A marathon a month?!

Most elite marathoners race twice a year. Runner, coach and podcaster Matt Fox is attempting something radically different: racing a marathon every month for the foreseeable future. Inspired by Japanese legend Yuki Kawauchi – the first person to run 100 sub-2:20 marathons – he’s already four months in. By sharing what he’s up to with his wide audience he’s already helping to rewrite the conventional wisdom on recovery and racing frequency.

Matt – an Australian who now calls Chicago home – calls what he’s doing a science experiment. The scientific method holds that a study’s results should be replicable. So for anyone interested in running performance, seeing if Fox can apply Kawauchi’s methodology and achieve a breakthrough improvement will be fascinating to follow.

He sums up what he’s doing like this: “I’m trying to run a marathon every month of the year – and trying to run as fast as I can. My goal is to improve over time by doing this – because I think Yuki has done that. But it’s important to understand that that doesn’t mean you’re improving every single marathon.

“My goal is really to try and continuously race marathons more and more, and go against the status quo of doing this long build-up heading into a race. I think a lot of people are stuck in the idea of thinking you have to do a long, slow build-up and then a taper week and then a whole recovery period and race twice a year. But Yuki has proved that you can do it a different way.

“So I’m trying to follow that approach and see if I can improve. Because he’s been doing that for eight, 10 years and gotten down to 2:07 doing it. So we’ll see how far I can get by doing it. And it might be nothing, but it might also be a few minutes.”

In mid-January at the Houston Marathon, Matt battled gusty headwinds and fatigue to clock 2:20:27. This followed times of 2:19:31 in Chicago’s October major, 2:18:41 (his current PR) at Indianapolis in November, and 2:19:44 at the California International Marathon in December.

“I’m pretty happy with the Houston run, even though it was not my fastest time, and it wasn’t even my second or third fastest time. It was my fourth fastest time, and it’s also the slowest time I’ve run for over a year. But I’m still very happy with it because I can tell that I still haven’t gone backwards.”

Behind this audacious experiment lies years of accumulated knowledge. As a teenager in Queensland, Matt was pursuing entry into the Australian Football League when a severely broken wrist sustained in his very first game for the Surfers Paradise Demons ended his footy career. He pivoted to the 800m.

“In the 800 metres, I tried to qualify for multiple national [Australian] teams between 2007 and 2012,” he explains. “I finished that career feeling like I’d failed, which now seems a bit silly because I came fifth in the country twice and ran times that were close to the Olympic qualifying time.

“Through that experience, so the last three years of competing in the 800, between 2010 and 2013, I became really curious about what athletes better than me were doing in training to be better than me. And so I started interviewing a lot of athletes and quizzing them about what they’re doing that I might be missing.”

This inquisitiveness became Sweat Elite, a blog Matt started in 2016 to dive deep into elite training methods. By 2018, the blog had evolved into the Sweat Elite podcast, which is now around 150 episodes strong. The show features in-depth conversations with professional athletes about their training approaches, complemented since 2021 by a YouTube channel. As well as interviews with other elites, there’s plenty of self-relection as Matt and his podcast co-host Luke Keogh share their own journeys of training, nutrition, racing and recovery.

Matt is also the founder of Sweat Elite Coaching Academy, which launched in 2023 (though he has been coaching since 2007) and now guides approximately 180 athletes across running and triathlon. He even has a travel company called Globe Runners, offering packages to runners who want to visit and train in some of the world’s most famous running spots – think Flagstaff, Boulder and Kenya.

Now 37, Matt first tackled the marathon when he was 30, running 2:59:36 in Helsinki on what was essentially a dare. American 800m specialist Nick Symmonds had declared he’d be able to run a three-hour marathon (later backing it in with a time of 3:00:35 in Honolulu in 2017). Egged on by a friend, Matt thought that with a four-month training block he could go sub-three. He was right but says it remains the hardest marathon he’s ever run.

Over the next few years, he methodically chipped away at his times: 2:43, then 2:35, then a levelling-up 2:27 in Valencia in 2019. Achilles issues nearly ended his running career in 2020, meaning he was pretty much sidelined for the whole year. Matt says he did in fact quit, but he struggled on, before coming back with a 2:20 PR at Indianapolis in 2021.

