Beyond Super Shoes: Inside the Swedish Lab That Powered Sabastian Sawe's Sub-Two-Hour Marathon

Maurten, a Swedish nutrition company, is making waves with its high-carb drinks, bicarbonate sludges, and hydrogels, which are proving as crucial to elite performance as the much-hyped "super spikes."

Inside a modest Gothenburg office building, conference rooms bear the names of distance running legends like Eliud Kipchoge and Keely Hodgkinson. The newest addition honours Sabastian Sawe, the man who recently shattered the limits of human endurance.

When Sawe clocked the first official sub-two-hour marathon in London last month, much of the attention was on his carbon-plated running shoes. However, a team of scientists and nutritionists on Sweden's west coast believe another element was equally, if not more, decisive.

Beyond the Super Shoes in Sabastian Sawe’s World Record Milestone

"We don't have the megaphone that the shoe industry has," explains Olof Sköld, co-founder and CEO of the sports nutrition brand Maurten, speaking to Guardian Sport. "We are not that visible. But if you talk to the athletes and coaches, the elite world knows who we are."

While major marathon podiums feature a variety of shoe brands like Adidas, Nike, and Asics, one constant has emerged among the top athletes. Since 2018, every men's and women's marathon world record has been set by a runner using Maurten's nutrition products. Sawe's incredible 1:59:30 in London is the latest example.

At that race alone, seven of the top eight men and five of the top six women had an official partnership with the Swedish company.

It is widely suspected that many other top competitors use the products unofficially. At the highest level of the sport, Maurten has become a dominant force.

Just before Christmas, the company's head of nutrition, Tobias Christensson, hosted Sabastian Sawe's coach, Claudio Berardelli, at their Gothenburg headquarters.

While Sabastian Sawe's team had been working with Maurten for some time, the visit was an opportunity to delve into the science behind the products and share the latest research.

Founded in 2015, Maurten's breakthrough was a sports drink that used a unique hydrogel to transport carbohydrates. Initially developed to make energy drinks less acidic and better for dental health, early tests revealed significant performance-enhancing benefits.

By encapsulating carbohydrates in the hydrogel, the drink effectively bypasses the stomach for absorption in the intestine.

This allows athletes to consume far more carbohydrates during exercise without the gastrointestinal distress common with other sports drinks. Christensson calls it an "absolute gamechanger."

Sköld recalls the initial feedback from elite runners in Kenya and Ethiopia. "They said it was magical because it disappears," he says.

"If you are a 50kg runner, you feel every bit of water inside. They believed it was magical because they were drinking something and it felt like it was disappearing inside them."

While Christensson acknowledges that "there is a lot of critique and discussion around the importance of the hydrogel technology," Berardelli was presented with several recent studies.

One demonstrated that a marathoner running at a two-hour pace would completely deplete their glycogen stores within 85 minutes without carbohydrate intake. Maurten's rapid replenishment system, Christensson argued, is essential for athletes pushing such boundaries.

This performance benefits of sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda, have been known for nearly a century. It acts as a "blood buffer," neutralising the acid buildup that causes fatigue during intense exercise. While legal for human athletes, severe stomach issues have historically prevented its widespread use.

Maurten had aimed to solve this problem since its inception, finally releasing a product in 2023 that is now common in elite middle- and long-distance running. Costing £15 per serving, their bicarbonate system uses the same hydrogel technology.

Dozens of tiny bicarbonate tablets are suspended in a thick gel, which is spooned down about two hours before a race. This allows the tablets to travel past the stomach and dissolve in the intestine, delivering the benefits without the side effects.

Upon arriving in Gothenburg, a simple finger-prick blood test revealed elevated pH levels, a result that proponents of a new nutritional strategy believe can enhance high-intensity performance. This is just one piece of the puzzle in the evolving world of sports science.

Those at the forefront of this innovation point to a growing body of anecdotal evidence across various running distances. For instance, between 2023 and 2025, coinciding with the launch of Maurten's bicarbonate product, 36 men ran a mile in under 3 minutes and 49 seconds. In contrast, only nine men achieved this feat in the preceding 12 years, despite the earlier introduction of super spikes and advanced track surfaces.

On the morning of the London Marathon, Josh Rowe, Maurten's head of sports tech, entered the latest weather forecast into a predictive model he had developed.

The screen displayed a stunning projection: his athlete, Sawe, was predicted to finish the 26.2-mile course in 1:59:29, just one second off the world record time the Kenyan would ultimately set.

"The scientist in me says it was more luck than anything else," Rowe commented, but this modesty downplays the extensive data collection that informed his prediction.

In the 14 months leading up to the London Marathon, Rowe's research team spent 32 days over six separate trips embedded in Sawe's training camp in Kenya.

They conducted a comprehensive battery of tests, measuring everything from energy expenditure and lactate response to running economy and carbohydrate oxidation rates.

For Sawe, this race-day fueling strategy was meticulously practiced and refined over months of "gut training." Rowe explains the concept: "The theory is that the intestine is like a muscle. So, with exposure, it gets better."

This preparation culminated in a London Marathon plan executed with military precision. After consuming large quantities of Maurten's high-carb drink mix in the two days prior, Sawe began race day with a bowl of the bicarb mixture and took a gel at the start line.

During the race, he drank exactly 160ml of drink mix every 5km and had a caffeine gel at the halfway point. This amounted to an average carbohydrate intake of 115g per hour, a figure significantly higher than what was widely considered the fueling limit before Maurten's innovations.

The aftermath of the London Marathon was "kind of insane," according to company representative Sköld. Maurten estimates it already has official relationships with about 70% of the elite runners in major marathons, but the company has been inundated with requests from athletes and coaches seeking the "Sawe treatment" in recent weeks.

The company supports approximately 1,000 athletes, primarily in running but also in other endurance sports like cycling and triathlon. The Manchester-based M11 Track Club, which includes Olympic 800m champion Hodgkinson and world indoor 1500m champion Georgia Hunter-Bell, even has a Maurten employee permanently embedded with the team.

He confirms that other nutritional innovations are in development but remains tight-lipped about the details. "I'm not allowed," he admits. "But the idea with the company is we don’t release products that don’t change the market."

Insiders at Maurten believe Sawe's performance in London is just a preview of what's to come as more athletes embrace their full fueling potential. "I think you will see some insanely fast marathons going forward," Sköld predicts.