Human Limits

The thought of a match race between Usain Bolt and Mo Farah over 600m has captured a lot of attention.  Here is an analysis I did for Outside that followers of Human Limits might be interested in.   I just hope this race comes off.

Mike

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I have devoted a couple of posts to 77 year old golf legend Gary Player and his lifelong devotion to fitness.   In response to my most recent post a reader sent the video clip below about 86 year old gymnast Johanna Quass.  I have been thinking about exercise and aging for a long time, but the clip below is among the most remarkable things I have ever seen.   Clearly a lifetime of training, talent, and injury avoidance are required to make a performance like that happen.  However, nothing like it happens without staying with it.

click here for video

I have been doing more body weight calisthenics and strength training over the last year, but this video has me thinking maybe I should take a tumbling class or start jumping rope again like I did in high school to improve my footwork for basketball.  In the end, loss of strength and balance leads many older people to become frail and lose their independence, maybe we need to rethink what we tell middle aged people to literally keep them independent and off the floor.

The Tour de France ended yesterday and I wanted to use it to continue to highlight issues related to sports doping.   Since the tour started, there were a number of busts in the track and field world apparently related to the use of a banned stimulant by Tyson Gay and several sprinters from Jamaica. Ultimately athletes are responsible for what goes into their mouths or bodies via other routes, but adulteration of “supplements” with banned substances is both a real problem and a convenient excuse.

1% is a Big Deal

The other issue I want to bring up is that a 1% edge in something like a 10,000m run would be a huge margin of victory (100m) or a huge improvement (~16-17 seconds for a world class runner).  If you simply translate this to the Tour de France which lasts about 80-90 hours it would be about 50 minutes.  That is unrealistic due to the team tactics and the fact that every day is not a test for the top riders.  However, this year there were more climbs than normal and perhaps 8 or 10 hours that might have been decisive, so 1% would be a 5-6 minute margin.   If you believe that drug tests and the biological passport are beatable with low dose drugs, a doping regimen that generates a 1% edge while remaining undetectable seems conceivable to me.   Lance Armstrong and his collaborators showed what is possible when the East German approach was privatized and there is more than enough at stake with a Tour win to tempt people to learn to fly under the doping control radar.

Show the Data

My colleague Ross Tucker, one of the World’s leading experts on human performance, has called for more transparency related to publishing the power outputs of riders during the Tour and other races.  I support this call completely.  He also has thoughts about the progression of performances that I agree with and recently posted on related to distance running.  Finally, here is a deep dive by Ross on this topic that is worth the read.

Summary

The biological passport may be working to limit doping in endurance sports.  The physiological data, especially in cycling where it is possible to measure power output accurately, should be of great interest to those trying to ensure clean competition.  Show us the data.

Over the last 10 or 20 years authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Jared Diamond have had multiple bestsellers on topics related to social science and anthropology among other things.  This is encouraging to me as a scientist and shows that the public appetite for information about science is high.  Now comes “the Sports Gene” by David Epstein of Sports Illustrated. The Sports Gene explores the nature versus nurture argument in the context of world class athletic performance.  It does an excellent job covering the scientific basis of athletic performance and amplifies the research with an impressive collection of narrative examples and interviews.

Pop science books are frequently criticized by “experts” as being oversimplified “Readers Digest” versions of the scientific landscape based on cherry picked data that is then distilled into a compelling story with little mention of the limitations of the data or alternate explanations. These oversimplified ideas then become part of the conventional wisdom.  Perhaps the best recent example is the so-called 10,000 hour rule about what it takes to become expert (or even world class) at any given activity. Epstein shows just how caveat filled the 10,000 hour concept is and points out that it only works if you have sufficient talent to begin with and that what might be called trainability varies remarkably from person to person.

So what is talent?   Major league baseball players struggle to hit the softball pitcher Jenny Finch showing us just how specific hand eye coordination, vision, practice, anticipation, and reading the opponent is.  How they interact to make a great hitter is even more complex.    The discussion of this topic reminded me of how Henry Aaron sat on the bench peering through a hole in the top of his cap to generate a mental map of any biomechanical clues about what the pitchers were throwing.   A similarly thoughtful discussion of the big “size sort” of body sizes to the right sport over the last 30 or 40 years is especially insightful and entertaining.  This is a topic I posted on last year during the Olympics and it explains all sorts of things, but curiously little is known about the genetics of height or just about any other trait that seems so essential to athletic performance.  When there are genetic clues, they are typically very complex and the effect size of the genes of interest is small. There are also excellent sections on the Jamaican sprinters and Kenyan runners as well as sudden death in young athletes to highlight just a few of the topics covered.

