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Take a look at this footage. That's Aleksandr Sorokin breaking the world record for the longest distance run in 24 hours. 198.6 miles. That's nearly eight marathons in a single day. Ultramarathons have a way of breaking Oh my gosh, she's going to do it. Medics there immediately to take care of Wayne. But Sorokin got the world record looking like this. You need just go through your pain.
[groaning] How does he make it look so easy? I just did 7 miles. My hips hurt, my knees hurt, I'm really thirsty, I haven't been drinking, and I'm hungry. It turns out that there are six factors that need to be perfectly dialed in to break a distance running world record. We met with athletes and scientists who are pushing the limits of human endurance. And what we learned could help all of us go far beyond our comfort zone. Running nearly 200 miles nonstop requires elite cardio. But how do we measure that? VO2 max measures the maximum rate at which your body can take in and use oxygen at maximum effort.
Basically, it's like the size of your engine. And to find out how it works, we tracked down the athlete who has the highest VO2 max in the world. This is insane. Meet Kristian Blummenfelt. He's one of the only triathletes on the planet to win an Olympic gold medal, a world championship, and an Ironman world title. And in January, his team recorded a VO2 max of 101.1 during testing in Norway, a new unofficial record and the first time anyone had ever breached triple digits. So when I saw the first time I was breaking 100, it was a little bit like uh it was like a cool experience, but it was also something we sort of expected.
Part of that record high score is simply genetics. The rest is left to highly intense training. Okay, good. Part of Blummenfelt's routine includes spending time at high-altitude camps that reach up to 7,500 ft above sea level. Up there, the air is thinner, so less oxygen reaches his bloodstream with each breath, and that forces his body to produce more red blood cells. When Blummenfelt returns to sea level, he brings that extra oxygen-carrying capacity with him, driving up his VO2 max. But, here's the thing. Blummenfelt's former coach told us he doesn't necessarily want the athlete's VO2 max to remain that high. For longer sports or sports with a longer duration, then VO2 max becomes less of a good predictor of performance
because the other characteristics are more important than necessarily the ability to turn around a lot of oxygen per minute. Basically, having a massive aerobic engine doesn't mean anything unless you're using it efficiently. So, as race season approaches, Blummenfelt's VO2 max actually starts to drop. And that's a sign his training is working. The VO2 max comes down, but also his actually biochemical efficiency also comes up. So, he's able to utilize the oxygen better for propulsion.
Sorokin also does altitude training alongside some of the most efficient runners on Earth in Kenya. Kenya and its neighbor Ethiopia have produced more elite marathon runners than anywhere else in the world. Just this year, Sebastian Sawe did what once seemed impossible. He became the first person to run an official marathon in under 2 hours. And Sawe has something in common with many of Kenya's greatest runners. He's from this strip of land right here. The Kalenjin people live mostly in Kenya's Rift Valley with elevations up to 9,800 ft above sea level. Living and training at that altitude is part of their success, but there may be something deeper at work, too.
Scientists have spent years searching the Kalenjin genome for clues to their extraordinary running ability. One study found genetic differences that could give an endurance runner an edge like body shape. Kalenjins are famously slight, often weighing little more than 120 lb with long, slender legs. Their legs act like pendulums, allowing them to swing forward efficiently and cover more ground with less energy. However, when you stretch a race beyond 26.2 miles, something striking happens. Kenya's dominance disappears. At ultra distances, what your body looks like is only part of the equation. What matters equally brings us to factor number two.
How well you move it. We sent our producer to a lab at Stanford University. That's part of a $220 million effort to study the world's fittest people. Running economy is how much energy you spend per distance traveled, kind of your miles per gallon. Part of a person's running economy comes down to basic build. Now, obviously, if you have way too much mass or huge muscles, it doesn't help you in endurance races. To show us what running economy actually looks like in real time, Scott needed a runner, but we didn't want to get him just any runner. So,
we hit up this guy. Dean Karnazes holds the world record for the longest distance ever run non-stop. 350 miles over 80 hours and 44 minutes. Which was somewhat of a letdown cuz I thought maybe I could run 500 miles. He set that record in 2005 and it still stands today. So, we asked the team at Stanford to analyze Dean's form. We've got him set up with our standard motion capture systems and from that we can create a digital Dean, a biomechanical model that lets us assess what's happening under the hood. You can see his body form. We get exact joint angles of all of his joints in his body. The special treadmill that Dean's running on is also tracking key data.
Every step sends a jolt of force through the body that's two to three times the runner's own weight. Over the course of a 24-hour race, a runner can take over 250,000 steps. And that force is very consistent. Is that unusual or The very consistent forces you're noticing is a sign of an elite athlete. People who are earlier on, there's much more variability step to step. You're wasting a lot of energy each step. His are just like the same every time. You can also see his running gait is quite efficient. He has a narrow gait versus a wide gait. His feet are fairly close together. When you have a wider gait, you just spend more energy stabilizing your body, but he's got a an amazing running form.
