WSJ - The Mental Tricks of Athletic Endurance
For the Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdič, the
unlikely key to Olympic glory was misdiagnosis. While warming up for her first
race at the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, Ms. Majdič skidded off an icy
corner and fell more than 10 feet into a rocky creek bed. She dragged herself
to an on-site medical tent for an ultrasound. “I don’t know,” the doctor said,
“but it looks like everything is OK.”
Sure, she was in excruciating pain that made
her shriek every time she exhaled. But the pain, she believed, was just in her
head. As long as nothing was broken, her decision was clear. “Can I go?” she
asked. The doctor said yes.
Later that evening, after gritting her teeth
through a qualifying race, a quarterfinal, a semifinal and a final where she
fought to an improbable bronze medal in the classic sprint, she finally went to
the hospital—where she was diagnosed, correctly this time, with four broken
ribs. The stabbing pain she’d felt during the semifinal? That was one of the
broken ribs puncturing her lung, which then collapsed. She missed the rest of
the Games and was in the hospital for nearly a week.
Such tales are a staple of
Olympic lore, a stirring reminder of the heights to which athletes can rise
with a medal on the line. In the coming weeks, as the world’s fleetest and
toughest converge on South Korea for this year’s Winter Games, we will
undoubtedly see more extraordinary feats of endurance. But how, exactly, do the
athletes do it? Is it just a matter of physical prowess and training, or is
there something else going on in these superhuman exertions?
Answers are
starting to emerge from a remarkable new body of research on human performance,
and the findings have lessons not just for Olympians but for everyone else,
too. All of us, it turns out, are capable of pushing back the physical and
psychological limits that we encounter at the gym, on the trails and in our
sporting adventures. The feeling that you can go no further is just that—a feeling.
And feelings can be changed.
Early studies of endurance focused, naturally, on
the body. Physiologists pieced together an impressively detailed picture of the
factors that—in theory—dictate our ultimate capacity. “Our bodies are machines
whose energy expenditures may be closely measured,” wrote the pioneering (and
Nobel Prize-winning) sports scientist A.V. Hill in 1926. As the mysteries of
muscle contraction and metabolism were decoded, endurance began to seem like a
question of plumbing—whose heart could deliver the most oxygen-rich blood
through the widest vessels to the biggest muscles.
There was one big problem
with this approach: It couldn’t predict who would win an athletic contest. No
matter how accurately you measure physiological parameters like oxygen
delivery, you’d be a fool to use that data to bet on the outcome of, say, a
marathon. Clearly, something was missing from the “human machine” picture of
athletic limits.
Hill and other early researchers soon realized that psychology
must play a key role. In 1961, a pair of scientists at George Williams College
in Chicago showed that they could boost the maximum strength of weightlifting
volunteers by 7.4% if an experimenter sneaked up behind the subject and fired a
.22-caliber starter’s pistol just before the lift. It was among the first (and
most bizarre) attempts to demonstrate that the limits we perceive as physical
and absolute are often negotiable and mediated by the brain.
The precise nature
of the mind-muscle connection remains hotly disputed today, but most
researchers accept the essential point: that the physical manifestations of
fatigue —racing heart, elevated core temperature, a rising tide of metabolites
like lactate in the blood—merely serve as sources of information for the brain,
rather than direct limits on our ability to continue.
Starting in the late
1990s, the South African author and fitness researcher Tim Noakes advanced the
view that our brains are wired for self-preservation. If you push hard enough
to endanger your health—by overheating your core or compromising your brain’s
oxygen supply, say—your brain will function as a protective “central governor,”
automatically weakening the nerve signals driving your muscles. The feedback
loop gives rise to the sensation of fatigue and signals you to slow down.
An
alternate view proposed a decade later by Samuele Marcora, an exercise
scientist at the University of Kent’s Endurance Research Group, posits that our
limits are defined by the balance between motivation and perceived effort. We
don’t stop because our fatigued muscles are incapable of continuing, in this
view, but because the effort required to continue is greater than we’re willing
to exert.
Whatever the mechanism, both camps agree that the subjective
perception of effort is a sort of master controller—which means, in practical
terms, that if you change your perception of a task’s difficulty, you can
change your actual results.
There are plenty of examples of this phenomenon. In
a 2014 experiment described in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,
researchers led by Dr. Marcora showed cyclists images of smiling faces on a
screen in imperceptible 16-millisecond flashes. The exposure boosted cycling
performance by 12% over the level recorded with frowning faces projected in the
same way. The sight of a smile didn’t lower the subjects’ heart rates or
lactate levels, according to Dr. Marcora. Instead, it subtly altered how their
brains interpreted those signals, evoking feelings of ease that bled into their
perception of how hard they were pedaling.
