A strong finish depends on how well your leg muscles can handle a beating.
At the 2012 Madrid Marathon, Spanish researchers recruited 40 runners to undergo a battery of tests immediately before the race, and again within three minutes of finishing. The goal was to understand why so many runners fade in the final kilometres of long events. When the results were tabulated, none of the usual suspects – dehydration, high core temperature, low blood sugar, and so on – could explain which runners faded the most. Instead, the best predictor was muscle damage.
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