Chapter 1
The Unforgiving Minute
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty secondsā worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything thatās in it. . . .
āRUDYARD KIPLING
On a frigid Saturday night in the university town of Sherbrooke, Quebec, in February 1996, I was ponderingāyet againāone of the great enigmas of endurance: John Landy. The stocky Australian is one of the most famous bridesmaids in sport, the second man in history to run a sub-four-minute mile. In the spring of 1954, after years of concerted effort, centuries of timed races, millennia of evolution, Roger Bannister beat him to it by just forty-six days. The enduring image of Landy, immortalized in countless posters and a larger-than-life bronze statue in Vancouver, British Columbia, comes from later that summer, at the Empire Games, when the worldās only four-minute milers clashed head-to-head for the first and only time. Having led the entire race, Landy glanced over his left shoulder as he entered the final straightawayājust as Bannister edged past on his right. That split-second tableau of defeat confirmed him as, in the words of a British newspaper headline, the quintessential ānearly man.ā
But Landyās enigma isnāt that he wasnāt quite good enough. Itās that he clearly was. In pursuit of the record, he had run 4:02 on six different occasions, and eventually declared, āFrankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound much, but to me itās like trying to break through a brick wall.ā Then, less than two months after Bannister blazed the trail, Landy ran 3:57.9 (his official mark in the record books is 3:58.0, since times were rounded to the nearest fift h of a second in that era), cleaving almost four seconds off his previous best and finishing 15 yards ahead of four-minute paceāa puzzlingly rapid, and bittersweet, transformation.
Like many milers before me and since, I was a Bannister disciple, with a creased and nearly memorized copy of his autobiography in permanent residence on my bedside table; but in that winter of 1996 I was seeing more and more Landy when I looked in the mirror. Since the age of fifteen, Iād been pursuing my own, lesser four-minute barrierāfor 1,500 meters, a race thatās about 17 seconds shorter than a mile. I ran 4:02 in high school, and then, like Landy, hit a wall, running similar times again and again over the next four years. Now, as a twenty-year-old junior at McGill University, I was starting to face the possibility that Iād squeezed out every second my body had to offer. During the long bus ride from Montreal to Sherbrooke, where my teammates and I were headed for a meaningless early-season race on one of the slowest tracks in Canada, I remember staring out the window into the swirling snow and wondering if my long-sought moment of Landyesque transformation would ever arrive.
The story weād heard, possibly apocryphal, was that the job of designing the Sherbrooke indoor track had been assigned to the universityās engineering department as a student project. Tasked with calculating the optimal angles for a 200-meter track, theyād plugged in numbers corresponding to the centripetal acceleration experienced by world-class 200-meter sprintersāforgetting the key fact that some people might want to run more than one lap at a time. The result was more like a cycling velodrome than a running track, with banks so steep that even most sprinters couldnāt run in the outside lanes without tumbling inward. For middle-distance runners like me, even the inside lane was ankle-breakingly awkward; races longer than a mile had to be held on the warm-up loop around the inside of the track.
To break four minutes, I would need to execute a perfectly calibrated run, pacing each lap just two-tenths of a second faster than my best time of 4:01.7. Sherbrooke, with its amusement-park track and an absence of good competition, was not the place for this supreme effort, I decided. Instead, I would run as easily as possible and save my energy for the following week. Then, in the race before mine, I watched my teammate Tambra Dunn sprint fearlessly to an enormous early lead in the womenās 1,500, click off lap after metronomic lap all alone, and finish with a scorching personal best time that qualified her for the national collegiate championships. Suddenly my obsessive calculating and endless strategizing seemed ridiculous and overwrought. I was here to run a race; why not just run as hard as I could?
Reaching the ālimits of enduranceā is a concept that seems yawningly obvious, until you actually try to explain it. Had you asked me in 1996 what was holding me back from sub-four, I would have mumbled something about maximal heart rate, lung capacity, slow-twitch muscle fibers, lactic acid accumulation, and various other buzzwords Iād picked up from the running magazines I devoured. On closer examination, though, none of those explanations hold up. You can hit the wall with a heart rate well below max, modest lactate levels, and muscles that still twitch on demand. To their frustration, physiologists have found that the will to endure canāt be reliably tied to any single physiological variable.
Part of the challenge is that endurance is a conceptual Swiss Army knife. Itās what you need to finish a marathon; itās also what enables you to keep your sanity during a cross-country flight crammed into the economy cabin with a flock of angry toddlers. The use of the word endurance in the latter case may seem metaphorical, but the distinction between physical and psychological endurance is actually less clear-cut than it appears. Think of Ernest Shackletonās ill-fated Antarctic expedition, and the crewās two-year struggle for survival after their ship, the Endurance, was crushed in the ice in 1915. Was it the toddlers-on-a-plane type of endurance that enabled them to persevere, or straightforward physical fortitude? Can you have one without the other?
