Human Limits

I was a guest on the Huffington Post’s live segment on doping in the Olympics.  Here is the link!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/08/pot-as-a-performance-enha_n_1757310.html?utm_hp_ref=live321&ir=HuffPost%20Live%20321

Over the next week or so I am going to wrap up some issues raised in the saturation posting I did on London 2012.  After that I am planning to do several series of longer but less frequent posts on issues like obesity, training, aging, exercise and heart health, and perhaps health care reform.   There will also be topical posts when things related to human performance pop up in the news.

Here are a few random thoughts about London:

• The success of London 2012 shows just how well things can go in an open and democratic society.  What happened in 1936 in Berlin was not the future. What happened in 2008 in Beijing is not the future.   A quote from Churchill seems appropriate here.

“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

In the long run we are ahead in spite of all of the chaos, confusion, distraction and pettiness that go with open societies.

• What will become of Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps?  At age 50 will they be fading dissipated stars looking for a gig on reality TV, or will they find other ways to contribute?  Here is a link to a mother’s letter to Phelps about his future.  People like Roger Bannister and Johan Olav Koss show that it does not have to be all down hill after an early athletic peak.

• How about the joy of the U.S. men’s basketball team and Coach K after winning the gold?  It is easy to caricature these guys as spoiled prima donnas.  Who would have thought they were motivated by things other than personal fame, statistics and money?

If you are having post Olympic withdrawal, my advice is to set some sort of athletic or exercise goal and start now, 2016 is closer than you think!

Unless something unusual and unexpected happens today in the marathon, the only world records in track and field will be for the women’s and men’s 4x100m relays and the 800m for men.  Most of this post will be about what David Rudisha did in the 800m; however the U.S. women went 40.82 in the relay and broke a record held by East Germany from the uber-doping era in the 1980s by over 1%, a remarkable achievement.  Before the ink was dry on the women’s record speculation started about just how clean it was.  This speculation was fueled in part because the previous record was held by a team from East Germany where there was a massive and well documented state sponsored doping program.  Last week I linked to a scientific summary of exactly what the East Germans were doing.  Here is that link again.

However, before we get too suspicious let’s quickly compare the Jamaican men to the U.S. women.   The 100m personal bests for the Jamaican men total 39.00s.  Divide their relay record of 36.84 by 39.00 and you get a ratio of 0.9446.  The personal bests of the U.S. women total 43.45s so the ratio of their 40.82 relay record to their group personal best is 0.9395.   Not that much difference.  If their ratio was similar to the Jamaican men’s their estimated time would b 41.04, still the world record by 0.31 seconds.   They were 0.22 seconds faster which can easily be explained by their superb baton exchanges.

So, before we all get a terminal case of skepticism about records, let’s look at the data.  Plenty of big jumps in record times over the years have had nothing to do with doping.

Now to Rudisha of Kenya who ran 1:40:91 in London.  He is the first man to break 1:41 and really dominated the fastest race at that distance ever run.   The depth of the field and the number of people who broke 1:43 was incredible.  Three of the ten fastest 800m times ever were run in this race.    This was clearly not the typical “sit back and kick” middle distance or distance race seen at the Olympics.

So, how good is Rudisha’s time?  I checked on the point tables contained in my copy of the classic “Computerized Running Training Programs” book and compared point totals for world records.  The tables are not perfect but they use a few reasonable assumptions about physiology and statistical models to make some educated guesses.  The tables were developed in the late 1960s and have stood the test of time.  I will pick the time in the tables closest to current world record for comparison with the current record on the right.

100m                  9.6 = 1110 points            (Bolt 9.58)

200m                19.2 = 1140 points           (Bolt 19.19)

400m                43.2 = 1110 points           (Johnson 43.18)

800m             1:41.1 = 1070 points           (Rudisha 1:40.91)

1500m           3:25.6 = 1100 points          (El Guerrouj 3:26.00)

3000m           7:19.8 = 1120 points          (Komen 7:20.67)

5000m         12:37.5 = 1130 points         (Bekele 12:37.35)

10,000m      26:16.4 = 1140 points         (Bekele  26:17.53)

Marathon  2:03:30.0 = 1120 points         (Makau 2:03:38.0)

You can see from the point tables that the 800m record appears a bit slow in comparison to the 400m and 1500m records.  The same is true for the marathon in comparison to the 5000 and 10,000m records.   The other point here is that Bolt’s 200 is worth about 1140 points and is the current “best” record for men.  1140 points in the 800m would be 1:37.7!  1140 points in the marathon would be 2:02:09!