Slovenia's Petra Majdič skied during
the women's individual sprint classic cross-country at the Vancouver 2010
Winter Olympics despite having broken ribs—and won a bronze. Right, a team official
helped her to the podium. Eliud Kipchoge, the Olympic marathon champion from
Kenya, has sought to self administer the same effect. Mr. Kipchoge has come the
closest to breaking the 2-hour barrier in a marathon, missing by just 26
seconds (in a race in Italy last year that doesn’t count in official records).
He deliberately smiled broadly every mile or so during the final stretch. “When
you smile and you’re happy,” he later explained to reporters, “you can trigger
the mind to feel your legs.”
A technique called transcranial direct-current
stimulation, or tDCS, which involves trickling a weak electric current between
two electrodes on the scalp, also can alter the relationship between physical
stress in the body and effort perceived by the brain. The current changes the
excitability of affected neurons, making them slightly easier to trigger. This
allows you to maintain a given level of exercise with weaker brain signals,
which translates into a lower sense of effort. A study published this month in
the journal Brain Stimulation showed a 23.5% increase in the time to exhaustion
in cycling after 10 minutes of brain stimulation.
Such eye-popping outcomes
have turned heads in the elite sports world. The U.S. Olympic ski and snowboard
team reported a 13% boost in propulsive force and an 11% boost in jump
smoothness when their ski jumpers tested headphones delivering tDCS effects.
Brothers Bryan and Taylor Fletcher, who lead the U.S. Nordic combined (ski
jumping and cross-country skiing) contingent heading to Pyeongchang, have been
particularly eager adopters.
The technique is perfectly legal according to
current Olympic and international sporting rules and would be difficult to
regulate anyway, since its use is impossible to detect. Still, some scientists
in the field have raised questions about the ethics of brain stimulation in athletes,
calling for further research on its long-term safety.
Not everyone wants to
wire up their brains for mild shocks, of course, but that’s hardly necessary to
adjust your relationship with your apparent physical limits. There are simpler
techniques. The crucial first step in all of them is to accept the idea that
your perceived capacity for endurance doesn’t always correspond to any
particular physiological reality.
For me, that happened when I was an aspiring
collegiate distance runner more than 20 years ago. At a low-key 1,500-meter
race in Quebec, the timekeeper, struggling to translate from French to English
on the fly, called out wildly misleading midrace split times to me. Convinced
that I was running faster than ever before without trying harder, I was
unshackled from my pre-race expectations and self-limitations. I improved my
previous best time by nine seconds in a four-minute race, an unprecedented leap
for me, after being stuck at the same level for four years.
Such deceptions
work in the lab, too. Cyclists in a heat chamber can maintain a faster pace if
the thermometer is rigged to show a falsely low temperature, according to a
2012 study in the European Journal of Applied Physiology by researchers at the
University of Bedfordshire. Olympic runners, cyclists and triathletes now
commonly swish a sports drink in their mouths and then spit it out in the late
stages of races, a tactic tested in a 2004 University of Birmingham study in
the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. It boosts
performance by tricking the brain into thinking that fuel is on the way, even
when the stomach can’t tolerate any more neon drinks. Olympic marathon champion
Eliud Kipchoge,top center, celebrated after a race, May 6, 2017.
Former Boston
Marathon champion Amby Burfoot once described the “absolute,
nodoubt-in-the-world best running workout you can do” as a series of all-out
mile repeats where, after you think you’re finished, your coach tells you to do
one more at the same pace. The surprise? You can. Most of us don’t have
sadistic coaches, or indeed any coach at all, but this general approach—setting
a tough but achievable finish line for yourself, and then raising your sights
once you reach it—is a powerful way of pushing beyond what seems initially
feasible.
There are limits to the power of deception, though. In a French study
published last year in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise,
cyclists raced against a virtual-reality avatar of their previous best performance.
When the avatar was secretly sped up by 2%, the cyclists managed to go 2%
faster, but when the avatars accelerated by 5%, the benefits disappeared. The
mind can deliver incremental gains, not quantum leaps.
Perhaps the most
powerful and widely applicable technique for changing how your brain interprets
incoming signals is to train yourself with motivational self-talk. Whether
you’re conscious of it or not, you have an internal monologue running through
your head during difficult tasks, and it has a measurable impact on how
effortful you perceive those tasks to be. It is possible to channel that
monologue in productive ways.