A suitably versatile definition that I like, borrowing from researcher Samuele Marcora, is that endurance is āthe struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.ā Thatās actually Marcoraās description of āeffortā rather than endurance (a distinction weāll explore further in Chapter 4), but it captures both the physical and mental aspects of endurance. Whatās crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty secondsā worth of distance run.
The time that elapses can be seconds, or it can be years. During the 2015 National Basketball Association playoffs, LeBron Jamesās biggest foe wasāwith all due respect to Golden State defender Andre Iguodalaāfatigue. Heād played 17,860 minutes in the preceding five seasons, more than 2,000 minutes ahead of anyone else in the league. In the semis, he surprisingly asked to be pulled from a game during a tense overtime period, changed his mind, drained a three-pointer followed by a running jumper with 12.8 seconds left to seal the victory, then collapsed to the floor in a widely meme-ified swoon after the buzzer. By Game 4 of the finals, he could barely move: āI gassed out,ā he admitted after being held scoreless in the final quarter. Itās not that he was acutely out of breath; it was the steady drip of fatigue accumulating over days, weeks, and months that just as surely pushed James to the limits of his endurance.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, even the greatest sprinters in the world fight against what John Smith, the coach of former 100-meter world-record holder Maurice Greene, euphemistically calls the āNegative Acceleration Phase.ā The race may be over in ten seconds, but most sprinters hit their top speed after 50 to 60 meters, sustain it briefly, then start to fade. Usain Boltās ability to stride magisterially away from his competitors at the end of a race? A testament to his endurance: heās slowing down a little less (or a little later) than everyone else. In Boltās 9.58-second world-record race at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, his last 20 meters was five hundredths of a second slower than the previous 20 meters, but he still extended his lead over the rest of the field.
At the same world championships, Bolt went on to set the 200-meter world record with a time of 19.19 seconds. A crucial detail: he ran the first half of the race in 9.92 secondsāan amazing time, considering the 200 starts on a curve, but still slower than his 100-meter record. Itās barely perceptible, but he was pacing himself, deliberately spreading his energy out to maximize his performance over the whole distance. This is why the psychology and physiology of endurance are inextricably linked: any task lasting longer than a dozen or so seconds requires decisions, whether conscious or unconscious, on how hard to push and when. Even in repeated all-out weightlifting effortsābrief five-second pulls that youād think would be a pure measure of muscular forceāstudies have found that we canāt avoid pacing ourselves: your āmaximumā force depends on how many reps you think you have left.
This inescapable importance of pacing is why endurance athletes are obsessed with their splits. As John L. Parker Jr. wrote in his cult running classic, Once a Runner, āA runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.ā In my race in Sherbrooke, I knew I needed to run each 200-meter lap in just under 32 seconds in order to break four minutes, and I had spent countless training hours learning the feel of this exact pace. So it was a shock, an eye-widening physical jolt to my system, to hear the timekeeper call out, as I completed my first circuit of the track, āTwenty-seven!ā
The science of how we pace ourselves turns out to be surprisingly complex (as weāll see in later chapters). You judge whatās sustainable based not only on how you feel, but on how that feeling compares to how you expected to feel at that point in the race. As I started my second lap, I had to reconcile two conflicting inputs: the intellectual knowledge that I had set off at a recklessly fast pace, and the subjective sense that I felt surprisingly, exhilaratingly good. I fought off the panicked urge to slow down, and came through the second lap in 57 secondsāand still felt good. Now I knew for sure that something special was happening.
As the race proceeded, I stopped paying attention to the split times. They were so far ahead of the 4:00 schedule Iād memorized that they no longer conveyed any useful information. I simply ran, hoping to reach the finish before the gravitational pull of reality reasserted its grip on my legs. I crossed the line in 3 minutes, 52.4 seconds, a personal best by a full nine seconds. In that one race, Iād improved more than my cumulative improvement since my first season of running, five years earlier. Poring through my training logsāas I did that night, and have many times sinceārevealed no hint of the breakthrough to come. My workouts suggested, at most, incremental gains compared to previous years.
After the race, I debriefed with a teammate who had timed my lap splits for me. His watch told a very different story of the race. My first lap had taken 30 seconds, not 27; my second lap was 60, not 57. Perhaps the lap counter calling the splits at the finish had started his watch three seconds late; or perhaps his effort to translate on the fly from French to English for my benefit had resulted in a delay of a few seconds. Either way, heād misled me into believing that I was running faster than I really was, while feeling unaccountably good. As a result, Iād unshackled myself from my pre-race expectations and run a race nobody could have predicted.
