Human Limits

For those of you who think I am obsessed with old school running history you are mostly right, I am interested in this stuff.  However, I am trying to use these stories and video clips to frame what is happening in London in specific and in the current distance running scene more generally.

That having been said, will London 2012 be an echo of Tokyo 1964?  In 1964 Billy Mills won the 10,000m and in a much lesser know race Bob Schul won the 5,000m and Bill Dellinger (later the track coach at Oregon) got the bronze.   The U.S. also had top five finishers in the 800, 1500, and 3000m steeplechase.  So, on the men’s side, the U.S. has done well so far in London and good places in the 5000m and marathon over the weekend make it possible for the overall results to be close to those seen in Tokyo.

The clip below is of the finish of the race and is a who’s who of distance running in the middle 1960s.  The race includes Ron Clarke, Kip Keino and a couple of other all-time greats.  Has there ever been a stronger field?

The Tokyo 5000m race is also important as a history lesson about training philosophies.  Schul who finished first was almost exclusively interval trained.  By this I mean interval training almost every day, twice per day.  The books are out of print, but information about his workouts can be found in the terrific “How They Train” books by Fred Wilt and also on Schul’s webpage.   Wilt’s books are a gold mine.

Second was Harald Norpoth of Germany who was an early disciple of what came to be known as high mileage long slow distance or LSD style training.  Third was Dellinger who used a mixed approach, that included continuous runs, intervals and hill running.  Of the three what Dellinger did is most similar to what a majority of elite runners do now.  So, the history of modern training philosophies is largely captured on the medal stand in Tokyo.

This brings me back to Rupp and the 2012 5000m.  He has the ninth fastest personal best in the field at just under 12:59.   A number of the other runners have broken 12:50.  However if you plug Rupp’s 26:48 personal best 10,000m into an equation that predicts times in other events you get a predicted best of 12:51, so Rupp starts the race in a competitive position.   He also has a strong finishing kick, his confidence should be high, and usually Olympic finals start slowly.

Whoever wins, let’s hope it is a race for the ages like 1964.

The 1500m (metric mile) final for men was held last night and won by Taoufik Makhloufi of Algeria in a time of 3:34.08   Leonel Monzano of the US was second and Matthew Centrowitz, also from the U.S. was fourth.  A couple of days ago I asked if Galen Rupp’s silver in the 10,000m was a start of something for U.S. distance running or a one off event.  It is way too soon to tell, but perhaps there is cause for optimism.

Makhloufi’s time was about 8 seconds off the world record (3:26).  By Olympic Standards it was typical of recent Olympic 1500m finals.  These are almost always relatively tactical affairs with a slow first couple of laps while the kickers wait for the last lap or so to make a move. Since 1988 the winning time has been between ranged from 6-11seconds slower than the world record.

No world record for the 1500m has been set at the Olympics since 1960 when the great Australian Herb Elliot did it with a 3:35:6.  Elliott, who was from Perth, Western Australia, never lost a race as an adult and unlike many of his competitors he focused on what might be called naturalistic training vs. the intensive interval training that was popular at the time.

Among other things he was doing a lot of barefoot running in the late 1950s.  He was also coached by the unorthodox Percy Cerutty who advocated all sorts of things including a philosophical approach toward running and training as a form of self expression.  I am attaching a link to an interview with Elliott about Cerutty and the clip below is from a French newsreel on his techniques.  Thanks go to Yvonne Hubmayr, who is also a native of Perth for sending me these links.

Click here to view video.

Some would argue that Elliott was so talented the type of training he did probably did not matter as long as he did enough of something.  I would argue that the real message is that we might all benefit from his “no-tech” approach.   This is true not only in our exercise and training programs but for life in general.  We are surrounded by technology is it making us more or less human?

The next clip of Elliott is by Bud Greenspan.   Watching Elliott lay it all on the line raises the question of what the rest of us are waiting for.

Click here to view video.

After yesterday’s long post on the East Africans, I want to catch up on a couple of things.

The home field advantage and the medal count.

I received a comment on the home field advantage and the impressive performance of U.K. athletes from Amby Burfoot of Runner’s World fame.  Amby is also interested in what the Galen Rupp silver in the 10,000m means for U.S. distance running.  Here is a link to Amby’s outstanding post on this topic.

