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Microbe may boost marathoners’ performance

By studying the stool samples of Boston Marathoners, ultramarathoners, and rowers, a team of researchers has found that these elite endurance athletes harbor large blooms of an intestinal microbe that seems to convert some of the lactate produced by their muscles into a beneficial compound. When the researchers seeded the digestive systems of mice with the bacteria found in these athletes, from a genus called Veillonella, the mice were able to run longer than a control group dosed with bacteria that don’t metabolize lactate. This hints that what Veillonella does with lactate—a by-product of exercise—might enhance performance (Nat. Med. 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41591-019-0485-4). “This is really a big step forward,” says Orla O’Sullivan, a researcher at University College Cork who has studied the microbiome of rugby players. Athletes have a more diverse gut microbiome than the rest of us, she says, but much of what has been reported before was correlation—previous