26/12/2025
Most runners think marathon performance is decided by pace, heart rate, and lung capacity.😏
❤️Cardiac and respiratory capacity together make up only about 35% of performance.🤯
💪🏻Tendon and muscular resilience contributes roughly 25%, deciding durability and injury resistance.
🧠Nervous and neuromuscular efficiency accounts for around 15%, influencing coordination, stride economy, and fatigue management.
Hormonal health contributes about 15%, driving recovery, adaptation, sleep quality, and cycle regularity.
The remaining 10% comes from factors like nutrition, hydration, biomechanics, and psychological readiness.
In reality, those systems are only part of the equation.
⚠️Sleep quality, daily stress, and hormonal cycle regularity decide how well you adapt to training, recover, and resist injury.
❤️🩹Poor sleep and chronic stress blunt neuromuscular coordination, increase central fatigue, and quietly raise injury risk long before pace drops.
👭For women, cycle irregularity is often an early warning sign of under-recovery and energy mismatch, not a badge of hard training.
Train the whole system, not just the watch.
hormonalhealth