So should you read this book? I recommend this book generally to sports fans, but more importantly this book should also be read by people who are broadly interested how an individual’s biology interacts with their behavior (training), their environment, and their culture.  Those who think that our genes are our destiny may want to think again.   Those who think it is only about 10,000 hours will want to think again too.  There are also many parallels between the biological and other factors that determine athletic performance and things like our individual health and also population health.  In most cases there is some ill-defined biological pre-disposition that only finds full expression when everything is just right or perhaps wrong in the case of disease.

This book might also be of interest to proverbial Little League parents interested in what sports their children might excel in. The limits of early overspecialization are discussed and in some sports like women’s gymnastics early specialization appears to be critical because there is a limited age related sweet spot.  For other sports, perhaps overspecialization is a bad thing and maybe we need go to go back to the future with traditional physical education.  This approach would develop a wide variety of more generic athletic and physical fitness skills that could be mixed and matched later as the interests of the aspiring athlete emerges.  If I have one criticism of the book it is that it could benefit from a few pictures or perhaps some graphs. However this is a minor concern and no way limits my enthusiasm for the Sports Gene.  That having been said, below is a picture of Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe and Alexander Popov who have 40 Olympic medals in swimming between them.

These men are all about the same size, and the picture suggests that perhaps there is an optimal size for swimming.  But of course they also trained hard and perfected their technique more than amplifying whatever talent they started with.  Was it their talent (nature) that got them to the top or their training, skill, and environment (nurture) that got them there?   Read the Sports Gene and decide for yourself.

East Africans dominate middle and long distance running and last year during the Olympics I did several posts on them.  Recently, there was a remarkable paper published documenting very high levels of physical activity and VO₂ max values in “untrained” Kenyan school children.  The tables below tell the story.  The Kenyan kids were small traveled on foot an average of 7.5 km to school and did an hour or more of vigorous physical activity per day.  Some of these very high values are due to the fact that these kids are so small.  It is complex but VO₂ is scaled to body size and when the scaled values (expressed as body weight to the 0.75 power) in the second table are converted for say a 60kg 14 year old, a value of 65/ml/kg/min would be physiologically similar.

This Data & International Competition

A superficial look at this data suggests that perhaps the rest of the world should just quit trying to do well at distance running, but there is another way to look at the data.  For example is there enough “aerobic talent” in the U.S. to compete with the Kenyans?  To look for an answer to that question I went to a database of Minnesota high school track times and found that in 2013 almost 50 boys had broken 4:30 for the 1600m run which is about 10m less than a mile.  Minnesota has a population of just over 5 million and the U.S. has a population of `310 million.   So if you extrapolate the Minnesota numbers to the entire country it seems reasonable to suggest that perhaps about 3,000 high school boys per year can run a 4:30 mile.  How many of these kids were well trained, how many ran year round, and more importantly how many might improve dramatically if they continued for a few years with good coaching?  A generation of runners is lasts perhaps 4-8 years so that means there are between  12-24,000 people in a given generation of potential US runners with at least some ability and this does not count the people that are either doing other sports or doing nothing.  Anyone who has been around distance running for a while knows a 4:30 miler who went on to great things.  Below is a quote from Frank Shorter related to John Parker’s novel on distance running “Once a Runner”.

…….a quote by Frank Shorter, from a conversation he had with the author during one of their training runs (they were roommates and friends): “How did I know you ran the mile in 4:30 in high school? That’s easy. Everyone ran the mile in 4:30 in high school.”…….

Does Matthew Elliott Prove My Point?

Recently, a miler named Matthew Elliott emerged onto the world scene.  He is a 27 year old school teacher who ran 4:42 for the mile in high school.  Elliott went to a small college with a cross country but no track team:

“At Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, Elliott ran cross country, but there was no track team. He used his final year of eligibility while going for his masters in early childhood education at Winthrop in Rock Hill, where he ran indoor and outdoor track, “and that’s where I found that I had a little bit of talent,” he says. He qualified for the NCAA Championships in 2008 but did not make the 1500-meter final.  Still, that was enough for him to keep running beyond college.”

