Marathoners vo2 max is pretty irrelevent. Certainly not relevent in training. It is already not very useful for cycling, and marathoners do not red line multiple times with attacks.
Running economy is much more related to performance, as the paper suggests. Training does not change vo2 in any meaningful way[/]. Altitude can, and so does weight loss and gain. EPO does as well. I don't know how much to expect with each. I have some teammates numbers for altitude, but everyone is different.
Thanks for the in depth review. It doesnt sound useful for anything one way or the other.