When I finished, I looked at the time: forty-five minutes. Wait — what?!? How could that be? Yep. I double-checked: forty-five minutes, as compared to my usual forty-three. So apparently all of that exhausting, red-faced, full-on push-push-push I had been doing had given me only a 4 percent boost. I could just take it easy and get 96 percent of the results.

