Inside an unremarkable Gothenburg office building rented from the local university are conference spaces named after distance-running greats: Eliud Kipchoge, Keely Hodgkinson and, the latest addition, Sabastian Sawe - the man who recently said “screw physics” and ran an official marathon in under two hours. Last month in London, Sawe became the first person to do so in 1hr 59min 30sec, and while much coverage focused on his carbon-plated shoes, a team of Swedish scientists, nutritionists and technicians believe another factor was just as significant, if not more so.
“We don’t have the megaphone that the shoe industry has,” says Olof Sköld, co-founder and CEO of sports nutrition brand Maurten. “We are not that visible. But if you talk to the athletes and coaches, the elite world knows who we are.” Indeed, since 2018, every men’s and women’s marathon world record has been run by an athlete using Maurten products. In London alone, seven of the top eight men and five of the top six women had an official relationship with the Swedish company - and the few exceptions likely just didn’t want to admit it. Maurten has become inescapable at the top of the sport.
Founded in 2015, Maurten’s initial trick was a sports drink using a novel hydrogel as a “vehicle” to transport carbohydrates. Originally intended to improve dental health by reducing sugar and acidity, early experiments showed it could bypass the stomach and be absorbed in the intestine, allowing athletes to take on far more carbs without gastrointestinal rebellion. “When we first started testing it with elite runners in Kenya and Ethiopia, they said it was magical because it disappears,” says Sköld. “If you are a 50kg runner, you feel every bit of water inside.”
But the company’s next innovation - a sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) delivery system - is where things get truly weird. Bicarb’s performance-enhancing benefits were identified almost a century ago; it acts as a “blood buffer” to counteract acidity during intense exercise. It’s legal for humans (illegal in most horse sports), but the severe gastro issues it causes meant few athletes historically tried it. Maurten spent years developing a bicarb system that uses the same hydrogel concept to transport many dozens of bicarbonate mini-tablets past the stomach into the intestine. Costing £15 per serving, the mixture - consistency somewhere between half-set jelly and over-thickened custard - is consumed with a spoon about two hours before exercise. Finger-prick blood testing after taking it showed elevated pH levels that proponents believe might favour high-intensity performance.
The results are hard to ignore: 36 men ran a mile in under 3min 49sec from 2023 (when Maurten launched its bicarb product) to 2025, compared to only nine over the previous 12 years, despite super spikes and track upgrades. On the morning of the London Marathon, Maurten’s head of sports tech, Josh Rowe, punched the weather forecast into a prediction model and got 1:59.29 - one second off Sawe’s eventual world record. “The scientist in me says it was more luck than anything else,” Rowe deflects, modestly ignoring the 32 days his team spent embedded in Sawe’s Kenyan camp over six trips, testing energy expenditure, lactate response, running economy and carbohydrate oxidation.
For Sawe, race-day fuelling was military precision: large quantities of Maurten’s high-carb drink mix in the two days before, a bowl of bicarb sludge on the morning, a gel on the start line, exactly 160ml of drink mix every 5km, plus a caffeine gel at halfway. That averaged 115g of carbohydrates per hour - significantly higher than the previously understood fuelling limit. Sköld describes the London Marathon aftermath as “kind of insane,” with the company inundated by athletes and coaches seeking the “Sawe treatment.” About 1,000 athletes are now supported by the company, predominantly runners but also cyclists and triathletes. The Manchester-based M11 Track Club, containing Olympic 800m champion Keely Hodgkinson and world indoor 1500m champion Georgia Hunter-Bell, even has a Maurten employee permanently embedded.
Moves are afoot to relocate from rented premises to a custom-built hangar in Gothenburg. “It will be like Willy Wonka where we can build our own world inside,” says Sköld. He confirms other nutrition creations are in the pipeline but won’t divulge them: “I’m not allowed. But the idea with the company is we don’t release products that don’t change the market.” Those inside Maurten believe Sawe’s run is just a glimpse of what’s possible as more runners fully recognise their fuelling capabilities. “I think you will see some insanely fast marathons going forward,” says Sköld. Yet for all the algorithms and hydrogels, Sawe still began his greatest day with breakfast of bread and honey. Some essentials do not need improving.