Creatine for Runners: Does It Help with Speed or Endurance?

Almost universally, the first opportunity that humans have to display their fitness and athletic potential occurs as soon as they develop the capacity to run. Long before the other attributes required to play specialized sports emerge, like general quickness, hand-eye-coordination, agility, strength, and flexibility, running from place to place creates an opportunity to compete using the simple measure of who can cover a distance in the shortest time.

It just so happens that running also ranks as one of the most effective ways to preserve cardiovascular health, burn calories, and maintain movement efficiency long after playing sports is no longer a priority. Long into adulthood, millions of people rely on running as an essential tool for improving the quality of their lives. 

With creatine now nearly universal in its availability, and with a greater percentage of fitness-minded people having a reasonable understanding of what it does, use of the supplement by everyday runners still sits at less than 50 percent. This is unfortunate, because the benefits of creatine are plentiful for runners, regardless of their training styles or races of choice.

Therefore, if you happen to run for competition, fitness, or both,  it’s important that you comprehend precisely how creatine engages with your body, and how you can personally benefit from its use.

What is creatine?

As prized and prioritized as creatine presently is, it is simply a combination of the three amino acids glycine, arginine, and S-adenosyl methionine, which aren’t particularly hard to come by. All three of these amino acids are easily attainable through ordinary foods.

Much of the value of creatine is derived from its attributes that are only unlocked when it is consumed in massive quantities. For this reason, supplemental creatine becomes essential for the overwhelming majority of people who lack the time and energy to eat several pounds of beef every day to acquire a standard 5 gram ration of creatine.

Once creatine enters your body, it is stored in your skeletal muscle and organs as creatine phosphate, where it lies in reserve as an energy source. When taken in supplemental quantities of 3-5 grams daily, creatine saturates your muscle tissue, thereby augmenting several processes that become essentially supercharged thanks to the abundant reservoir of energy they are now capable of tapping into.

How do creatine supplements work?

When you need quick bursts of power during a run, your body relies on the ATP-phosphocreatine system. This operating time of this system typically lasts less than 15 seconds during all-out effort. 

To use an example from a precise racing scenario that many runners often find themselves in, creatine supplementation can give you an extra second or two of peak speed and power beyond what your competitors are able to muster. In a race where hundredths of a second matters, that small extension can be the difference between victory, or missing the podium completely.

The same principle applies to any of your training sessions that require you to display your speed. Creatine enhances muscle contraction force, letting you generate more power and maintain harder leg drive for longer periods of time.  Even in less explosive runs, creatine acts as a buffer between energy systems. By doing this, it improves your ability to handle repeated changes in pace, helping you stay strong and recover quicker between efforts.

Creatine dosage guidance 

While the guidance for creatine intake was initially established with resistance training workouts in mind, the scientific basis for determining that guidance is based on what is necessary to saturate your skeletal muscle with sufficient creatine to unlock its foremost benefits, regardless of your purpose for taking creatine.

Even if you only intend to run, doses in the range of 3-5 grams of creatine per day are adequate to supply you with all of the creatine you need to add value to your runs, whether you’re simply training, or making your final preparations to race.

Not just for bodybuilders

When discussions are had about creatine, and how it grows, strengthens, and repairs muscle tissue, its effects on specific measures of performance often fly beneath the radar. Sure, it’s nice to have a body that appears fit, aesthetic, and attractive, but a body that is functional often acquires all of the other benefits as byproducts of training for optimal movement efficiency. 

When it comes to running, this is certainly the case. Yes, runners have historically benefitted, and continue to benefit from including resistance training alongside their essential running workouts, as resistance training has emerged as an essential tool for improving running economy. (1) However, even in instances where no strength training protocols have been added, creatine supplementation has improved the performances of runners in several ways.

Sprinting and Interval training 

Whether you’re going to be sprinting just once, or a series of times, creatine will improve your all-out speed potential, and your capacity to quickly replicate that level of peak sprinting output. In multiple studies, creatine has conclusively lowered athletes’ sprint times while also helping them to maintain the quality of their performances over multiple all-out efforts.

Practically speaking, this is accomplished by creatine’s ability to improve and sustain mean power over the course of multiple sprints. (2) (3) On top of this, creatine also improved biomechanical impact control specifically in running-based HIIT sessions, indicating that creatine can also help runners to maintain the functional integrity of their muscles over the prolonged hard impacts with the ground that occur during sprint training. (4)

Long-distance endurance 

Amongst runners, creatine’s benefits are often underrated, particularly because the overwhelming majority of competitive runners compete in long-distance events, like 5Ks, half-marathons, and full marathons. 

Because creatine does not directly benefit aerobic capacity, it is widely believed that it provides no benefits to long-distance runners aside from aiding muscle recovery. In actuality, creatine’s ability to enhance anaerobic fitness and accelerate recovery from bursts of energy can be used as a tool within a broader strategy to lower race times during distance events. (5)

In essence, distance runners who supplement with creatine develop a capacity that other runners don’t, which is the ability to start races faster to surge ahead, the strength to use bursts of energy to separate themselves from the pack, and the ability to explode for the finish line and end races with a flourish.