“I actually did pretty low volume leading into that. And I took six weeks completely off in May, June, 2021, because I was just so sick of the Achilles pain. And then I trained for about four months and ran 2:20, and that was really surprising,” Matt says.

He wasn’t able to improve on that Indianapolis PR until hitting 2:19:31 in Chicago last October. We were curious what he attributed that to.

“I put it down to doing more of the same constantly – I was copying everyone else, in a way. I was just doing long, hard runs and threshold runs, and volume. You could argue not enough volume, maybe. Eighty to 90 miles a week, 140 to 150K a week. I sort of got stuck, or clearly I needed some different stimulus to really help me move forward.”

That stimulus came with two recent changes: working on pure speed through hill sprints and very fast top-end training, and shedding some weight. “Steve Magness would call it the speed gap,” Matt explains, referencing the renowned American coach. “If you improve your top end speed by 1%, in theory, most other paces and efforts slower than that should also improve by 1%.”

“I also experimented with just dropping some weight. I cut five kilos between June and October, from 74 kilos down to 69 kilos [163 pounds to 152 pounds] because, speaking back to the Indianapolis run, the one thing that was really interesting about that was that I was much lighter than normal.”

Now, Matt has found his groove in the marathon – and he’s ready to challenge every assumption about how to race it. “I noticed when I was running marathons, I’d recover pretty fast,” he explains. “I started thinking about how Yuki doesn’t have to deal with this frustration of training for months only to get bad weather on race day. If one day doesn’t work out, he’s onto the next one.” Fox’s approach between marathons is carefully calibrated. He takes four days completely off after each race, though he walks for an hour daily – a recovery method he believes is underrated. After that, he returns to a basic weekly structure: Wednesday intervals, Friday hill sprints, Sunday long run. But he’s learning to modify the intensity.

“The marathon itself is such a big stimulus,” he explains. “You’re carrying over that two-hour-20-minute tempo run. You don’t really need to do that much.” Matt now thinks he overtrained between his December and January marathons, including a 40km training run at 3:35–3:40 per kilometre [5:46–5:54 per mile] and multiple intense track sessions. Going forward, he’s reducing both the volume and intensity of his key sessions by about 40%.

Recovery nutrition has become crucial to his experiment. Matt has developed a precise post-race protocol combining protein, creatine, and exogenous ketones. “If I’m going to be able to do this and run well back-to-back, I’m going to need to completely maximise the recovery after every marathon,” he says. “Just having protein after training, which is what I would normally do, is probably the most basic approach you could take.” He’s found the combination of all three supplements significantly aids his recovery.

Looking ahead, he has mapped out most of 2025: Osaka in February (pending visa approval – Matt is tensely waiting on a Green Card that for months the system has been saying is imminent, and he can’t leave the States until it’s sorted), the McKirdy Micro Marathon in March, Ballarat in April (same deal – Green Card dependent), and tentative plans through to December. The schedule includes ambitious doubles, like racing Grandma’s Marathon and Gold Coast Marathon just two weeks apart in June and July.

While he knows injury or fatigue could derail the experiment at any time, he’s optimistic about his potential to improve. “I’ll do it for as long as I can,” he says, “but if by July or August I’m running 2:23, 2:24 and it feels really hard, and that’s happened multiple times in a row, then I’ll have to reassess.” His ultimate goal isn’t just personal achievement. “I want to share that you can approach the marathon in a different way,” Matt explains.

“I don’t think I have any special talent for this. I think many people could do this. And so I want to show people that you can race marathons far more frequently if you want to. Yeah, there’s a risk; there always will be a risk, but there’s a risk of injury doing anything when it comes to the marathon.” “But, setting injury aside for a minute, you don’t have to race twice a year. If you want to, you can race four, five, six, seven, eight times and still do well.”

The caveat? You need the base. Matt warns against anyone attempting this without at least 10 marathons under their belt and a decade of consistent running at 60–70 kilometres (37.3–43.5 miles) per week minimum. For those with the foundation, though, Matt is showing there might be more than one way to chase your potential over 42.2 kilometres.

He believes he can run 2:15 – though he laughs that he once thought 2:28 was his ceiling. “In my mind, I’m not going to stop until I run 2:15,” he says. “And at that point, if I feel like that’s just as fast as I can possibly go, then I’ll have to reassess what the next goal is.”

Until then, month by month, race by race, Matt Fox is giving the rest of us an exciting science experiment to follow.