Maurten, the Swedish hydrogel sports-nutrition company that has fuelled most of the major marathon world records of the past decade, has now published the detail of the carbohydrate plan it built with Sabastian Sawe ahead of his 1:59:30 in London. The headline number is 115 grammes of carbohydrate per hour during competition, sitting modestly below the 120g/h ceiling that has become the Maurten elite-protocol benchmark in cooler races. The figure is interesting less because it is unprecedented — sub-two pacing has long been assumed to require it — and more because Maurten has now disclosed the six-month gut-conditioning programme used to make it sustainable.
The plan, set out in a Maurten case study published this past week, started in October 2025 with what its physiology team calls "tolerance laddering": gradually adding 10g of carbohydrate to a single long run each fortnight, beginning at 60g/h and rising in measured steps. Sawe spent November and December at 80g/h on long sessions, then moved to 100g/h for January and February's London training block, and only began testing 115g/h in tempo and race-pace simulation runs in March. The protocol used Maurten's standard hydrogel mix — high-fructose 320 Caf at the higher splits, plus solid Maurten Solid C in the warm-up and pre-race window — and was supervised by Mike Trees alongside Sawe's coach Federico Rosa.
The race-day execution was tighter than is sometimes assumed. Sawe took six hydrogel feeds during the marathon: one at 6km, then at 5km intervals through 31km, with a final supplementary feed at 36km. Each feed was 65g of carbohydrate from a combination of Drink Mix 320 Caf in the bottle and a single Maurten Gel 100 Caf at the longer-spaced stops, which Maurten's case study reports gave him an average sustained intake of 113g/h across the body of the race. The pre-race loading sequence is the more novel piece: a 24-hour 12g/kg/day plan with reduced fibre, plus a 90-minute pre-race micro-loading window using Maurten's new Solid Race format, which the company is positioning as the next product launch.
The published plan offers the wider running community its first detailed view of how an elite team is now operationalising the high-carb intake levels that academic literature has been pointing to for several years. The 2024 modelling paper from the American Physiological Society had suggested that male sub-two athletes likely need 93 plus or minus 26g/h of bioavailable carbohydrate, but that field-tolerance was a bigger constraint than absolute supply. Maurten's case study essentially answers that constraint with a long, gradual gut-training arc rather than a race-week loading trick, and is a meaningful update on the previously published 120g/h benchmark used for Eliud Kipchoge in 2019.
The disclosure is also a competitive shot. Maurten's two main rivals in the elite marathon segment — Precision and SiS — have both published their own race-day protocols in the past 12 months, with SiS notably backing the 120g/h Beta Fuel system used by Sifan Hassan at last year's Berlin Marathon. The Sawe case study restates Maurten's claim that the practical ceiling is closer to 115g/h once the field constraints of GI tolerance and palatability are accounted for. With Cape Town's elite men's field beginning their pre-race protocols this week and the European 10,000m Cup turning to Pacé in late May, the next eight weeks should see the Maurten plan road-tested across a wider range of conditions.