And he's not swinging his torso at all. It seems like he's very steady. You see he's steady from the side and if you look from the back, he's a very steady from the back. He's not swaying this way or that way. But the interesting thing is that Dean doesn't even think about his form. Uh Scott says you have perfect beautiful running form. Do you think about your running form when you're doing this? I paid him to say that. No, I just run to what feels natural. I don't I've never trained to run. I don't think there is a perfect body. It's really how can you make best use of the equipment you have, of the body you have. We've
seen that Dean's body is incredibly built for endurance. But Sorokin has a different challenge. He has to endure long distances and race the clock. He's not as small as Dean, but that actually might play to his advantage. His larger, heavier frame costs more energy to carry, but his longer legs give him the stride that helps generate speed. However, there's only so much you can change about the body you were born with. So, I went shopping for the next advantage.
Right now, I'm heading to the Brooklyn Running Company, where I'm going to try on some special shoes for long-distance running. So, what are you looking for? I'm looking for something that's going to be comfortable for, you know, running for a few hours at a time. You know, I'm up to about an hour running now and I would like to go a little bit further. The first marathoner, Pheidippides, is said to have run from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens barefoot. And for most of running history, footwear was an afterthought.
However, as the margins between world running records shrank, researchers started looking to footwear for the next edge. That edge came in 2017 when Nike introduced the Vapor Fly, a new kind of racing super shoe. I tried on four different versions of super shoes. My first impression, this shoe, even though it has a huge, big cushiony bottom, it's very, very light. And each one had different that could affect performance. Immediately, I would say probably feel 20 to 30% more bouncy than the last pair. Yep. What makes super shoes so different is how much energy they can actually save a runner. The original Nike Vaporfly saves about 4%. And over a marathon, that's roughly the
amount of energy it would take to run an extra mile. So, yes, that there is the science behind "Hey, it's 4%, it's going to save me some time." Right. But also, the shoe doesn't do all the work. It is the training. It's the fueling. It's the strengthening. So, you've really got to look at these things holistically, right? The shoe's going to give you what you give it. And the technology on these shoes has kept improving. It's not an understatement to say that super shoes transformed the running world. Take a look at this chart. Before super shoes, new world records were rare, averaging
just a couple a year. That average more than tripled after 2016. A big part of the super shoe revolution came from a new generation of ultra-light, highly responsive foams. Back at Stanford, we tested the foam of an ASICS Metaspeed Sky. So, this is just another one of these cylindrical foam samples. When you compress the foam, you're putting energy into it, and then when you unload it, you want to get as much of that energy back as possible. And so, the fact that these curves are fairly close together means that a large amount of the energy that you put into the foam is returned. It's about 90% of the energy is returned. Then, there's the carbon fiber plate.
In sort of non-technical terms, I think it sort of acts as a spring, so you land and then it pushes you forward instead of just pushing you up. Super shoes help fuel a global running market that's worth $20 billion. So, how much are these? Yeah, now we're talking a few bands here. It's about 250 plus. 250, okay, we're getting into the higher the more expensive shoes. So, the in general is the carbon fiber plate going to cost you a little bit more. the materials of the shoe, absolutely.
Cuz now you're paying for performance. Just look at the shoes that Sebastian Sawe War when he broke the marathon world record. I think they released it publicly the day after the marathon for $500 and they immediately sold out. We've narrowed it down to these two pairs of shoes. They're both ASICS shoes. One does not have a carbon plate inside and this one has a carbon and plastic plate inside. So, we're going to get on the treadmill and see how they feel.
You know, it takes a couple minutes for me to get the kinks out of my knees, you know. Based on the experience I just had on the treadmill, I feel like the plated shoes would maybe get me faster, but I wouldn't be able to go as long. But, these, because of the comfort factor, I feel like that's going to get me running longer than these would. Now I understand why the most elite runners might have a plate because they're not just going for distance, they're going for time and distance. Absolutely. Sorokin has raced in the Adidas Adizero Pro Evo 2, but both times he broke the 24-hour record in 2021 and 2022, he chose the Nike Air Zoom Alphafly Next% Everything Sorokin does is about
managing a limited supply of energy. How much he burns, how much he wastes, and crucially, how much he can replace. So, here we are looking at some of the food items at the 3100 race. Over a 24-hour race, an ultra runner can burn as much as 20,000 calories, which is an insane amount. That's like 10 days of energy for the average adult or about the energy that's in 65 hot dogs. Burning that many calories is one problem, but replacing them is another challenge altogether. And that brings us to factor number four. We are at the Sri Chinmoy 3100 Transendence Race. Today is September 16th and there are people who have been running around
this same block in Queens for 2 weeks and they will continue running for almost another month. Every day these runners start at 6:00 a.m. and they run until 12:00 midnight. They break to sleep, they take breaks to eat, use the bathroom. Other than that, all of their waking moments they are running. After hours of continuous exercise, the body actually diverts blood away from the digestive system and into the muscles that are actively working. You don't want to eat anything. You want to stop. You want to cry. Just give me leave me alone. I want to run. I don't want just finish this race.
