The latest episode of NOVA features a Marathon Challenge, in which they take ordinary people and prepare them for the Boston Marathon. Inadvertently, but effectively, it argues against marathon training.
The Team NOVA runners start their training with a VO2max test, and most of them score quite poorly — but the one fellow who ran in college still has a “superior” score decades later. Aerobic capacity has a tremendous genetic component, and training delivers dramatically diminishing returns. After almost nine months of rigorous marathon training — versus his usual pick-up soccer on the weekends — his VO2max increases just 8 percent. It’s only the sedentary members of the team who increase their VO2max by 20, 30, or 40 percent.
More interesting to the average American though is the fact that the members of Team NOVA do not lose weight. In fact, they don’t lose fat or increase muscle either. Marathon training has no effect on body composition. The only member of the team to show any improvement in body composition is the woman who recently put on 75 pounds before starting training, and she loses the weight by dieting and getting up at 5:00 AM to do a fitness boot camp every morning.
If we weigh these meager benefits against the stress fractures and other injuries from training, it doesn’t look like marathon training makes sense for most people — certainly not as much sense as, say, soccer.