Are You Among 0.7% Faster Runners?

For years, caffeine sat on the anti-doping list. Today it’s in almost every runner’s kitchen. So does it actually make you faster? A 2023 meta-analysis pulled together 21 studies on caffeine and endurance running with 254 runners, from recreational to trained. They found that in time trials, caffeine cut finishing times by about 0.7% on average. That sounds tiny, right? But on a 50-minute 10K, that’s roughly 20 seconds. On a 4-hour marathon, it’s well over a minute and a half. But it can...