It's very common for your GI system to get disrupted or even shut down and it's a big issue with runners. So, nausea, stomach cramps, and vomiting are just some of the side effects of when the body starts to do that. Things like sports drinks or ginger candies can help settle the stomach. But the thing that makes fueling for an ultra so hard is that everybody's digestive system is slightly different. I would say fueling has been the biggest unlock for a lot of athletes with much higher carbohydrate than has been previously recommended.
There's no single way to get those carbs down. Some runners tolerate solid food, but others do better with carb-loaded liquids. Mango, banana, protein powder, some soda, water. You know, I guess everybody has their own things that they really like to fuel themselves with. The goal is simply to find what the runner can tolerate consistently. Because if stomach stops, you stop, too. What I have right here is called goo.
It's an energy gel. This is what ultra runners like to eat cuz it's just pure carbohydrate. So, let's give it a try here and see if we like it. Oh! That is disgusting. It tastes like medicine. Look at it's It has the consistency of Neil Sporting. Look at that. Disgusting. I'm struggling to finish this. I really am. And my fingers are I'm going to have to wash my hands after this. Totally sticky.
Food isn't the only thing competing for space in the gut. Athletes also have to keep hydrating without overdoing it. Drink too much plain water and the sodium in your bloodstream can become dangerously diluted, causing cells in the body and brain to swell. That's a condition called hyponatremia and in very rare cases, it can be fatal. Cynthia Lucero, a 28-year-old runner, died from it during the 2002 Boston Marathon. That remains a sobering reminder of just how little room for error there can be in endurance sports. From every athlete we spoke with and the helpers here at the 3100 race, one thing became clear. There is no such thing as a perfect fueling plan.
This is spring water. Right. This is coconut water. Okay. This is water with fresh squeezed lemon and molasses. And here's the thing, even the perfect fueling plan can fall apart under the wrong conditions. There's one variable that can take all of that strategy and throw it out the window. The weather. The weather has crushed world record attempts before. At the 2018 London Marathon, Eliud Kipchoge finished in 2 hours, 4 minutes, and 17 seconds in record heat. Just 5 months later, in cooler Berlin weather, he ran nearly 3 minutes faster, shattering the world record at that time with a 2-hour 1 minute and 39 second finish. So, what is heat actually doing to a runner that can cost them that much time?
Josh here is about to help us find out. And this is my temperature probe. This is like the full part that goes in. So, it's pretty far down. Um but this goes down into the esophagus so that we can get a measure for the core temperature because that's a lot uh more accurate than trying to measure by like skin or by ear, especially in the hot room. That room is over 100° F. As Josh walks, his muscles generate heat. Then he ups the incline and speed. As the temperature goes up, your ability to dump heat through sweating uh and radiation decreases. And there's a point where the body simply can't keep up. So, when it gets to 38, 39, 40°, uh that's when you shut down.
39° C is 102° F, the kind of core temperature you'd associate with a very high fever. And the longer you stay that hot, the greater the danger. One way to prepare is heat acclimation. Kristian Blummenfelt knows the process well. He deliberately overdresses for runs, forcing his body to adapt. Like I'm dressing like it's uh -5° and snow outside, and I can go out and run a session in uh those sessions is mentally awful. But as Dean has experienced firsthand, sometimes the heat can be as punishing as the distance.
You know, um running 135 miles across Death Valley in the middle of summer is brutal. The pavement gets up to 200°, so the heat coming off the ground is intense. Which brings us back to Sorokin. His record race in Verona, Italy was run in relatively mild conditions with overcast skies and temperatures hovering around 70° F. Could an even cooler race day be enough to get him to 200? It's going to depend on the individual, but if you're in a cooler environment, then other factors will be limiting other than your ability to lose heat.
By now we've attacked the problem from every angle. Training the body, refining the stride, optimizing the footwear, the fuel, even the conditions. And a lot of these things can be controlled. But here's the thing, no matter where the race is, eventually dusk approaches. The main race begins when sun go down. You tired, you painful, and you want to stop. Pace go down. And that brings us to the final factor. I am locking in to run as far as I can around the course. Hopefully it's more than an hour and I don't embarrass myself. Thank you. At the far end of endurance, the best athletes aren't the ones who avoid suffering.
