The Marathon Isn't Dumb. Your Pacing Is.
A few days ago, a researcher named Brady Holmer posted something that set runFinTwit briefly on fire. His argument, roughly: "The best way to get fit is to train for a marathon. Running the actual full race is the dumb part." BowTiedBull, with 213K followers, piled on: "total depletion last 6.1 miles."
Both of them are describing a real phenomenon. Neither of them is diagnosing it correctly.
The death march in miles 20 through 26 is not a feature of the marathon distance. It is the consequence of a specific error made much earlier in the race. And there is 13 years and 208,000 finishers worth of evidence to define exactly what that error costs.
The Data You're Actually Running Against
In 2023, Ristanović and colleagues published an analysis of 208,760 finishers at the Vienna City Marathon spanning 2006 through 2018. It is one of the largest pacing datasets in the sport [1]. Their finding: positive pacing (slowing down as the race progresses) was observed in every single performance group, at every level, across all 13 years.
Read that again. Even the fastest runners slow down in the marathon. Elite execution doesn't avoid the phenomenon. It compresses it.
Here's the number that matters. Low-level recreational men slowed an average of 7.9% from their first 10K pace by the end of the race. High-level men slowed 4.14%. The difference between a death march and a controlled second half is less than 4 percentage points of speed variance across 42 kilometers.
The "total depletion" BowTiedBull describes is real. But it maps precisely to the lower end of that distribution: runners who burned through their glycogen stores early, let their pace slip above threshold, and arrived at mile 20 already running on empty. The issue isn't the marathon distance. It's the first 20 miles.
What "Dumb" Actually Looks Like
Here's what a positive-split marathon looks like in practice. You feel good at the start. The crowd is moving, your legs are fresh, your watch reads a pace that's faster than your plan. You tell yourself you'll bank time. You convince yourself the second half will feel easier because you'll have built a cushion.
It won't. The physiology doesn't work that way.
When you run the first half faster than your aerobic ceiling allows, you recruit muscle glycogen at a rate that outpaces your ability to restore it. By mile 18 or 19, the stores aren't just low. They're gone. The last 10K doesn't become a mental battle. It becomes a physiological shutdown, where every mile is slower than the last regardless of effort, and the race that looked so controlled at 13.1 turns into exactly what BowTiedBull described: total depletion.
This is the experience Brady Holmer is critiquing. This is the marathon that earns the "dumb" label. But it's not the only available marathon. It's just the most common one.
The Other Race
The runner who starts 10 to 15 seconds per mile slower than their realistic race pace arrives at the midpoint feeling controlled rather than already taxed. They've preserved glycogen. Their legs have the contract-and-release elasticity that translates directly into late-race speed. The pace they were holding in mile 4 starts to feel sustainable in mile 22, because physiologically, nothing has broken down.
Ristanović's data shows this clearly. The narrower the pacing spread (the more even the pace distribution across the five race segments), the better the performance outcome. Elite runners don't just run faster. They waste less. The compounding effect of a calmer first half shows up precisely in the miles that look "dumb" in a positive-split race.
The research team put it plainly: "Better runners showed more even pacing than slower runners." The simplicity of that sentence should not obscure how much it contains. Pacing isn't just a strategy. It's the variable that separates a race that rewards months of work from one that destroys it in the final five miles.
What This Means If You're 10 Weeks Out
This debate isn't abstract if you're in the middle of a training block for Chicago, New York, or Berlin. The summer base miles you're running right now are building the aerobic engine that will determine which side of that data distribution you land on.
We covered the training side of this in last week's piece. 10 Weeks Out: The Honest Conversation About Your Fall Marathon. The short version: the discipline you're practicing now, running slower than feels necessary in the heat of late July, is the same discipline that saves your race in the back nine miles. Every easy run you do at the correct effort is a deposit against the pacing mistake that turns miles 20 through 26 into a death march.
The marathon isn't dumb. Starting faster than your fitness allows is dumb. And the corrective is available to anyone willing to ego-check their first mile.
Run the second half faster than the first. That's it. That's the whole argument.
References
1. Ristanović L, Cuk I, Villiger E, Stojiljković S, Nikolaidis PT, Weiss K, Knechtle B. The pacing differences in performance levels of marathon and half-marathon runners. Frontiers in Psychology, 2023 Dec 21;14:1273451. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1273451