Sawe’s secret sauce: inside the lab that fuelled marathon record
Swedish firm Maurten’s highcarb drinks, bicarb sludges and hydrogels are rivalling super spikes in their impact ‘When we first started testing it, the athletes said it was magical because it disappeared’ 16 May 2026 - THE GUARDIAN/ Sport Ben Bloom Gothenburg - Inside an unremarkable Gothenburg office building rented from the local university are a series of conference spaces named after the modern greats of distance running. There is the Eliud Kipchoge room, the Keely Hodgkinson room and, the latest addition, the Sabastian Sawe room, in homage to the man who recently redefined the limits of human endurance. When Sawe last month in London became the first person to run an official marathon in under two hours, much of the coverage focused on the Kenyan’s carbon-plated shoes. But here, on the west coast of Sweden, a team of scientists, nutritionists and technicians believe another factor was just as significant, if not more so. “We don’t have the megaphone that the shoe industr...