They're the ones who can stay in it. The mental game is even more significant than it is in a marathon to fight central fatigue, the urge to give up, the boredom of training, the pain tolerance is really essential. Sorokin is a good example of just how rare that is. For almost 25 years, the record stood at 188.6 miles. Then Sorokin beat it the first time by running 192.2 miles, and the second time by running 198.6. He didn't just break the record, he shattered it by nearly 10 miles. You every step is pain, pain, pain, pain, pain. You pushing, putting, pushing here, here in your head, but it's hard thing, yes.
I've met a lot of people and what I see Alex is different. His character and his mind, he can suffer for a long time. When I see him in the race, so he changes completely. He's going into his own mode of competition. We are going to spend a little bit of time talking to the frontrunner in the race, Andrea from Venice, Italy, and get a little bit of, you know, his experience. Andrea, you have won this race five years in a row. Is that true? It is true, yeah. Um does it get easier? Uh not at all. Every edition is a very special one and there's different challenge every year, definitely.
Something new to learn, something new to adapt. How do you handle the boredom? Well, I mean, it's something that you build it up along the years. I try to think about positive things, family, friends, uh what gives me joy somehow. On races this long, feet can swell as much as a full shoe size. Blisters form and split open. Muscles cramp up. Heatstroke, dangerously low sodium, kidney injury, sprained ankles, broken bones from falls, and rarely, death, are all real risks in ultra running. And that's the strange thing about what happens inside your head during an ultramarathon. The same race that can bring you to your lowest point can also produce moments of intense euphoria.
Take a look at Sorokin a few hours into the race. Some runners describe this feeling as runner's high. It can take 30 to 60 minutes of continuous running to kick in as endocannabinoids help reduce pain and anxiety and trigger euphoria that can last from minutes to hours. Dean knows the feeling well. And to me it's it's just a it's a feeling of euphoria. It's a calmness that comes over your body and it's a drug that you know is a good positive drug. Still, a runner's high can only carry you so far. Eventually, the brain runs into a much more basic need. So I set out to see how far I could run without stopping. The first night without sleep was fine. The second night was a little bit less fine. Um going
into that third night without sleep is very disorienting. During his record 350-mile run in 2005, Dean actually started hallucinating and he had what they call an out-of-body experience. Like I'm somewhere else. I'm not in my head. It's always in a helicopter or hot-air balloon hovering over myself looking down and I thought This is probably what happens right before you die. So really to me um the limitations on how far a human can go is not just human endurance, but it's sleep deprivation. But there's another way to push human endurance even further.
Give the body time to rest. So just how far can someone run if they're allowed to eat, sleep, and then keep going? Yes, so many of these runners, they're they stay in just like guru consciousness in meditation. A lot of them say that um without it they couldn't really finish this race. So with guru in their meditation and everything else, that's what fuels them to complete it. Sri Chinmoy believed that sports, and distance running in particular, could be a way of discovering limits you didn't know you could cross.
He called the idea self-transcendence. So the goal of this race isn't really to beat the person next to you, it's to go further than you thought you were capable of. So, I just completed 0.2% of what the people who finish this race do. I am super tired. I'm going to call it. And let's call it 6.5 miles. Um I don't know. That's kind of disappointing now that I look at it. What's going on mentally with the people that are in this race uh to keep going? Surrender. You keep going and exhausting as much as you can. You keep going. You leave it all up to the supreme. You leave it all up to guru.
So, this is for me, it's a kind of self-actualization. So, I am becoming what I really want to become in my life. And that's a big opportunity that life gave me and I'm I'm really I feel privileged somehow. So, where is the limit? Maybe there isn't one number where the human body simply says, "This is as far as I can go." Maybe the limit depends on the rules of the challenge. Sorokin's is 24 hours. For the runners in Queens, it's 52 days. For Sri Chinmoy, that was the entire point. The finish line wasn't supposed to show you where your limit was. It was supposed to show you that the limit you believed was there might be
further than you think. Here's the most encouraging part. You don't have to start young to start pushing yourself. In ultras, data shows that the longer the race, the older the runners tend to be. The average ultra runner is 42 and nearly 70% are in their 30s and 40s. How old are you? I am 44 year old. And do you feel like you're at your peak condition or do you think that you have more to go? Uh well, that's a very interesting question. I guess in the ultra distance world until 50, everything is possible. This my belief. That's because ultra running rewards something you can only build over time, experience.
It is less about the time and more about the experience, the ability to keep going, your ability to fight central fatigue and boredom, and your experience to manage everything going on. If you can start where you are, go a little further tomorrow, and keep showing up, there's no telling how far you might go. Is there a limit to how far someone can run? No, there is no limit. The records are made to be broken, and there is always a way to improve. Only it takes a lot of time.
