Meb - the oldest winner in ages!

Well none of us are getting any younger but some would have you fooled if you didn't know better! Last month, Meb Keflezighi won the 2014 Boston Marathon - just two weeks shy of his 39th birthday. He is the first American to win the Boston Marathon in 31 years and is the oldest runner to win since the 1930s. In an unprecedented performance Meb took the lead almost from the starting gun - and led all the way through - giving the pre-race favourites a big surprise. So how big an achievement is this?

Science says that, as we get older, it is less likely that we will beat our younger counterparts in a race. Why? Well here are a couple of reasons:

1) From our late 30s, maximal oxygen consumption, or VO2 max, decreases at a rate of around 10% per decade, or about 1% per year, in most people. VO2 max is dependent on heart rate, which decreases by about 5 to 10 beats per minute per decade. This means that you can't send as much oxygen to your working muscles and so you can't run as fast.

2) Wear and tear builds up on the joints. Connective tissue becomes less elastic, and lubricating fluids decline, making us more injury-prone.

So how did Meb pull this one off?

After a brilliant marathon running career (which saw him win a silver medal in the 2004 Olympic Marathon, secure a win in the New York Marathon in 2009 and also achieve a 4th place finish at the London Olympics Marathon) Meb had found the toll of elite training finally started to take its toll.

After the London Olympics Meb had struggled with injuries and was no longer able to put in the consistent, uninterrupted training necessary to bring out his best performances. So he turned to the ElliptiGO Project, looking to take on smarter but less debilitating training methods to extend his running career and overcome the injury barriers which had slowed him down.

It required focus and dedication to allow the new training to pay dividends and Meb wasn't able to get in enough training to perform to his potential at last year's New York City Marathon, due to injury setbacks in the build-up to the race. But he was able to train consistently from that point onwards, largely by training smarter (using ElliptiGO cross-training) and employing dedicated stretching and recovery routines, to make his preparations as scientific as possible. 

This had allowed Meb to get competition-fit on much lower overall running mileages, whilst keeping all his running sessions extremely intense - and bulking out his endurance training with rides on the ElliptiGO. He had committed to the Boston Marathon immediately after the terrorist attacks which took place in 2013 (while he was there as a spectator) and he was able to get to the starting line of the 2014 Boston Marathon fully trained and able to express his full abilities. The rest, as they say, is history...

 
Click hereto listen to Meb's insightful interview with Bryce Whiting, conducted immediately after the race, in which Meb explains how he used the ElliptiGO to resurrect his athletics career.

For anyone out there who already rides an ElliptiGO or is interested in getting one, check out this film of the epic 1400km ElliptiGO ride at the London Edinburgh London (LEL) 2013 cycling event, for inspiration!