Human Limits

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.

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.

Today, I want to do a little more on the genetics of elite athletic performance.  A couple of days ago I briefly reviewed the genetics of height.  The bottom line is that while 80% of height is heritable (runs in families); it has been very hard to figure out the genetics of height.  Hundreds of gene variants with very small effect sizes contribute to height and when all of these genes are considered the consensus among the statisticians is that somewhere between 5-20% of the variation in height can be explained by simply “reading” differences in the genetic code.

What happens if we zoom out and think about athletic ability in general and what makes an Olympian or even an Olympic champion?

1)   To be a champion at anything you have to practice, practice, practice and this has been popularized as the 10,000 hour rule by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.   10,000 hours is a debatable number but the idea of practice and commitment is not.

2)    Like height the genetic components that make up what might be called ‘talent’ have been really difficult to decipher.  How various gene variants that might give someone an edge in some element of the mental or physical aspects of a given sport remains mostly a mystery.  Jonatan Ruiz and colleagues have some ideas about the perfect genotype for endurance sports, and it is really rare.

3)    Remember the role of environment and culture.  Based on their success in distance running one would guess that the Kenyan and Ethiopian tribes that dominate distance running might also do well in cross country skiing and endurance cycling.  However, we will never know until it either starts to snow in East Africa or the roads there get good enough for cycling to take off.

4)    Success runs in families.  So does early exposure and access to coaching and perhaps a competitive environment at home.   Early exposure also starts in East Africa as young kids run to and from school and play soccer at high altitude all day long.

So, success in sports is multifactorial.   Ross Tucker and Malcolm Collins have come up with a model that explains how a bunch of these things might interact.  I don’t agree with every element of their model but it is a good start.   They also offer an excellent critique of the 10,000 hour concept.

Along these lines, in elite competition like the Olympics, the margin of victory is tiny and there is no way we can measure any variable in the lab accurately enough to predict who might win by less than 1%.   If you ask me for a rough guess I will tell you for most sports, 80% or more is about practice and commitment and that means that almost any young person has the physical ability to get really good at something (say breaking 3 hours for the marathon or becoming a low handicap golfer).  However, the closer you get to truly outstanding the more important that ill defined thing called talent is, and the less we understand about the genetics of it.

Finally, it is pretty clear that we are a long way away from a blood test to identify which child might do well at what.  Practical approaches like considering body size, measuring vertical jump, running various distances for time, tests of strength, and tests of coordination are probably a much better way to go.

Then there is the equally complex matter of the psychology of desire and commitment…..

Today’s post is a bit more technical.

During the first week of the Olympics gymnastics and swimming will be two of the featured events.   I get a lot of questions about how much of elite athletic performance is due to genetic factors and how much is due to environmental factors: the classic problem of nature vs. nurture.

So why not start with gymnastics and swimming.   Gymnasts tend to be short and swimmers tend to be tall.   In the case of gymnastics it is important to have a high strength to body weight ratio.   A major factor that determines the strength of a muscle is its cross sectional area.

As people get taller the cross sectional area of their muscles gets bigger and they get stronger.  However, their body weight (essentially body volume) goes up faster.  Area is essentially a squared function of height and volume a cubed function.  There is a whole area of biology called allometry or scaling that considers these relationships for all sorts of things.

The practical effect is that as people get taller on average their strength to weight ratio gets lower and that makes it harder to do all of the tricks that the top gymnasts do.   This is one of the reasons that the top women in gymnastics have gotten younger and as a result shorter and lighter as the tricks required to compete at the highest level have gotten harder.

In 1968 26 year old Vera Caslavska dominated women’s gymnastics at the Mexico City Olympics.  She was reportedly 5’3’’(160 cm) and about 128 pounds (58 kg).  Caslavska, a Czech, was also a hero in resisting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Watch this video of her and compare it to what you will be watching on TV during the next week.

In swimming, a bigger surface should slow things down and make it harder to move through the water.   However, streamlined body positions like that seen in the Michael Phelps video posted yesterday, can limit the negative effects of size.  Swimmers are also in the water and essentially floating so there isn’t much penalty for getting heavier.