Many athletes consider such techniques a little
hokey. My college track teammates and I laughed our way through the mandatory
self-talk training we received from a well- meaning sports psychologist,
figuring that if we honed our muscles and our maximum oxygen uptake
sufficiently, we wouldn’t need to worry about such flimflammery.
That’s now one
of my greatest competitive regrets, given the mounting evidence of self-talk’s
physiological impact. A 2016 study by Stephen Cheung, an environmental
physiologist and avid cyclocross competitor at Brock University in Canada, gave
cyclists two weeks of self-talk training before an all-out ride in a heat
chamber at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Replacing negative thoughts like “I’m
boiling” with motivational statements such as “Keep pushing, you’re doing well”
boosted their time to exhaustion from eight minutes to over 11 minutes. Most
tellingly, it allowed them to push their core temperatures half a degree
higher, on average, before quitting.
In that slender half degree is the margin
between perceived and actual limits—and, perhaps, between silver and gold in
competition. Consider the closest (and wildest) finish at the last Winter
Olympics in Sochi, a dead heat between Norway’s Emil Hegle Svendsen and
France’s Martin Fourcade in the 15-kilometer biathlon. Both men notched
identical times of 42 minutes, 29.1 seconds—but what’s most remarkable is the
frantic sprint that preceded this finish. If limits were a simple reflection of
spent muscle fibers and a maxed-out heart, you’d expect the final stretch of a
long and grueling race to be the slowest. Instead, it’s often the fastest.
This
isn’t simply a question of pacing errors or cat-and-mouse racing tactics. A
2006 analysis by South African scientist Ross Tucker analyzed the pacing
patterns of every men’s world record in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter run in the
modern era. Of the 66 races dating back the 1920s, the last kilometer was
either the fastest or second-fastest in every case but one. The sight of the
finish line—and the knowledge that you can soon stop—automatically reframes
your brain’s interpretation of your body’s signals, and you discover that
you’re not quite out of juice after all. None of this means that limits are
“all in your head,” or that you can simply choose to ignore your brain’s
diktats. But neither are those limits carved in stone. For the medal hopefuls
in Pyeongchang, as for the rest of us, that’s a truly empowering idea. ‘The
mind can deliver incremental gains, not quantum leaps. ’ Emil Hegle Svendsen of
Norway and Martin Fourcade of France in the 15-kilometer biathlon atthe Sochi
2014 Winter Olympics.
What drove Petra Majdič onward during that long, painful
day of competition in Vancouver? “I thought that Slovenians need some
message—that it’s possible,” she told herself. “At the end of that path, the
goal will be reachable. And you will have suffered to do it, but it doesn’t
matter. You can do better.” —This essay is adapted from Mr. Hutchinson’s new
book, “Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human
Performance,” which will be published by William Morrow on Feb. 6.
Comments
But there is a potential downside to using the mind to drive the body to its extreme limits, as the first three paragraphs of this WSJ article makes clear. In our own sport or IM triathlon, there are the cases in the last century of Julie Anne White, and Chris Legh, who both were racing at the pro pointy end in Kona, and each ended up driving so hard they pulled enough blood away from their large intestine to their muscles that they killed parts of the bowel, requiring surgery to remove some of the colon. (Legh of course went on to continue racing, winning multiple IM titles, and eventually retiring due to a different problem with his heart.) Then in the first decade of this century, two-time winner Tim DeBoom dropped out on the run after "gritting through" an agonizing kidney stone, probably from dehydration, while multiple IM winner Lisa Bentley did a race in Kona with a ruptured appendix.
While not a pro-level racer, I've had my own success by driving myself beyond what I thought possible. I have also used that "skill" to create gaps in my training plans by working so hard I created injuries. The harder we work, and the older we get, the higher the risk, it seems. To paraphrase this song from Little Feat 45 years ago, don't let your mind "make a promise that your body can't fill" (also, not the line in here: "With the right medication, we won't be lazy", also part of the risk):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0716GZX33/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title
I'm half way through. Well written summary so far of what we know about how to measure an endurance athlete's capabilities. Second half has six chapters with (presumably) advice on how to deal with these limiters: Pain, Muscle, Oxygen, Heat, Thirst, Fuel. Third half is: Training the Brain, Zapping the Brain, Belief.
So far, I'm satisfied with my purchase for my Kindle.