Are marathons getting easier to run?

Marathons have long been regarded as the ultimate endurance test, requiring months of intense preparation and extended recovery periods. But has that distance challenge become easier? If you ask any seasoned distance runner, they will agree; the marathon is less gruelling on the body today than it was a decade ago.

Traditionally, elite runners stuck to the gold standard of two marathons per year—one in spring and one in fall. Now, more professionals are racing three or four annually, bouncing back faster than ever. At the 2025 Ottawa Marathon, Canada’s second-fastest marathoner, Rory Linkletter, shared some insights on why he thinks more runners are taking on the distance, and what it means.

“I think it’s a number of things from a training perspective,” said Linkletter. “The latest shoe technology and foams help a lot because you’re less beat up from training and racing than before.”

Before the era of carbon-plated shoes, marathoners weren’t wearing footwear with 40mm stack heights. For brands, it was about developing the lightest and most durable racing shoe for their athletes. Hoka was an early advocate of high-stack, high-cushion designs. But it wasn’t until Nike introduced a carbon plate in the midsole with the launch of the Vaporfly 4% in 2017 that the carbon era truly began. Since then, carbon-plated racing shoes have continued to evolve, offering greater efficiency, smoother transitions and reduced joint impact, allowing runners to recover faster and race more frequently.

Linkletter says another thing that helped him, but might not be so obvious, is fuelling. Many runners have figured out how to fuel for marathons (i.e., using products like Maurten, Science In Sport (SiS) or Tailwind), which all help you perform and speed up recovery from the race itself to get your body the nutrients it needs to bounce back. 

Gone are the days when marathoners just relied on water and a few energy gels to get them through a race. Many have started using high-carb beverages, electrolytes and recovery supplements to accelerate performance and post-race recovery. Most nutrition brands have strategically designed their fuelling products to stop runners from hitting the wall, and made products to replenish their glycogen stores more efficiently. The key isn’t just what they fuel with, it’s also when and how they do it. This advanced fuelling throughout a marathon prevents excessive muscle damage, and makes recovery far quicker and less taxing. Even for Linkletter, he finds it much easier to bounce back now than it was when he ran his first marathon in 2019.

Outside of shoes and nutrition, Linkletter believes another factor is the way people look at marathons in 2025. “For so long, it was you train hard, you race, you take a huge break–then rinse and repeat. Now with the shoe technology and fuelling, coaches are discovering that you can strategically come down a little bit without taking a long break, and still build back up.”

So are marathons, easy? No, finishing 42.2km still demands months (and months) of consistent training, but the advancements in shoe technology and nutrition have made training and recovering from one easier. While Linkletter advises against racing two marathons in six weeks, as he did in Boston and Ottawa, he says the experience taught him a lot, and he embraced the challenge.