About the home field advantage, he noted that the games are awarded years in advance and that as a result countries invest in better facilities and preparation.  Plus getting the games is a big motivator for young athletes.  Good points all.   One example is the case of Australia, a country that generally ranks highly in the per capita count.  They got a big bump in 2000 at Sydney but their commitment started decades earlier.  This link is to the history of the Australian Institute of Sport which took off after a poor showing by Australia in 1976.  It describes the comprehensive strategy used “down under” to increase the medal count.  Another strategy is to focus on sports where the medal count return on investment can be high.   The U.K has done this in cycling.

Why is the long jump “getting worse”?

The Olympic record in the long jump dates to 1968 when Bob Beamon jumped 8.9m and broke the world record by 55cm (nearly 2 ft).   However, as the wikicommons graph below shows, there have been big increments in the record before followed by periods of stagnation.  Jesse Owens set a record in 1935 that lasted 25 years and Beamon’s mark stood until the early 1990s when the current record was set by Mike Powell.  The women’s mark (like a lot of women’s records) dates from the 1980s.

If graph does not appear, click here.

The last really consistent great jumper was Carl Lewis who at age 35 won his 4^th gold medal in Atlanta.   There is also an urban legend about a 30 foot jump by Lewis in Indianapolis in the early 1980s, but a bad call was made and the jump ruled a foul.

I don’t have an explanation for why long jumping has stalled out, but in the case of both Owens and Lewis they were also great sprinters.  Perhaps in the era of big money track and field those with the talent to compete in the sprints stick with the sprints, thus limiting the talent pool in the less glamorous long jump.  The other obvious explanation, at least in the U.S., is that kids who can jump tend to focus on basketball.

Katie Ledecky vs. Ye Shiwen.

At least one media outlet in the U.K. questioned the big drops in time Katie Ledecky made on her way to gold in the 800m freestyle, and played the doping card.   The suspicions voiced in the U.S. swimming community about 16 year old Ye Shiwen’s world record swim in the 400m IM and also raised the issue of a double standard and even racism.   Was Ye singled out?  In both cases we should all remember that big drops are not unusual for swimmers in this age group.   The Chinese should also remember their history of organized doping in swimming and understand that it was not so much Ye Shiwen’s overall time as it was the impressive speed of her last 100m that raised eyebrows.

What I am wondering about.

Jamaica has done well in the sprints since 1948, and other Caribbean countries have also had medalists.  However, this year the Caribbean sprinters seem to be more competitive than ever and from more of the islands than ever.   In the next couple of Olympics will we see a tidal wave of islanders?  When we look back in four or eight or twelve years will we say that Bolt turned on the whole region?

Way to go Mo and Galen!

On Saturday, Mo Farah of Great Britain and Galen Rupp of the U.S. broke the East African monopoly on the 10,000m by winning gold and silver respectively.  Their performances raise the general question of “who will beat the Kenyans?”  The short answer to this is the Ethiopians who have shared in this dominance since both countries emerged as distance running powers in the 1960s.  But is what happened in London the start of something new?

Farah was born in Somalia and immigrated to the U.K. as a child, so I want to focus on Rupp who is white kid from Oregon and the first U.S. athlete to medal in the 10,000m since Billy Mills in 1964.  Rupp is also a product of the NIKE sponsored “Oregon Project” which seeks to develop U.S. talent in distance running to compete with the East Africans.  Directed by Alberto Salazar, the idea is to nurture selected people in a controlled and scientific way to combat the hordes of East Africans who seek to use running as a means of very basic economic advancement.

This has happened before.

The first thing that needs to be appreciated is that since reliable world records started to be kept in the early 1900s, there have been three periods of regional dominance in distance running.   A good example is seen in the world record progression for the 10,000m for men.  It shows that runners from Finland held every world record from 1912-1944.  From 1949-1962, the Eastern Europeans held 9 of 10 records.  Since 1977, East Africans are 11 for 14.  Currently runners from Kenya and Ethiopia dominate the list of 25 fastest times for the event and have won the vast majority of Olympic medals in the 10,000m since 1968.

It is hard to compare eras for a number of reasons, but the old days were dominated by archaic amateur rules, limited high quality competition, and later the Cold War.  However, I want everyone to realize that there is nothing new about regional dominance in selected track and field events.

Is there anything “special” about the East Africans?

