More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 29 - February 5, 2020
The pain in their thighs, especially, is so severe that in any other context they would find it impossible to walk a single step. Yet each continues to run sub-six-minute miles because each still believes the pain is worth the hope of winning.
Sub-six for a whole marathon after 112miles of biking is crazy!
For Dave Scott was, on top of everything else, the hungriest man in the world. He had to be to support his extreme level of activity. A typical lunch in his freshman year of college consisted of thirteen grilled-cheese sandwiches. He once ate eight and a half pounds of ice cream in one sitting.
Dave was not the fastest guy over short distances, but he seemed able to sustain his maximum speed almost indefinitely. Heat did not slow him down, as it was supposed to. And most importantly, at the end Dave could, as he said, “pound it out with anyone”—because his greatest athletic ability was his inability to quit.
Ironman also made his thirty-hours-a-week workout habit something other than freakishly pointless.
Dave did most of his training alone. Each workout was a private game, like his old seventh grade game of racing the bus to school. Games provided the telos that enabled Dave to pursue his mission of “seeing what he could do.”
Interesting he trained mostly alone.
You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: Make use of suffering. —HENRI-FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
Upon returning to his empty house Oliver mechanically switched on the television, nodded off, then woke up the next day and did it all again. He explained to Mike, “I had money; I had stability; but I had nothing to make me feel alive, to make my body and mind work in different ways.” Triathlon changed all that and brought Oliver back to real living.
This is why it's a sport very popular among 40 something year olds :)
In the hardest moments of a long race, the athlete’s entire conscious experience of reality boils down to a desire to continue pitted against a desire to quit. Nothing else remains. The athlete is no longer a student or a teacher or a salesman. He is no longer a son or a father or a husband. He has no social roles or human connections whatsoever. He is utterly alone. He no longer has any possessions. There is no yesterday and no tomorrow, only now. The agony of extreme endurance fatigue crowds out every thought and feeling except one: the goal of reaching the finish line.
Confidence is important in all sports, but in endurance sports it’s everything. An athlete can go no faster than he thinks he can.
Sam suspected that a toxic effect of the drugs on the central nervous system caused the patients to feel more fatigued by the same level of physiological stress and thereby reduced their exercise performance. But this could be true only if the feeling of fatigue itself, not the body’s actual physiological capacity, determined the limits of exercise performance—a heretical idea.
This perception-based art of pacing is how endurance athletes finish races in the shortest time possible. But even the athlete who masters this art must fight against a desire to quit in the last part of each race. If you don’t want to quit, you’re not doing it right.
In 2008 Sam conducted an ingenious study proving that exercise is, in fact, cognitively demanding. He began with the premise that if endurance exercise is truly cognitively demanding, then athletes should give up more quickly in exercise tests that they start in a mentally fatigued state than they do in exercise tests that they start when mentally fresh.
This is fascinating. But intuitive too.
One of Dave’s favorite swim workouts was a set of seven 500-yard intervals with a short rest period after each. As he worked his way through the set, Dave swam faster and faster. But he also made the rest periods shorter and shorter. Plenty of other swimmers would do one or the other—either increase the tempo of the intervals or reduce the rest periods between them. Dave did both. He thought it was a good idea to practically cripple himself with fatigue before attempting his fastest efforts.
Interesting insight into Dave's approach
Each year, between January 1, when he resumed training after a post-Ironman break, and April 1, Mark never allowed his heart rate to exceed the Phil Maffetone–imposed limit of 155 beats per minute.
Curious if this approach is still in favor. The book didn't go into great detail about it - but this article from Phil has more depth: https://philmaffetone.com/want-speed-slow-down/ and here is a good review of ithttps://gonefora.run/does-maf-training-work - sounds like something to look into.
Dave not only thrived on the challenge of feeling fatigued in races but was compelled to confront that challenge in every single workout. Some mysterious inner force coerced him to go hard every day without respite.
