Endure - Alex Hutchinson

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temperature hits a critical threshold of about 40 degrees Celsius. But Noakes takes this idea a step further, arguing that in real-world situations like running a 10K on a hot day, the brain gets involved long before you reach that critical temperature. You don’t hit 40 and keel over; you slow down and run at a pace that keeps you below 40.

      The most controversial claim is that this pacing instinct isn’t entirely voluntary: your brain forces you to slow down, long before you’re in real physiological distress. In experiments led by Noakes’s student Ross Tucker, cyclists started at a slower pace right from the outset when the temperature was high—and crucially, the amount of muscle recruited by the brain was also lower within the first few minutes. At a conscious level, the cyclists were trying just as hard (as their reported level of effort indicated), but fewer muscle fibers in their legs were contracting thanks to their central governor’s inbuilt caution. The difference between the traditional and revised views of the brain’s role, Tucker explained during my visit in Cape Town, is that “they’re really looking at the off switch, whereas we’re looking at the dimmer control.”

      It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of this debate. Over the course of my visit, I spent hours with various students, postdocs, and colleagues of Noakes, learning about the various tentacles of evidence that buttressed their brain-centered view of endurance. There were long-standing historical anomalies, like the puzzlingly low lactate levels observed when people exercise to exhaustion at high altitudes, contrary to what Hill’s model would predict. And there was a steady stream of new observations: an instant performance boost when you swish a carbohydrate drink in your mouth and then trick your brain by spitting it out; marathon runners setting world records despite supposedly crippling levels of dehydration; brain-altering drugs like Tylenol that boost endurance without any effect on the muscles or heart.

      But when I asked Noakes for the single most convincing piece of evidence in favor of his theory, he said, without hesitation, “the end spurt.” How could the runners at Comrades, after pushing themselves through 56 miles of hell, summon a finishing sprint to beat the 12-hour limit? Conventional physiology suggests that you get progressively more fatigued over the course of a run, as muscle fibers fail and fuel stores are emptied. But then, when the end is in sight, you speed up. Clearly your muscles were capable of going faster in the preceding miles; so why didn’t they? “That shows that our understanding of fatigue is totally wrong,” Noakes said. It must be the brain that holds you back during long efforts, and then releases the final reserves when you’re nearly finished and the danger is past.

      I always try to evaluate scientific theories dispassionately, based on evidence rather than anecdote. But in this case, my head was nodding involuntarily as Noakes spoke. This phenomenon wasn’t just familiar to me—it was, in some ways, my nemesis. In my mid-twenties, after a few injury-plagued years, I’d moved up from 1,500 to 5,000 meters. But every time I raced the longer distance, my pace would gradually tail off in the later stages of the race—and then I’d launch a sizzling last lap, leaving everyone (including myself) puzzled about why I had slowed down so much in the previous laps. At first I chalked it up to inexperience, and then to lack of concentration. And there may be some truth to both those explanations, but it felt like something deeper.

      By the time I ran what would turn out to be my fastest 5,000, on a perfect evening in Palo Alto, California, in 2003, I’d decided I needed a new mental strategy: I would pretend I was only running 4,000 meters, and simply not worry if I had to jog the last kilometer. I wanted to run 2:45 per kilometer, and my first three kilometers were 2:45, 2:45, 2:47. The moment of truth: I knuckled down and vowed to run the fourth kilometer as hard as I could—but little by little, I drifted back from the pack I was running with. My next split was a disappointing 2:53. That was as fast as I could move my legs, and my pace slowed even more as I entered the final kilometer. I’d bitten off more than I could chew and was paying the price.

      At most track races, officials mark the start of your final 400-meter lap by ringing a cowbell in your ear. It’s a handy Pavlovian cue that tells you that your suffering is almost over. And on that night on the Stanford track, I once again felt the curious and familiar transformation in my legs as the bell rang for me. I passed ten runners while running the last lap in around 57 seconds, a full 10 seconds faster than my average pace for the race. My last kilometer, at 2:42, was my fastest even though I only started sprinting with a lap to go. And—I can’t emphasize this enough—I was trying as hard as I could right up to the penultimate lap. A friend who’d come to watch asked if I was trying to impress her by slowing down late in the race so I could finish with a flourish. No, I said, I just … But I didn’t have an explanation. I didn’t understand it myself.

      As it turns out, it’s not just me. Noakes showed me a study that he, Tucker, and Michael Lambert had published in 2006, analyzing the pacing patterns of almost every world record set in the modern era in the men’s 800 meter, mile, 5,000, and 10,000 meter races. For the three longer races, the pattern was startlingly consistent: after a quick start, the record breakers would settle into a steady pace until the final stages of the race. Then, even though they were running faster than they’d ever run before, and their oxygen-starved muscles were presumably awash in a sea of fatigue-inducing metabolites, they accelerated. Of the 66 world records in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters dating back to the early 1920s, the last kilometer was either the fastest of the race or the second fastest (behind the opening kilometer) in all but one. I was willing to attribute my own uneven pacing to incompetence—but these were the finest runners in history on the best day of their lives, which suggests that the pattern is more deeply ingrained than a mere pacing error.

      In fact, there’s good reason to think that pacing is driven as much by instinct as by choice, according to Dominic Micklewright, a researcher at the University of Essex. Micklewright followed an unorthodox route to academia, going straight from high school to the Royal Navy, where he served as a diver on nuclear submarines for seven years, and then spending nine years as a police officer in London before studying sport and exercise psychology. His interest in pacing dates back to his training as a military diver, when he and the other trainees had to swim submerged to the other end of a 1,200-meter saltwater lake on Horsea Island, on Britain’s south coast, without using up their supply of air. “If they caught you breaching, you would get clobbered over the back of the head with an oar, or they’d throw in one of those underwater scare charges,” he recalls. With that incentive, you inevitably thought very carefully about the challenge of spending your energy—and oxygen—as frugally as possible.

      In 2012, Micklewright had more than a hundred schoolchildren ranging in age from five to fourteen complete a battery of tests to assess their cognitive development, in order to slot them into one of the four developmental stages proposed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget; then the kids ran a race lasting about four minutes. The younger kids in the two lower Piaget stages opted for the unfettered sprint-and-then-hang-on-for-dear-life approach, starting fast then steadily fading. In contrast, the kids in the two higher Piaget stages had already adopted the familiar U-shaped pacing profile that world-record holders use: a fast start, gradual slowing, then a fast finish. Sometime around the age of eleven or twelve, in other words, our brains have already learned to anticipate our future energy needs and hold back something in reserve—a relic, Micklewright speculated, of the delicate balance between searching for food and conserving energy deep in our evolutionary past.

      Not everyone buys Noakes’s argument that pacing patterns like the end spurt reveal the workings of a central governor. For example, it could be that you speed up at the end of a race because

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