The Speedsuit Nobody Wore
Sabastian Sawe showed up to his race without the speedsuit Adidas built for him. The suit improves running economy by more than 1 percent. That is not a rounding error. In a sport where athletes chase hundredths of a second and tenths of a percent in VO2max, a full percentage point in economy is a canyon. Sawe left it in the bag.
Nobody knows exactly why. Maybe the fit was off. Maybe the mental weight of a new variable felt heavier than the physical gain. Maybe he just did not trust it yet. Whatever the reason, the decision is more interesting than the technology. It says something about how far optimization can go before it starts working against you.
Runner's World ran a piece this week asking whether marathoning has become "sterilized" in the age of sub-2:00. The question lands at a strange moment. Athlos just announced $2.1 million in prize money for its new two-meet format. The Enhanced Games experiment flopped, but the conversation it started about what "pure" sport even means is still smoldering. Adidas drops a speedsuit that moves the needle on human performance, and the athlete it was built for declines to use it.
You could read that as a rejection of optimization. I think it is more nuanced than that.
The mental side of racing is fragile in ways that power meters and lactate thresholds cannot capture. Every variable you control eliminates a source of uncertainty. That sounds like progress. But uncertainty is also where racing lives. The thing that makes a race a race, and not a calculation, is the part you cannot fully anticipate. Strip enough of that away and you are left with something that looks like running but does not feel like it.
I have thought about this a lot in the context of pacing. Modern marathon pacing is algorithmically precise. Pacers hold metronomic splits. Watches beep at programmed intervals. Carbon shoes return energy with mechanical predictability. You can run a marathon now where almost nothing surprises you, if you follow the plan. But I would argue the best races I have ever run are the ones where something did surprise me and I handled it anyway.
That is the tension Sawe walked into and the one every runner faces eventually. When does the pursuit of control become the thing you need to let go of?
The speedsuit probably works. The science behind reducing aerodynamic drag and improving mechanical efficiency is solid, and a 1 percent gain at the elite level is worth chasing. But the gap between a lab-tested improvement and a race-day decision is filled with questions that have nothing to do with the lab. How do you feel in it? Does thinking about the suit distract you from thinking about the race? Are you racing your competitors or racing the technology?
These are not anti-tech questions. I am not arguing for cotton shorts and leather spikes. The point is simpler: no amount of optimization removes the mental game. It just moves it. When the physical variables are locked down, the pressure shifts entirely to the mind. And the mind can be a harder opponent than any pace chart.
Runner's World poses the question as "has marathoning become sterilized?" I think the better framing is: what are we optimizing for, and what are we losing along the way?
If you are training for a race right now, you are probably surrounded by data. Your watch tells you your training readiness. Your app predicts your finish time. Your shoes promise a percentage point of efficiency. All of it is useful. None of it is the whole story.
The real test is not whether you can follow a pace plan when everything goes right. It is whether you can make a decision at mile 20 when the data says one thing and your body says another. Sawe made a decision before the race even started. He declined to add a variable he did not fully trust. That might have cost him a performance edge. It might also have freed up mental bandwidth for the race itself.
I do not know which calculation was right. I only know that calculation existed, and that it is the kind of math no lab can do for you.
For your next race, pay attention to the decisions you make before the gun goes off. What are you wearing? What is your pacing strategy? How many variables are you carrying into the first mile? Ask yourself which of those variables are helping your race and which are just helping you feel prepared.
There is a difference. The speedsuit can probably make you faster. Knowing when to leave it in the bag might make you a better racer.
### References
- Runner's World. "Sub-Two Marathon Optimization" (May 2026). https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a71339969/sub-two-marathon-optimization/
- Let's Run forum. "Adidas: We've developed a new speedsuit that improves running economy by more than 1% (but Sabastian Sawe didn't wear it)" (May 2026). https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=14190146
- Let's Run forum. "Athlos announces new 2 meet format for 2026, $2.1 million in prize money" (May 2026). https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=14186156