The human body was not really designed to absorb food during exercise, but in an Ironman race the body must defy its nature and absorb food anyway. Completing an Ironman is a 10,000-calorie task. Without refueling on the go, it could be done only at a crawl. Some bodies absorb food energy during exercise better than others, and in Ironman this ability is almost as important as speed and endurance. Many a successful short-course triathlete has failed to make the jump to Ironman because his gastrointestinal system wasn’t up to the challenge, even though his lungs and muscles were.
Dave instinctively, needlessly presses even harder. He cannot help himself. A runner ahead is like a terrible itch that can be relieved only by a quick overtaking. Mark surges smoothly with him, thinking, If I go down, let me take him with me.
5:48 per mile through the first eight miles of the marathon. Jesus.
It’s all about expectations—hell’s a bit more bearable when you always knew you were going there.
Specifically, Steve’s analysis will lead him to conclude that in the last ten minutes of the race, Dave Scott fights as hard against total physical exhaustion as any athlete ever has for as long as human beings have raced.
Only accelerations in the anterior-posterior (AP) plane are strongly associated with running economy. The runners with the smallest accelerations in this plane are the most efficient, regardless of their degree of bounciness or whatever else is going on with their stride. This makes sense when you consider that a runner who exhibits large accelerations in the AP plane is a runner who slows down and speeds up quite a bit from stride to stride, even while trying to hold a steady pace. The greatest source of energy waste in running is the braking that occurs when a foot makes contact with the
...more
In running, a stride pattern exhibits low entropy when each individual stride looks almost exactly like the preceding one and the next. A stride pattern exhibits more entropy when each stride looks a little different from the one before and the one after.
However, scientific testing of these techniques has consistently shown that making conscious changes to one’s natural stride actually reduces efficiency. It makes no difference what the specific change is. Steve’s work with control entropy explains why. When you make a conscious change to your stride, your brain becomes more actively focused on your running. Your body wants to do what’s natural, but your brain forces it to do otherwise. And forcing it always reduces control entropy.
In much the same way that a species of life figures out how to survive in a changing environment by evolving blindly through random mutation and natural selection, the running stride evolves through repeatedly confronting speed and endurance limits—through crises that challenge the neuromuscular system to come up with novel movement patterns that yield more speed and endurance. You just have to run hard, without thinking about it, and let the process happen. Consciously fiddling with your stride in the hope of accelerating its evolution toward greater efficiency not only can’t help but is
...more
Steve has seen some evidence to suggest that runners who train in groups and runners who train at relatively high intensities have better strides than runners of equal experience who train alone and runners who train at lower intensities. He thinks it’s possible that simply trying harder day after day may accelerate stride improvement. Runners who habitually push themselves to keep up with teammates or training partners, or who chase after challenging time standards, raise the stakes on their bodies, pressuring their bodies to figure things out faster.
His research suggested that struggling to keep up with naturally faster runners is one of the most powerful ways to improve running economy.
This progress was largely the result of improvement in his movement efficiency, as his aerobic engine was already well developed when he started running. But Dave’s running economy did not improve by means of any conscious meddling with his stride. Intuitively, he must have known better than to make that mistake. Instead, Dave’s stride improved because, as he said himself, he ran like a dog.
“I keep the intensity high,” Dave told one interviewer. “Even if I’m doing a longer run, I make a huge part of that run hard, if not the whole thing.”
The true keys to greatness—as the athletes themselves demonstrate on the proving grounds, and as Steve reaffirms in his lab—are contained in the baldest clichés. No pain, no gain. Effort is everything. Just do it. Run like a dog.
Mark Allen’s Total Triathlete,
Mindless performance may be especially helpful in endurance sports because of the supreme importance of the capacity to suffer. The more science and technical detail an athlete incorporates into the training process, the more distracted he becomes from the only thing that really matters: getting out the door and going hard.
Endorphin junkies are a dime a dozen. Dave Scott had become a self-described endorphin lunatic.
To paraphrase Dave Scott, something within us just can’t resist trying to “see what we can do” with these bodies and minds while we have them, no matter the price.
One of the first questions Dave Scott was asked after the greatest race ever run was how it felt. “It was kind of painfully enjoyable,” the Man said. “And I’m not sure I want to feel that again.”
