Michael and Jessy are back after covering Boston and London, and this week's five stories cover everything from a polarizing youth running debate to one of the most shocking marathon debuts in American history.

In this episode:

An 11-year-old from Indiana, Ben Dick, ran 1:20:14 at the IU Health 500 Festival mini marathon — reportedly the fastest half ever run by a boy his age. He dropped his dad at mile seven. The internet is split. We dig into what happens to these kid phenoms long-term, and why pediatricians (and Jessy's kinesiology background) say the half marathon distance is too much for a developing 11-year-old body.

Sprinter Abby Steiner is suing Puma and Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix, claiming the carbon-plated shoes and spikes she wore caused the foot and Achilles injuries that have kept her off the track since the 2024 Olympic Trials. We unpack the questions this raises about athlete responsibility, sponsor accountability, and how you even quantify a derailed sprinting career.

While the running world was glued to Sebastian Sawe's near-sub-two London Marathon, 25-year-old Vinny Mauri quietly ran 2:05:54 at the Glass City Marathon in Toledo, Ohio — the fastest U.S. marathon debut on record. Before the race he joked that if he didn't break 2:16 he wasn't a real marathoner. He broke the course record by more than 13 minutes. Nobody had heard of him. His Twitter feed is mostly Bitcoin memes. Expect a major brand to scoop him up fast.

Cocodona 250 has kicked off in Arizona — 253 miles from Black Canyon to Flagstaff with 40,000 feet of climbing and a 125-hour cutoff. Courtney Dauwalter is the clear women's favorite (and looking for redemption after dropping out last year), but the field is deep with Rachel Entrekin, Heather Jackson, and surprise headliner Randy Zuckerberg. The men's race is wide open with Jeff Browning, Joe McConaughy, Ryan Clifford, and Adam Kimble all in the mix.

And finally — the running brand quietly dominating the industry isn't Nike, Adidas, or Asics. It's Brooks. Their best quarter ever: 23% global growth, North America up 20%, EMEA up 30%, China up 136%. Eleven straight quarters as the #1 specialty performance running brand in the U.S. Michael shares early thoughts on the unreleased Hyperion Elite 6 (out August), which Jess McClain and Clayton Young raced in Boston.

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The two-hour marathon barrier is gone. At the 2026 London Marathon, Sebastian Sawe became the first person ever to run under two hours on a record-eligible course — and Yomif Kejelcha did it too, in his marathon debut.

Outside columnist and Endure author Alex Hutchinson joins Michael Doyle, Alex Cyr and Katelyn Tocci to make sense of it.

We get into:

• Why Hutchinson thinks the shoes (the Adidas Adios Pro Evo 3) are still the biggest single factor — and why Nike has lost its grip on the super-shoe race
• Sawe's astonishing negative split: 60:29 out, 59:01 back, with a final 5K that put him on 1:52 marathon pace
• Whether the marathon is even the same race anymore — and whether "marathon pace" as a training concept is dying
• Norwegian-style threshold blocks vs. classic long marathon-pace work
• Resilience and durability — what they are and how (or whether) you train them
• Bicarb / sodium bicarbonate: the science of why it works, and whether marathoners should bother
• Why drafting "like a zombie" might be the most underrated tactic in distance running
• What's actually possible from here: 1:57? 1:56? Are we further from our potential than we think?
• The recreational-runner takeaways: shoes, fuel, sleep, and what to skip

A wide-ranging, occasionally contrarian conversation about an inflection point that may reshape the sport for the next decade.

📚 Books by Alex Hutchinson:Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human PerformanceThe Explorer's Gene

📰 Sweat Science Substack: alexhutchinson.net

Sebastian Sawe just ran 1:59:30 on the streets of London — the first sub-two-hour marathon in history on a sanctioned course. And he wasn't alone. Yomif Kejelcha, in his marathon debut, ran 1:59:41 to make it two sub-2s in a single race. On the women's side, Tigst Assefa lowered her own women's-only world record, with Hellen Obiri running a huge PB just under 2:16 for second.

Michael Doyle, Alex Cyr and Katelyn Tocci recorded this instant reaction from Knees Up on Hackney Road, with Jessy Carveth dialing in live from the finish line media center — including a quick word with Sawe himself before the press conference.

In this episode:

• The moment the media center went silent — and then erupted — as Sawe came around the final bend
• How a 90-second negative split delivered the first official sub-2
• Yomif Kejelcha's astonishing marathon debut and what it means for the next decade of the event
• Tigst Assefa, Hellen Obiri, and the women's race that almost got lost in the sauce
• The Adidas Pro Evo 3: why Adidas held it back from Boston, and what it does to the shoe wars
• Where John Korir's 2:01 in Boston now sits in the conversation
• Athlete vs. shoes vs. nutrition: the Maurten data on Sawe's pre-London block
• Whether the marathon has finally been "figured out" — and what that means for the rest of us
• Boston vs. London as a race weekend, the case for a two-day London in 2027, and why this one race may have just changed the sport