To answer this question we need to take a quick look into the physiology of what makes an elite distance runner.   There are three factors critical for success, they include:

1. VO₂ max, or maximal oxygen uptake.  This is essentially how big the engine is.
2. The so-called lactate threshold.  This sets what might be called a physiological “red-line”.
3. Running economy or efficiency.  How much oxygen is used to go how fast?

The idea is that VO₂ max sets an upper limit and the fraction of VO₂ max that can be sustained in competition is related to the lactate threshold.  If you know these two values they tell you how much energy a given runner can use for over a given period of time.  If you know running economy you can make a pretty good guess of the speed that can be generated with that energy.   In a couple of scientific papers, my colleagues and I have explored these concepts in detail.  We have focused on the marathon, but the principles also apply to the 10,000m.

So, do the East Africans have exceptional values for any of these factors?  A careful review of the scientific studies shows that their values are nothing special for elite distance runners.  However, many do have outstanding values for running economy, but these values are not better than those seen in the most efficient whites.  Also, no genetic factors have been identified to explain their success.

There is an important caveat here.  A time of 26:40 for 10,000m is 1600 seconds.  A one percent margin would be 16 seconds, or about 100m on the track in a real competition, which would equal a big win.  One percent is also within in the limits of the measurements we can make in the lab that are related to real performance in real competitions.  So, it is possible to determine who is world class in the lab, but very difficult to slice it any thinner than that.

If the East Africans have something special it is likely due to hard and active lives at high altitude from an early age.  A typical story is the one I heard from my college teammate Harrison Koroso from Kenya.  He described, beginning at age 8, running two miles to school, coming home for lunch, running back, and playing soccer for fun; all of this at 7-8,000 feet.   The highlands of Kenya are also likely to be pretty free of video games and carpools to play dates.

My main conclusion is that there is way more to the East African success than some physiological secret sauce.  In fact there is no physiological secret sauce.   I did not go into it here, but there are no secret innovative training techniques either.  Top runners have been training essentially as “hard as you can” since the 1950s or early 1960s.

Plenty of talent in the U.S.?

I also want to argue that there is in fact plenty of talent in the U.S.  If you look at the all time U.S. high school lists they are pretty impressive.  What is also impressive is the number of people on these lists that either faded and never became world class, or became world class but for whatever reason never medaled in Olympic competition.   The video clip at the end of the post is of Jim Ryun setting a world record for the mile in 1967 when he was 20 years old.  His 3:51:1 on a dirt track would be perhaps 6-7 seconds faster on a synthetic track and close to the current world record.  He also ran this fast with no pace maker or rabbit.

Ryun did medal; he got silver in the 1968 games at Mexico City, which is about 7,000 feet high.  He was coming back from mononucleosis and defeated by Kip Keino of Kenya.  Keino ran an Olympic record 3:34.91, a remarkable time at high altitude.  Ryun was tripped in 1972 and failed to advance and his career was over at 25.  Rupp is 26, how would Ryun have faired in the corporate sponsored environment Rupp has?

When you get past the top 10 lists, most people connected to the running subculture in the U.S. know stories about the kid who ran a 4:15 mile in high school with minimal training and never pursued it much further.   We have also heard stories about the kid who was good but not great in high school and blossomed later.  If this talent were harvested and nurtured in the way the Rupp’s has been, what would be the result?

My conclusion here is that there is more than enough talent in the U.S., some of it actually gets identified but what happens after high school is a crapshoot.  There are about 120 million people living in Ethiopia and Kenya combined and the good runners come from selected ethnic subgroups.  With more than 300 million people, there has to be sufficient talent in the U.S. to challenge the East Africans.

Return on investment thinking and who does what.

Per capita income in Kenya is about $800 per year and about $400 per year in Ethiopia according to the World Bank.  Become a good runner, place highly in a few major races and you can feed yourself and extended family for a long time.  If you become truly elite, you are wealthy.   You don’t have to have a Ph.D. in behavioral economics to understand that kind of motivation in poor societies.  If every kid with a shred of talent in the distance running areas of East Africa goes for it, what emerges from the competitive crucible is sure to be exceptional.

What would the equivalent of a $10,000 purse at a midlevel race be in western terms?  How many kids would keep running if the there was a distance running circuit with prize money on the order of that seen in the professional golf?  I don’t know but I bet it would be plenty.

