The household item turning runners into world record holders. 7 track and field records broken in February

[Demovictory9]

The household item turning runners into world record holders
In an eight-day span in February, seven of track and field's historic marks were broken. And it's partly thanks to baking soda.

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/track-field/household-item-turning-runners-world-record-holders-rcna194810

When Grant Fisher stepped off the track at Boston University on Feb. 14, it wasn’t entirely a shock that the American distance runner had just broken the world record for the indoor 5,000 meters.

For one thing, he was in great shape. Only six days earlier, Fisher, 27, who was coming off a breakout season in which he earned two silver medals at the Paris Olympics, had also broken the world record at 3,000 meters in New York City. Larger trends were also at play: He was running on one of the fastest tracks in the world, wearing Nike spikes whose carbon plates and advanced foams helped return energy with every stride.

Yet in Boston, when Fisher was asked about the factors that had led to his pair of world records, he acknowledged one so surprisingly simple that it’s probably in your kitchen.

He’d recently begun taking baking soda.

“I think it makes an impact, and if that impact is 1%, that would be massive,” Fisher told reporters. “It’s probably more like 0.1%, if there is one. And if it is just mental, then I’ll take that, too.”

Fisher is among the many professional runners in recent years to embrace baking soda — known within the sport by its scientific name, sodium bicarbonate, or simply “bicarb” — as a legal means of running faster times than ever. The use of a bicarbonate “system” sold by Maurten, a Swedish company, has become so widespread that at track and field’s world championships in 2023, two-thirds of all medalists from 800 to 10,000 meters were using it. At the Olympics last summer, more than two-thirds of all running medalists were using it — “and in some cases, all the finalists were using it,” the company told NBC News.