This general line of reasoning also applies to oxygen transport systems and when you add that to more muscle strength, taller swimmers have an advantage.  In general smaller people do better in things that are weight dependent and taller people do better in things that are weight independent.  This is especially true in endurance sports.  Compare the size of the distance runners with the swimmers and rowers you will be watching over the next couple of weeks.

So how much of this is “genetic”? It is known that height is about 80% heritable and there are excellent equations that use parental height and other factors that are pretty good at predicting the adult height of children.   However, at this time, there are no clear genetic explanations for why some people are tall and some people are short.  This has been studied extensively in hundreds of thousands of people and no answers have emerged.

I am attaching a link to a summary article on this topic and also a recent scientific article.   One idea is that as we learn more about how genes are turned on and off and how they interact with environmental factors the genetics of height will become clearer.  The other idea is that so much of what and who we are is so complex that there will never be clear genetic answers for most of it.

Yesterday I wrote about how elite athletes have an ability to focus and relax while at the same time putting forth great effort.  In skill sports like golf or hitting a baseball this is a version of Yogi Berra’s classic quote “how can you hit and think at the same time?”

This concept was stated more elegantly a couple of days ago in the NYT by the great Ichiro Suzuki about his first at-bat (he got a hit) at Yankee stadium after being traded to the Yankees.  “My 11 1/2 years here is a long time and I was thinking what I would feel like in my first at-bat, I really didn’t think anything. Nothing came to me. It was just a wonderful day to experience that.”

In sports associated with fatigue no one is better than Michael Phelps at keeping his rhythm and form at the end of a race.  There is an incredible video of Phelps swimming freestyle that shows just how skilled he is.

Terry Laughlin, the Total Immersion swimming guru, has a number of ideas that can help us all learn to do what Ichiro and Phelps do so well.   There is also a great interview by Amby Burfoot of Kim Conley who ran a perfect race to make the U.S. Olympic team in the 5k.  Her story exemplifies the Relax and Win approach.

Today we shift gears from doping and focus on the positive.

Willie Williams was my head track coach at the University of Arizona in the late 1970s.  Coach Williams had been a great sprinter in the early 1960s at San Jose State where he was coached by the legendary Bud Winter.   Coach Williams frequently encouraged people to relax instead of simply trying harder.  Where did this come from?

It came from Bud Winter who had developed a philosophy of high level performance that can be summarized as “relax and win”.   Some of this had to do with specific form and technique drills he advocated, and some of it was about a mental approach to competition.  It also has striking parallels to the psychological concept of Flow.

Nose around budwinter.com and you will get some insight into Winter’s approach.  There is also a video of him at practice conducting his iconic form drills.

During the Olympics we are going to see many examples where the margin of victory will be incredibly small.  In many of these cases, the winner will be the athlete who can retain their focus, form and rhythm when their whole body essentially feels like it is on fire.  In 2008 Michael Phelps was the poster boy for this.

This concept was also covered by Mary Pilon in the NYT in a recent series on 400m runner Amantle Mashto.  I was also struck by another piece by Mary in the Times on Wesley Williams, a superb blind long jumper and how committed he must be to the type of relaxed focus taught by Winter.

The question for us all is how to apply these concepts throughout the day.

Recent posts have focused on how elite endurance athletes might be manipulating their red blood cell counts to get a competitive advantage.   About 10 years ago I did a brief article that provides a scientific explanation for why blood doping and EPO work.  The article is still current.

In my 7/22 post I also expressed optimism that the biological passport system might be able to keep doping in check.   My colleague Ilkka Heinonen forwarded a link to a recent paper that paints a less optimistic picture.

While we are on the topic of EPO, there was a major expose in the Washington Post on the overuse of EPO to boost blood counts in patients with anemia.   The story points out that the development of EPO was a major breakthrough in biotechnology and a triumph of converting basic research into improved clinical care.

However, like a lot medical innovations, overuse is a problem and a major driver of health care costs in the U.S.  The best estimate is that about 30% of medical care costs have something to do with use of technology in ways that do not improve patient outcomes.

No matter where you are on the U.S. health care reform debate, the issues related to technology overuse need to be addressed.   During the next few weeks I will be focusing on the Olympics, but let’s not forget the real world while we are at it.