A flip side of the coin is the recent example is Lukas Verzbicas, who is on several of the top 10 lists for U.S. high school runners.  He is also superb at the triathlon and has more or less opted out of running (he had a scholarship at the U of Oregon, a perennial power) to focus on the triathlon.   The speculation is the path to the top is less competitive in the triathlon and fame and glory (and perhaps money) more certain.

Summary

In this post I have argued that the primary factors responsible for East African dominance in distance running are cultural and economic.  The evidence for an explanation based on physiology, training, or genetics is pretty thin.  Is Rupp a one off, or will his impressive performance be catalytic like Greg LeMond’s victories in the Tour de France were?  LeMond won the Tour in 1986.  He came back from a life threatening hunting accident to win again in the 1989 and 1990.    His victories and courage broke the myth of European superiority in cycling and opened the way for competitors from all over the world.

I was on KARE-11 on Saturday morning sharing thoughts on women in the Olympics and tips for the general public to get started on their own athletic endeavors.  Click here to see the live segment.

I had an e-mail exchange with Bill Katovsky yesterday that raised a couple of interesting questions about things that have happened at the Olympics over the last couple of days.   Bill has written a number fitness and training oriented books, most recently one on minimalist footwear and injury prevention.  Here is a brief summary of two questions from Bill.

1)  Great Britain seems to be doing very well the last couple of days in the medals count.  Is there a home field advantage?

When I looked this morning the Brits stood third after the US and China who were tied for first.  There is an excellent graphic from 2008 in the New York Times that explores medals by country over the years.  It looks like the home field advantage is substantial.  Australia for example went from 41 total medals in 1996 to 58 in 2000 when the Olympics were in Sydney.   In 2004 and 2008 they were back in the 40s.

2)    About Katie Ledecky, the 15 year old who won the 800m freestyle swim.  Bill asks, “How can someone that young win, and win by a lot — she set an American record– in an endurance race like the 800m. Can you imagine a 15-year boy winning the 800m in track? Why in swimming, and why with women?

There is long history of girls in this age group doing incredibly well in Olympic swimming.  The wiki link to the 800m record progression (scroll down to get the women’s list) shows a number of outstanding examples including Shane Gould, Debbie Meyer, and Janet Evans.  They were all 15 or 16 when they set records in the 800m.

Swimming is different than running.  By the time many outstanding swimmers are in their early teens they are training extremely hard by adult standards, and many have been training hard for five plus years.  There is less orthopedic stress in swimming, in other words no pounding, so kids in this age group can handle high training loads with less risk of injury.  For so-called aerobic sports (distance swimming, running, cycling), swimming is the most technique driven.  So it is possible for a young swimmer to be both really fit and have the technique needed to win at a young age.

Teenage girls have done well in all sorts of sports for a long time (think tennis and golf), and the other issue in swimming and endurance sports is that there may be a body composition sweet spot where muscle mass is high but before the adult “curves” emerge.

Bill and I discussed some other issues like a white athlete winning the long jump, and a non Kenyan/Ethiopian winning the men’s 10,000m with American Galen Rupp getting the silver.  I will save these topics for later because each deserves a longer post with more on the background physiology and sociology behind them.

This Sunday the Women’s Marathon will be run in London.  Until 1972 the longest Olympic running event for women was 800m.  In 1972 the 1500m was added and in 1984 the first Olympic Marathon for women was conducted.   The program now parallels that for men:  3000m steeplechase, 5000m, 10,000m, and Marathon.

The chart below from the marathonguide.com site shows the progression of world and Olympic records for men and women.  You will note that there are no women’s records until the late 1960s. Before that a number of women “snuck into” various marathons starting in the 1920s, but nothing was official until the late 1960s.

Once women were allowed to compete their times dropped quickly as they adopted the high milage training programs that men were using.  These programs had evolved from about 1900 to 1960.  Women from E. Africa and other parts of the world were also competing at a high level by the 1980s.  So the slow evolution of records and world wide participation experienced by men was compressed for women.

To study physiology in the real world, Sandra Hunter and her team at Marquette University have analyzed results from multiple years of the mega-marathons in Boston, New York, Chicago, Berlin, London and also the World Championships.   This analysis shows that in general, women and men seem to peak in their late 20s, and that women are 10-12% slower than men.   On average, elite women runners have more body fat than elite male runners and they also have less oxygen carrying capacity in their blood.  When these differences are factored into the physiology of elite distance running they are consistent with the time differences noted above.