The final point I want to make today is that Peter Snell, who won the 800m in Rome and 800/1500 double in Tokyo ran 1:44.3 on a grass track in 1962.  On a synthetic track that would convert to an estimated time between 1:41 and 1:42.  Below is a brief video on Snell with some footage of his races.

There is a lot more I could discuss related to Snell including high mileage training for 800/1500m runners but that can wait for a series of longer posts I am planning on training.   Here is a link to a longer documentary on Snell and his revolutionary coach Arthur Lydiard.  Like the Kenyans who have followed, Snell led an active life from a young age and the hill running and training long runs had to help.  In comparison to the East Africans, only the altitude was missing.   I wonder what would happen to the 800m record if a good (45 second personal best) but not great 400m runner followed the Lydiard plan used by Snell.

A couple of days ago Emily Sohn of Discovery News called to chat about why and how world records continue to fall.   Here is a short version of our discussion:

1.  Multiple incremental improvements over time.  A good example is swimming and contributing factors include: better and deeper pools, wave suppressing lane lines, high tech suits, and technical advances like better turns.  Better pool architecture and lane lines reduce the chop and turbulence in the water and my bet is that the availability of easy to use video equipment has also helped coaches tweak technique.
2.  Major technical breakthroughs.  Two examples that come to mind are fiberglass pole vault poles and more recently “clap skates” in speed skating.   The skates provide essentially an extra lever and when they were introduced there was a record breaking spree.   In sports like golf and tennis there seems to be a continuous march of improved clubs and racquets.
3. More and better competition.  For all sorts of reasons including more money in more sports and the end of amateurism people now compete for longer.   Top athletes in many sports can now make a living doing their thing.  Elite sport used to be mostly for people from wealthy countries and that is not longer the case either, so the talent pool has expanded and is likely to continue to expand.
4. Better medical treatment helps people recover from what were once career ending injuries.  While it was a motorcycle accident, the fact that Hermann Maier came back in skiing after almost losing his leg, proves the point.  The skill of my orthopedic surgery colleagues, the rehab physicians, therapists and trainers is incredible.  Orthopedics has also been aided by improvements in materials science and high tech replacement parts and less invasive techniques.   In the last 30 years I have personally seen orthopedic surgery move from essentially medieval carpentry to one of the most tech driven and creative areas of medicine.
5. In sports like figure skating, diving and gymnastics that include acrobatic “tricks” there has to be an element of world wide “double-dare” going on.   In other words the world sees someone do a “triple” whatever and people start to think about how to do a quadruple…….
6. There are no more secrets, training techniques and technical improvements in equipment diffuse rapidly and the rate of adoption of new ideas is now essentially instantaneous due to the electronic environment we all live in.
7. Depending on how well you believe that drug testing works, there is always the issue of doping. So undetected doping is a possibility.  As I have mentioned before, while drug testing is not perfect, it is better than it used to be.  The fact that a number of records in track and field date from the 80s and 90s (especially for women) suggests that testing is getting better.  So hopefully doping is less of a factor, but healthy skepticism is always a good thing on this topic.

As I said to Emily, I am not sure the underlying human motor has gotten any better, but when you add the factors listed above up improvements continue to pile up.

Enjoy the next to last day of London 2012.

A few days ago I wrote about East African dominance in distance running and discussed the “talent” issue vs. the environmental and cultural factors that make the Kenyans and Ethiopians so good.  However, for people like me who were living and running competitively in the American Southwest in the late 1970s there is an alternate answer to “who will beat the Kenyans?”

In the late 1970s a few of my friends and I traveled from Tucson to Albuquerque, New Mexico to participate in the La Luz trail race up Sandia Peak.  The race was won by Al Waquie of the Walatowa Pueblo of Jemez tribe.  As I recall, he defeated Ric Rojas by 2-3 minutes in a race that lasted about an hour (I think I finished about 15^th).  At the time Rojas was among the top ranked 10k runners in the US and seen as a potential heir to Frank Shorter.  Waquie dominated the classic mountain climbs in the West and also won the Empire State Building ascent numerous times.

Waquie is not alone, Native American kids from selected high schools in the Four Corners region like Tuba City have done very well in high school distance running.  And, this is nothing new; in 1912 the great Hopi runner Lewis Tewanima won a silver medal in the 10,000m in an era when runners from Finland were as dominant as those from Kenya and Ethiopia are now.   Like the Kenyans and Ethiopians, the tribes that live in the Four Corners have lived at high altitude for centuries.

Al Waquie is perhaps the most impressive runner I have ever seen and that includes the likes of Alberto Salazar, Frank Shorter, Henry Rono and Bill Rogers.  Most people who saw him in action or raced in the same races he competed in still can’t believe what they saw or what he did.

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?