Recovery improvements 

If you’re a consistent runner, your body takes a beating. Sure, this stems from the physical exertion required to cover long distances while relying only on the power of your own two feet, but you’ll also be forced to contend with the discomfort caused to your body by repeated foot strikes against the dirt, treadmill, or the pavement.

Even when taken before and after races of extremely long distances, creatine was able to reduce the presence of muscle-damage markers in tested runners by anywhere from 19 percent (creatine kinase) to nearly 61 percent (prostaglandin E2). (6) In other studies, creatine contributed to reduced muscle soreness and general fatigue in the days following intense training through running. (2)

Body weight and body composition improvements 

Body composition is a huge factor in running, especially in light of the various debates about what an optimal body looks like for different types of runners. For example, there are often major tradeoffs between an athlete’s weight, and the amount of force they can apply against the ground to propel that weight forward. 

In essence, it isn’t necessarily better in an absolute sense to have a light body or a strong body; you want a body that has the optimal amount of muscle for driving the body across the desired distance in the shortest amount of time. 

While the amount of muscle that is optimal for running is heavily dependent on the distance being discussed, as the weight of the muscles becomes detrimental as the length of the run continues, a low body fat percentage is essential for optimizing body efficiency. 

In essence, when all other factors remain equal, creatine intake increases functional body mass while reducing unnecessary body fat. (7) Therefore, in a majority of cases, supplementation with creatine will make runners more efficient at covering their preferred distances at their body weight if all other lifestyle and nutrition factors remain unchanged.

Note on nutritional supplements for runners

While creatine is a highly effective supplement for improving running performance, it is just one of several nutrients that can be advantageous for runners to consume before, during, and after training sessions. Rather than viewing this as an either-or scenario, you should consider taking these nutrients alongside creatine, not only to accelerate your progress, but to ensure your body’s continued productivity, particularly during long training sessions.

These added nutrients include water mixed with hydration supplements loaded with electrolytes for hydration support and basic preservation, cyclic dextrin for extended energy during training, and protein for optimal muscle repair and recovery during the periods in between training sessions.

Creatine helps you stay in the running

Running is a highly beneficial form of exercising that is also therapeutic and enjoyable, but the grind of daily runs can cause running to become physically harmful and too painful to take pleasure in. Fortunately, creatine supplementation is one of the healthiest ways to boost the quality of your running workouts, making it easier to perform at your best during your training runs, and aiding your recovery so that you can continue bettering your body through the activity that you love.

Sources

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2. Wax B, Kerksick CM, Jagim AR, Mayo JJ, Lyons BC, Kreider RB. Creatine for Exercise and Sports Performance, with Recovery Considerations for Healthy Populations. Nutrients. 2021 Jun 2;13(6):1915. doi: 10.3390/nu13061915. PMID: 34199588; PMCID: PMC8228369.

3. Fukuda DH, Smith AE, Kendall KL, Dwyer TR, Kerksick CM, Beck TW, Cramer JT, Stout JR. The effects of creatine loading and gender on anaerobic running capacity. J Strength Cond Res. 2010 Jul;24(7):1826-33. doi: 10.1519/JSC.0b013e3181e06d0e. PMID: 20543729.

4. da Silva Azevedo AP, Michelone Acquesta F, Lancha AH Jr, Bertuzzi R, Poortmans JR, Amadio AC, Cerca Serrão J. Creatine supplementation can improve impact control in high-intensity interval training. Nutrition. 2019 May;61:99-104. doi: 10.1016/j.nut.2018.09.020. Epub 2018 Oct 9. PMID: 30708260.

5. Forbes SC, Candow DG, Neto JHF, Kennedy MD, Forbes JL, Machado M, Bustillo E, Gomez-Lopez J, Zapata A, Antonio J. Creatine supplementation and endurance performance: surges and sprints to win the race. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2023 Dec;20(1):2204071. doi: 10.1080/15502783.2023.2204071. PMID: 37096381; PMCID: PMC10132248.

6. Santos RV, Bassit RA, Caperuto EC, Costa Rosa LF. The effect of creatine supplementation upon inflammatory and muscle soreness markers after a 30km race. Life Sci. 2004 Sep 3;75(16):1917-24. doi: 10.1016/j.lfs.2003.11.036. PMID: 15306159.

7. Pashayee-Khamene F, Heidari Z, Asbaghi O, Ashtary-Larky D, Goudarzi K, Forbes SC, Candow DG, Bagheri R, Ghanavati M, Dutheil F. Creatine supplementation protocols with or without training interventions on body composition: a GRADE-assessed systematic review and dose-response meta-analysis. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2024 Dec;21(1):2380058. doi: 10.1080/15502783.2024.2380058. Epub 2024 Jul 23. PMID: 39042054; PMCID: PMC11268231.