Shalane Flanagan’s Project Eclipse journey began on September 26, 2021, when she toed the line at the Berlin Marathon. In the weeks prior she had a baseline blood analysis from InsideTracker, the personalized performance and nutrition system.
InsideTracker has now released some insights collected during Flanagan’s mission to run Project Eclipse – and take on the six World Marathon Majors in just seven weeks.
Flanagan tested five times over the course of Project Eclipse, with InsideTracker analyzing more than 43 blood biomarkers to assess muscle health, inflammation, brain health, stress response, energy and endurance.
‘The results were used to inform science-backed nutrition and lifestyle recommendations to calibrate and optimize critical markers for recovery and endurance.’
“Following the Berlin and London marathons, I was feeling about how I expected, but the blood test following those races showed me that there were small, distinct changes I could make in nutrition timing and recovery to improve some biomarkers related to muscle health, recovery and stress,” said Flanagan.
“It was amazing to see how much better I felt after Chicago and Boston, even with those races on back-to-back days. If I hadn’t seen that window of opportunity, I might have assumed there was no room for improvement.”
Dr Gil Blander, co-founder and Chief Science Officer at InsideTracker, said “Shalane is an amazing athlete, so we were expecting to see her respond incredibly well to the challenge. Our deeper curiosity was uncovering what we could learn that would help non-elites optimize for their own amazing feats.
“The biggest takeaway for us was seeing how quickly relatively small nutrition and lifestyle adjustments can notably change those critical biomarkers – even in a person who’s already well-optimized, and even when in a period of incredible stress.”
Athletes can download a full report of Flanagan’s key biomarker results, observations and adaptations online.
InsideTracker will host a virtual media event to discuss the findings on Thursday, December 9, at 18:00 EST featuring Flanagan and members of her InsideTracker science team.
