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November 17 - November 25, 2019
The problem was that the fat-adapted athletes became less efficient, requiring more oxygen to sustain their race pace.
You train to burn fat, House says, but you race on carbs. Once you’re in the mountains, in other words, you try, as Louise Burke counsels, to maximize every metabolic pathway you’ve got by hitting the carbohydrates as hard as you can.
Technology evolves, but when it evolves so quickly that it effectively picks winners, that’s a problem.
“The difference only is thinking,” he tells another reporter: “You think it’s impossible, I think it’s possible.”
Pacing, in Tucker’s formulation, is the process of comparing the effort you feel at any given point in a race to the effort you expect at that stage—an internal template that you develop and fine-tune from experience.
in my view, Marcora, Tucker, and Noakes are now saying essentially the same thing. Effort is what matters.
an inevitable question looms: how do you train effort? The standard answer, and still the best one, is that you train your body.
So anything that moves the “effort dial” in your head up or down will affect your endurance, even if it has no effect on your muscles or heart or VO2max.
In this sense, all training is brain training, even if it doesn’t specifically target the brain.
he and others have identified a cognitive trait called response inhibition, which involves overriding your initial instinct, as a key.
How do you improve your response inhibition? By inhibiting your responses, over and over, in a systematic way.
“Being boring is an important characteristic for inducing mental fatigue and, therefore, a brain training effect,”
We often think of races as “painful,” but physical pain is completely distinct from the sense of effort—the struggle to keep going against a mounting desire to stop—that usually limits race speed.
After twelve weeks, the physical-training-only group had improved their time to exhaustion by 42 percent; in comparison the physical-plus-brain-training group had improved by a whopping 126 percent.
In fact, while the control groups got worse at the cognitive task when their breathing was restricted, the elite groups actually got better—precisely the sort of performance under stress that enables you to dig a little deeper when the stakes are highest, whether in the heat of combat or at the end of a multi-day adventure race.
The goal, Paulus explains, is to cultivate “non-judgmental self-awareness”: for a marathoner, leg pain and shortness of breath become neutral sources of information, to be used for pacing, rather than emotionally charged warnings to panic about. “You learn to monitor how your body actually feels, while suspending judgment about it,” he says.
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Instead, he sees motivation, effort, and pain as distinct but interrelated factors that influence endurance through separate “processing loops” between various brain regions.
In the end, when it comes down to two guys on a bike, maybe that’s the real secret weapon: believing that you have another gear.
a sense, every stride you take during a race is a microdecision: will you speed up, slow down, or maintain your current pace?
Even in training sessions, with nothing but pride on the line, he noticed that Kenyan and Western runners had markedly different mentalities. The Kenyan up-and-comers would simply run with the leaders—often international champions—for as long as possible, then drop out or start jogging when they could no longer keep up. Coolsaet and other foreigners, meanwhile, would maintain a steady but sustainable pace.
Instead of a consistent string of pretty good performance, he opted for a few great ones mixed in with some undeniable stinkers—which, when I thought about it, was a pretty good trade.
So if it’s not just about money, why do Kenyans run the way they do?
it comes down to belief. Even the humblest Kenyan runner, he noticed, wakes up every morning with the firm conviction that today, finally, will be his or her day. They run with the leaders because they think they can beat them, and if harsh reality proves that they can’t, they regroup and try again the next day. And that belief, fostered by the longstanding international dominance of generations of Kenyan runners, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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placebos can produce measurable biochemical changes.
In other tasks, subjects set higher initial goals and tried for longer before giving up when they had their lucky charms with them—evidence that what psychologists call “self-efficacy,” or a belief in their own competence and success, altered their behavior in ways that became self-fulfilling, like the aggressive racing of Kenyan runners.11
Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that continue to linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game.
“You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can.”
A vast body of sports-specific studies back this insight up, using various forms of deception to trick people into pushing harder or for longer than they normally can.
The task was simple: alternate two minutes hard with one minute easy and repeat twenty times.
But according to a 2006 analysis by University of Nottingham researcher David Gardner, winning times at major races like the Kentucky Derby and the Epsom Derby have remained stagnant since about 1950. Over the same period, winning times at major marathons such as the Olympics continued to drop by more than 15 percent.
Philosophers make a distinction between justified beliefs and true beliefs.
Run a lot of miles Some faster than your race pace Rest once in a while22
All the blandishments of modern sports science—altitude tents and heart-rate-variability tracking and bioengineered sports drinks and so on—amount to minor tinkering compared to the more elemental task of pushing your mind and body in training, day after day, for years.
As elite track coach Steve Magness has written, technological enhancements like running with a GPS watch “slacken the bond between perception and action.”
In any honest accounting, training is the cake and belief is the icing—but sometimes that thin smear of frosting makes all the difference.
When I line up for a race, I remind myself that my fiercest opponent will be my own brain’s well-meaning protective circuitry.