Another interesting thing is that even in the elite races, the gap between the first and fifth place finisher is greater for women than men.  In a more recent paper, the Hunter team also showed that as women age what might called the “depth gap” widens more for women than men.  One major reason for the widening gap is likely lower participation by women in the older age groups.

Another explanation for the depth has been advanced by Rob Deaner, who argues that a small fraction of men are essentially crazy competitive, train like maniacs and then finish with relatively fast times.   He advances a number of interesting ideas about behavioral genetics that might explain these findings.  However, he also notes that in countries with higher levels of gender equality women account for a greater fraction of success in international competition.

My own view is that we will not be able to answer the nature vs. nurture element of these differences in depth until multiple generations of girls and women have been encouraged to compete in sports at a high level from early childhood.  However, one thing does seem certain; a tidal wave of age group records is coming for women in their 50s and 60s as the women of the title IX generation age up.

Michael Phelps won his 20^th medal on Thursday night and will likely get two more on Friday and Saturday.  After his 19^th medal a couple of nights ago, I got an e-mail from my friend and colleague Denis Cortese about how his total compares to what a great decathlete might get if there were a medal given for each of the 10 events in the competition.

This is a good question because Olympic sports differ in how many “gettable medals” there are for a given athlete.  If you look at the list of multiple medal winners there are a lot of swimmers, gymnasts and cross country skiers.  For a variety of reasons there are more opportunities to rack up big medal totals in these sports.

There are 13 individual events in swimming per Olympics and Phelps has been in four (2000, 2004, 2008, 2012).  At the end of the day he will have at least 12 and likely 13 individual medals and at least 10 and perhaps 11 golds in 52 chances.  So Phelps has won about 20% of the individual golds available in men’s swimming since 2000.  The stats look better if you exclude 2000 when he was 15 and did not medal.  He is also the first swimmer to win gold in the same event three times in a row.

Based on some back of the envelope calculations it is uncommon for an athlete to compete or medal in the decathlon in more than two Olympics.  Since 1904, 72 medals have been awarded and only 10 people have won medals in two Olympics.   No one has medaled in three.  Because the decathlon is about cumulative point totals, it is possible for an over all winner to emerge without ever winning a single event.

In the legendary 1960 competition between Rafer Johnson and CK Yang, Yang won 4 individual events and Johnson only 1 against the rest of the field.  If you score it as match play, it was Yang over Johnson 7-3, but Johnson got the gold on points.  The video clip is summary of their competition and the only thing to add is that both Johnson and Yang went to UCLA and not the University of California as stated in the clip.

 If you are unable to see the video, click this link.

It is exceptional for anyone to win four or more individual events in an Olympic decathlon like Yang did and even two or three is unusual.  So like Phelps a top decathlete would win 20% or maybe a bit more of their individual events.  However, participation in four games would be almost inconceivable.

Another interesting example is Carl Lewis.   He won eight individual medals over four Olympics.  As of now (who knows what Usain Bolt will do in a few days) he is the only man to repeat in the 100m (1984, 1988).   He also won the long jump four times in a row; only a few people have won the same event in any sport four times in a row.   Lewis also missed a chance to pick up more medals due to the 1980 boycott.

A comparison of Phelps and Lewis shows one of the main differences between swimming and track.  Phelps has medaled in events ranging from less than one minute to events lasting longer than four minutes, and there are a whole lot of swimming events that last about two minutes where he has excelled.   In 2008, if the schedule had permitted he probably could have medaled in the 400m freestyle and even the 1500m freestyle.  He was that good!

In track the range is much narrower.  The physiology and biomechanics of this are complicated, but you don’t see the same person winning events with a big time range, for example 400m to 1500m, at the same track meet like you do in swimming.  If you account for range and assume that Lewis really only had a chance to get individual medals in the 100m, 200m, and long jump; he is 8/12 with 7 golds.  So, let’s not forget Carl Lewis.  In my book he was nearly as dominant but for even longer than Phelps.

More importantly, let’s not forget Rafer Johnson.

• UCLA Student Body President
• Silver medal 1956 decathlon
• Gold medal 1960 decathlon
• Flag bearer 1960
• Torch lighter 1984
• Long time leader in the Special Olympics movement
• One of the men who disarmed Robert Kennedy’s assassin in 1968

Phelps and Lewis are great champions.  Rafer Johnson is a hero for the ages.