Elliott found a coach and continued to improve and is now in a position to potentially represent the U.S. in the World Championships.   Elliott also works full time as a teacher of young children with special needs.

Summary

When you look at my talent pool estimate above, read about Matthew Elliott, and talk to longtime observers of distance running and hear the many stories of wasted natural ability about the kid who “ran 4:15 with no training”; one conclusion is that there is more than enough talent in the U.S. to compete with the Kenyans and Ethiopians.  When you consider what the rest of the world has to offer it is hard to believe that there is not enough talent out there, if identified and cultivated, to give them a run for the money.

A couple of months ago I highlighted Gary Player’s fitness regimen.  At age 77 he is in the ESPN “body” issue.  Here is a link to article on him and the video clip below show the great man in action.

click here for video

After the post on Alain Mimoun I got a nice note from publishing icon and fitness activist George Hirsch:

“Thanks for this. As a teenager, I attended the 1952 Helsinki Games and became a lifelong admirer of Mimoun, a true champion in every way.”

That led to a longer exchange about George’s role as a leader of the NY Marathon in bringing Mimoun’s great competitive partner Emil Zatopek to New York in 1979.  The picture below is of Bill Rogers, George and Zatopek out for a run in Central Park.

As e-mail conversations sometimes do, things drifted to Zatopek’s support for greater political freedom as part of the Prague Spring in 1968.  With the suppression of the Prague Spring, Zatopek lost his official status and was apparently given a series of menial jobs.  At some level he was probably protected from even more harsh treatment by his international status and George Hirsch indicated that it did not take a major diplomatic effort to get him to New York in 1979.  In 1990 he was politically “rehabilitated” as communism crumbled in the former Czechoslovakia.   So, like Mimoun, Zatopek was a man of great personal resilience.

How Does This Relate to Nelson Mandela?

All of this discussion about resilience got me thinking about Nelson Mandela whose health and perhaps life is slipping away at age 94.  The details of Mandela’s life are well known, but perhaps less well known is that he was devoted to a program of calisthenics and running in place during his nearly three decades as a political prisoner.   In his 70s he then had the physical stamina to emerge from prison, lead his country and focus on reconciliation vs. revenge.  He also continued an exercise program well into his 80s.  I can’t help but think that his physical endurance contributed to his mental endurance and the resilience it took to just keep pushing forward against long odds.  From a scientific perspective surely the exercise helped him deal with the stresses of resistance and leadership and kept him cognitively sharp for a long time.

The 4^th of July is a time when we should all spend a few minutes reflecting about the ongoing struggle for human freedom.  Thinking about how Nelson Mandela pressed on over so many years is a good place to start, and so is following his example and getting some exercise before the festivities and fireworks start.  At some level resilience is a skill that can be learned and physical activity can surely contribute to it.

The great French/Algerian runner Alain Mimoun, who won the marathon at the 1956 Olympics, died last week at the age of 92.  Mimoun is best known for his many silver medal finishes to the incomparable Emil Zatopek who is arguably the greatest distance runner of all time.  Less well appreciated is that Mimoun is in many ways a herald of all that came after him:

• He was born in Algeria when it was still a French Colony.  This is what we now might call the developing world and his excellence anticipated by more than a decade what other North African Arabs and runners from Ethiopia and Kenya have achieved starting with Abebe Bikila in 1960.
• He competed well for a very long time in an era when careers at the highest level typically lasted for only a few years.  In 1960 he competed in his fourth Olympics and placed 34^th in the marathon with a time of 2:31:20 at age 39.
• He won the French national title in 1966 at age 45 and in his early 50s he broke 2:35.
• He remained fit and active into his 90s.

I knew about his races with Zatopek and his victory in 1956 from the Bud Greenspan documentary “The Persistent Ones”, but I had no idea that he was one of the first great master athletes as well and a model for successful aging.  The video below shows Mimoun running in the forest at about age 90.  He was clearly a man ahead of his time and an example for us all.

click here for video