain stage at the Tour at the Plateau de Solaison that day, then won the time trial to Thonon-les-Bains the next.
\nThe race for third produced the most compelling contest of the final week. Two Tour debutants fought for the last podium place and the white jersey of best young rider: Mexico’s Isaac del Toro, Pogačar’s UAE Team Emirates XRG teammate, and France’s Paul Seixas of Decathlon CMA CGM. On stage 20, Pogačar rode in support of Del Toro, who held on to finish third overall, 9:42 down, and take the white jersey. Seixas finished fourth.
\n\nMads Pedersen won the green jersey despite winning only one stage, through consistency in the intermediate sprints. Richard Carapaz took the polka-dot jersey with two Alpine stage wins in the final week and was named the race’s most combative rider.
\nThe record speed and the heat are the details that interest physiologists. Hot conditions normally slow endurance performance: as described in the 2015 consensus on training and competing in the heat, more blood is diverted to the skin for cooling and sweat losses reduce blood volume, so the heart has to work harder for the same power output.
\nThat a record average speed came in a heatwave tells us something about how professional cycling now prepares. Teams routinely build heat acclimatisation into their programmes, plan individual hydration and carbohydrate intakes to the gram, and use cooling strategies before and during stages. The relaxation of feeding rules during this Tour was an acknowledgement that conditions had moved beyond what those preparations alone could absorb.
\nBefore stage 15, both Pogačar and Vingegaard were woken during the night for anti-doping tests. The tests generated substantial debate within the sport: about rider welfare and sleep during a three-week race on one side, and the necessity of unannounced testing to maintain credibility on the other.
\nThat debate is unlikely to go away. A sport whose leading riders are going faster than ever, in harder conditions, will continue to face questions about how those performances are achieved, and robust, credible testing is part of the answer, even when it is inconvenient.
\nPogačar turned 28 in September. None of the four men he has joined ever won a sixth Tour. Whether Pogačar can, and whether a generation that includes Del Toro and Seixas will let him, is now the defining question of the sport.
\nHis season ended abruptly a month later. Leading the Vuelta a España, he crashed on stage 8, suffering a concussion, a broken collarbone and a fractured vertebra, and his team announced that he would not race again until 2027. Enric Mas went on to win the Vuelta.
\n", "image": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Jonas_Vinegaard_and_Tadej_Pogacar_on_stage_14_of_the_2025_Tour_de_France.jpg/1920px-Jonas_Vinegaard_and_Tadej_Pogacar_on_stage_14_of_the_2025_Tour_de_France.jpg", "date_published": "2026-10-11T18:16:46.005Z", "date_modified": "2026-10-11T18:16:46.005Z", "authors": [ { "name": "Abraham Spring", "url": "https://unbrokenreview.com/authors/abraham-spring/" } ], "tags": [ "Cycling", "Tour de France", "Tadej Pogačar", "Remco Evenepoel", "Isaac del Toro", "heat" ] } ] }