Men are twice as likely to hit a wall in the marathon
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The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
Marathon runners dread this. It's the moment that they're on the pace, but then suddenly the energy levels have dropped and they begin to slow down. Well, now a study has found that men are almost twice as likely to hit the wall and researchers have suggested that it might be down, in part at least, to overconfidence. I'm joined by Professor in Clinical Exercise Physiology at the School of Health and Human Performance in DCU, Niall Moyna. Good morning to you. Good morning. This happens a lot, doesn't it, where people hit the wall, all sorts of people, men and women. So we might talk about that first.
What does it mean to 'hit the wall' in a marathon?
Why does that happen?
Well, when we run a marathon, it's not just about our physiology. It's also about the effective use of the energy that we have. So there are two energy tanks in the body. There's the carbohydrate tank and there's the fat tank. And we use both of them. However, there's 100,000 calories in the fat tank and there's 2,000 calories in the carb tank.
Why are men more likely to hit the wall compared to women?
And the problem is when you run out of the carbs and you rely entirely on fat, that's when you hit the wall. So if you run very hard, you tend to use the carbohydrates more than the fats. And that's the problem with the men, unfortunately.
OK, so the men are going out hard and they're not pacing themselves. Is that what's going on?
That's it. And in fact, you know, I think it's probably down to the lack of a patient gene in men. We don't we don't tend to be very, very patient. We want it's a bit like an elite sport. We want to really get into the mix. And, you know, at the start of a marathon, just think about all the excitement and that. And obviously men get far more excited with all the crowd that are there. And when you go off too fast, that first 5K, unfortunately, you cannot get it back at the other end. You really pay dearly for it because obviously you run out of those carbs and you hit that dreaded wall. Women, on the other hand, they take a much more effective approach. It's the tortoise and the hare. They go off much, much slower and they're using primarily their fat.
In addition, women also have this... they have a better ability to use fat than men in general. So first of all, they have that advantage, but then because they go slower, particularly over the first half of the race, they're utilizing that fat as well, and they're conserving their carbohydrates for the last 10 to 15 kilometers.
Yeah, but there's plenty of men listening to this, Niall, who will say, well, I know exactly how to run a marathon and I start off slow, I pace myself and I push towards the end. So it's not everybody, you know, who will make this mistake. But what the study tells us is it's more common for men to hit the wall, so to overextend themselves at the start of the thing.
Yeah, and particularly in people who are running the marathon in a time beyond three hours, it seems to be much, much more prevalent in that group. So particularly if you've done a marathon before and this happened, then you don't need to listen to me. You know exactly how it feels. But if you have not run a marathon, and I always give this advice to people who are running the first marathon, I always say, go easy the first half because you will be rewarded in the second half.
How does energy management affect marathon performance?
If you go hard in the first half, you pay dearly in the second half.
And that is called a negative split, isn't it? Doing it right. Yes.
The whole idea is to probably... A negative split is you run the first half slightly slower... than the second half. Most people do the opposite. They run the first half fast and they'd slow down, particularly over the last five to 10 K. And that's where most of the damage occurs because you normally don't run out of that. The carbohydrate tank doesn't dry up until around, 36 kilometers. So you're running the last 12 kilometers basically on fat. And that's very, very inefficient. And that's why we have to slow down. So the key message is run the first half slow and you're rewarded handsomely during the second half.
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