Human Limits

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.

In anticipation of the 100m this weekend there will be a lot of talk about Usain Bolt.  Bolt is the world record holder in both the 100 and 200 meters.  On a time basis he is clearly the fastest man ever.

However, I want you to watch Bob Hayes who ran 10.06 on a dirt track in 1964 at the Tokyo Olympics.  The clip below shows him dominating from the inside lane.  It was featured in the documentary film “Tokyo Olympiad” by the legendary Japanese director Kon Ichikawa.

Even more amazing is his anchor leg in the 4×100 relay.   After the Olympics, Hayes played professional football with the Dallas Cowboys.

Modern tracks are probably 2-3% faster than the dirt and cinder tracks Hayes ran on.  It is also tempting to think about what might have happened if Hayes had focused on track full time instead of playing football.  He never ran a race after his early 20s.

So maybe “Bullet” Bob is still the world’s fastest human.

The 16 year old Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen set a world record in the 400m individual medley on Monday.  Her world record swim of 4:28 and change included a final 50 that was faster than Ryan Lochte’s split during his 4:05 mark a few days earlier.  This has fueled speculation that doping drove her breakthrough performance.

Since at least the 1970s all remarkable performances, especially those by women, have been subject to suspicions about doping.  In some countries there has been so-called state sponsored doping.   Here is a link to a chilling article about doping in the former East Germany.   There has also been plenty of doping that was not state sponsored as demonstrated by this interesting list of major cases.

The arguments that Ye Shiwen is clean go something like this:

1. She has passed multiple drug tests.
2. The Chinese were embarrassed by doping scandals in the 90s and are out of the business.
3. Her overall time (while spectacular) is still about 9-10% slower than Lochte’s and that is pretty much the standard male/female difference.
4. There have been incredible performances by people who were not doping.

The arguments that make her performance suspicious are:

1. The idea that her last 50m would be faster than Lochte’s is simply inconceivable.
2. The Chinese have a history of organized doping.
3. A number of women (and men) who seemed too good to be true were in fact too good to be true.  Many track and field records, especially those for women, are stuck in the 1980s and early 90s when doping control was even more beatable than it is today.  Many of the men’s records in the field events like the shot put also date from that time suggesting that doping control has gotten better.

As I pointed out in earlier posts on doping, the tests are beatable. However, it is hard to imagine that a 16 year old girl could concoct and execute a doping scheme that would beat current doping control measures on her own.  So my conclusion is that she is either legit or has been subjected to some sort of doping program without her consent and willing participation.  Ultimately the young Germans who were doped without their consent received compensation and the officials and Drs. in charge were punished.

Intentional doping by an adult is one thing, systematic doping of teenagers by adults is far worse.  Let’s hope this is not happening with Ye.

There was a great article on U.S. Olympic swim coach Teri McKeever in the NYT a few days ago.  The article describes her empowering approach and some of the unconventional and innovative things she has done like challenging ideas about mindless high yardage training in swimming.  She sounds a lot like the great track coach Bud Winter who I wrote about earlier this month.

In this Olympic season we are hearing a lot about the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Dream Team and its legendary coach Chuck Daly.  Daly won in the Ivy League, won with the “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons in the NBA and won with the Dream team.  From what I can tell Daly was also about empowering people and not micromanaging the super talented players he worked with.

The great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success to teach his players how to empower themselves.   Legendary track coach Bill Bowerman did many similar things using a more free-wheeling, individualistic and profane approach.

When I read about McKeever, Winter, Daly, Wooden and Bowerman it seems to me they knew exactly what Daniel Pink is talking about in the video I have included on motivation.

Read about the great coaches and ask yourself how you can use their ideas to get the best out of yourself and the people you work with.