Digging deep

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This article was published 17/02/2018 (3002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before her event at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver eight years ago, Slovenian cross-country skier Petra Majdic fell three metres into a rocky ravine and broke four ribs, one of which eventually punctured and collapsed a lung.

And yet she made it through her qualifying round, the quarter-finals, the semis and then won a bronze medal in the final, after which she checked into a hospital.

How could she do that? How could she ignore excruciating pain and all the other psychological and physiological signals that were flashing “STOP!” in her brain.

Alex Hutchinson, an award-winning Toronto columnist for Runner’s World, Outside and the Globe and Mail, would say that, on one level, the answer to Majdic’s improbable feat is simple: it’s endurance — “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to give up.”

Those 11 words, first formulated by renowned psychobiologist Samuele Marcora, succinctly summarize Hutchinson’s timely treatise on the myriad and often-microscopic ingredients in play whenever we try harder — whether digging in the flower bed or diving to a depth of 300 feet, where the pain in lungs that have shrunk under pressure to the size of fists is “like lying on a searing barbecue.”

Fortunately for serious athletes — or any reader curious about what drives athletes at the Pyeongchang Olympics, for that matter — Marcora’s simple, 11-word answer is just the starting point of Hutchinson’s endlessly fascinating new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance.

Like the researchers he writes about, who were inordinately extreme competitors, Hutchinson personally experienced the limits of endurance twice as a long-distance runner in Canadian Olympic trials only to see his hopes dashed by injury.

With a PhD in physics from Cambridge, he returned to school in 2004 for a degree in journalism and a job at a daily newspaper in Ottawa. But it wasn’t long before his “obsession with decoding the mysteries of endurance” drew him away from the daily ink-stained grind in pursuit of answers as a freelance “running science geek.”

Hutchinson writes that the idea that became Endure was planted in 2009 when he discovered the work of groundbreaking physiologists like Marcora and Tim Noakes, who were upending the century-old paradigm that our bodies are “engines” with predictable limits of effort as a result of the interplay of six factors — pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst and fuel.

To be sure, as Hutchinson explains in chapters devoted to extensive reviews of the six factors, they each can significantly limit effort.

But they can’t explain how Majdic won a bronze medal despite the pain in her ribs and lung. Nor can they explain a whole range of astonishing feats that Hutchinson parades throughout the book.

How, for example, did Tom Boyle lift a car off a cyclist trapped underneath in an accident? Boyle’s effort was so great that he shattered eight teeth without realizing.

Why did Pablo Valencia survive in the Sonora Desert for eight days without food or water and not develop heatstroke while hydrated athletes routinely do? Valencia, by the way, was so desiccated that he looked like a mummy and his wounds did not bleed.

Did the certainty that rescue was just a satellite phone call away gull Henry Worsley into exceeding his limits while attempting to ski more than 1,700 kilometres across Antarctica? He was alone, pulling a 130-plus-kilogram sled for upwards of 16 hours a day for three months. When he died of organ failure shortly after being airlifted to Chile, was it because he had endured himself to death?

And if he had, or even if that’s possible, why is it that death from endurance, while commonly believed, is so rare as to be unproven?

The short answer, this time, is the brain.

Modern research techniques, building on generations of discovery, are demonstrating that the brain often acts as a “central governor” that reviews trillions of bits of information from billions of cells and moderates, subtly but measurably, effort.

The brain often rejects conscious demands for more effort, but not always. Marathons have been lost when leg muscles refuse to obey demands that they work faster, and they have been won when a failing runner suddenly “kicks” to the finish line at his fastest pace of the race.

And, as it turns out, muscles have sneaky ways to fool the brain when they want or need to.

The “mind” can fool the brain, too, with such simple techniques as thinking happy thoughts.

In fact, given that he has pretty much maxed out every other aspect of his training, Hutchinson concludes that “motivational self-talk training” is his best option for improved performance.

“Training is the cake,” he writes, “and belief is the icing.”

Gerald Flood is a former Winnipeg Free Press comment editor who long ago discovered that athletics is well worth reading about.