Ian Sample

Sebastian Sawe was the first in with a time of 1 hour 59 and 30 seconds.

And right on his heels was Yomif Kajelcha, who ran it in 1 hour 59 and 41 seconds.

That's incredible that they both managed this feat.

And actually, this brings us on to how they did it, because Tigist Assefa, Yomov Kajelcha and Sebastian Sawe, the fastest woman and the two fastest men, were all wearing the same kind of shoes.

But Maddy, look, I mean, you could put me in those shoes and I'm not suddenly going to run a marathon in two hours.

So tell me a bit about the training that goes into achieving this.

These researchers in Canada have been interested for quite a while in why some people believe in the paranormal and supernatural activity.

And as part of their work, they've been interested in whether infrasound, which is this sort of sound you can't hear, it's below your hearing level.

Whether that might be playing a role.

And you can get infrasound from a lot of sources.

You can get it from traffic going by, but you can also get it from things like old pipes and boilers and ventilation systems.

So if they're down in the basement of your creepy old manor, then they could be generating this kind of sound.

Well, a while back, this same group did some experiments at a haunted house attraction in Edmonton in Canada.

And the place is fantastically called Deadmonton.

And they ran experiments to see if playing infrasound had any impact on how scary people found the experience.

And they got some results saying that people might die.

go through the attraction faster when the infrasound was on but they had a few problems with the kit and so on and basically the results were inconclusive so the latest work really follows on from that somewhat limited experiment and they had people

in a room, listen to different types of music.

So calm instrumentals or kind of spooky music, the kind of music you might come across in one of these haunted house attractions.

And while they're playing that music, they also had some hidden subwoofers that were, for half of them, putting out some infrasound.