After Roger Bannister came the delugeāat least, thatās how the story is often told. Typical of the genre is The Winning Mind Set, a 2006 self-help book by Jim Brault and Kevin Seaman, which uses Bannisterās four-minute mile as a parable about the importance of self-belief. ā[W]ithin one year, 37 others did the same thing,ā they write. āIn the year after that, over 300 runners ran a mile in less than four minutes.ā Similar larger-than-life (that is, utterly fictitious) claims are a staple in motivational seminars and across the Web: once Bannister showed the way, others suddenly brushed away their mental barriers and unlocked their true potential.
As interest in the prospects of a sub-two-hour marathon heated up, this narrative cropped up frequently as evidence that the new challenge, too, was primarily psychological. Skeptics, meanwhile, asserted that belief had nothing to do with itāthat humans, in their current form, were simply incapable of running that fast for that long. The debate, like its predecessor six decades ago, offered a compelling real-world test bed for exploring the various theories about endurance and human limits that scientists have been investigating. But to draw any meaningful conclusions, itās important to get the facts right. For one thing, Landy was the only other person to join the sub-four club within a year of Bannisterās run, and just four others followed the next year. It wasnāt until 1979, more than twenty years later, that Spanish star JosĆ© Luis GonzĆ”lez became the three hundredth man to break the barrier.
And thereās more to Landyās sudden breakthrough, after being stuck for so many races, than simple mind over muscle. His six near-misses all came at low-key meets in Australia where competition was sparse and weather often unfavorable. He finally embarked on the long voyage to Europe, where tracks were fast and competition plentiful, in the spring of 1954āonly to discover, just three days after he arrived, that Bannister had already beaten him to the goal. In Turku, he had a pacer for the first time, a local runner who led the first lap and a half at a brisk pace. And more important, he had real competition: Chris Chataway, one of the two men who had paced Bannisterās sub-four run, was nipping at Landyās heels until partway through the final lap. Itās not hard to believe that Landy would have broken four that day even if Roger Bannister had never existed.
Still, I canāt entirely dismiss the mindās roleāin no small part because of what happened in the wake of my own breakthrough. In my next attempt at a fast time after Sherbrooke, I ran 3:49. In the race after that, I crossed the line, as confused as I was exhilarated, in 3:44, qualifying me for that summerās Olympic Trials. In the space of three races, Iād somehow been transformed. The TV coverage of the 1996 trials is on YouTube, and as the camera lingers on me before the start of the 1,500 final (Iām lined up next to Graham Hood, the Canadian record-holder at the time), you can see that Iām still not quite sure how I got there. My eyes keep darting around in panic, as if I expect to glance down and discover that Iām still in my pajamas.
I spent a lot of time over the next decade chasing further breakthroughs, with decidedly mixed results. Knowing (or believing) that your ultimate limits are all in your head doesnāt make them any less real in the heat of a race. And it doesnāt mean you can simply decide to change them. If anything, my head held me back as often as it pushed me forward during those years, to my frustration and befuddlement. āIt should be mathematical,ā is how U.S. Olympic runner Ian Dobson described the struggle to understand the ups and downs of his own performances, ābut itās not.ā I, too, kept searching for the formulaāthe one that would allow me to calculate, once and for all, my limits. If I knew that I had run as fast as my body was capable of, I reasoned, Iād be able to walk away from the sport with no regrets.
At twenty-eight, after an ill-timed stress fracture in my sacrum three months before the 2004 Olympic Trials, I finally decided to move on. I returned to school for a journalism degree, and then started out as a general assignment reporter with a newspaper in Ottawa. But I found myself drawn back to the same lingering questions. Why wasnāt it mathematical? What held me back from breaking four for so long, and what changed when I did? I left the newspaper and started writing as a freelancer about endurance sportsānot so much about who won and who lost, but about why. I dug into the scientific literature and discovered that there was a vigorous (and sometimes rancorous) ongoing debate about those very questions.
Physiologists spent most of the twentieth century on an epic quest to understand how our bodies fatigue. They cut the hind legs off frogs and jolted the severed muscles with electricity until they stopped twitching; lugged cumbersome lab equipment on expeditions to remote Andean peaks; and pushed thousands of volunteers to exhaustion on treadmills, in heat chambers, and on every drug you can think of. What emerged was a mechanisticāalmost mathematicalāview of human limits: like a car with a brick on its gas pedal, you go until the tank runs out of gas or the radiator boils over, then you stop.
But thatās not the whole picture. With the rise of sophisticated techniques to measure and manipulate the brain, researchers are finally getting a glimpse...
