Dr. Kristine Snyder of Stryd was lead author on the study covering impact of course design on Kipchoge’s 2-hour marathon attempts
Dr. Kristine Snyder, Stryd’s Human Movement Algorithm Designer, was lead author on the study covering the impact of course design on Eluid Kipchoge’s 2-hour marathon attempts at Breaking2 in Monza and the INEOS 1:59 Challenge in Vienna.
Dr. Snyder and co-authors did an analysis of the effect of uphills and downhills and curves on the time it would take to run both the Breaking2 (Monza) and INEOS 1:59 (Vienna) courses using oxygen consumption equations from the literature that do not take into account any user data. They found that the Vienna course incurred only ~1.4 second penalty and could save ~47 seconds (~46 due to uphill and downhill) in time over the Monza course, whereas Eliud Kipchoge ran 45 seconds faster in Vienna. While other factors such as drafting strategy, weather, shoes, and crowd proximity could well have played a part, the choice of course in Vienna was found to be advantageous over that in Monza.
While some of this analysis work will be applied to Stryd race predictions in upcoming updates, the Stryd Race Power Calculator will go a step further, utilizing each runner's Stryd data to personalize the race prediction!
You can read the full study here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02640414.2020.1843820