Mind over Muscle

What is it that prevents you from running or biking or swimming faster and farther than you ever have before? Well, obviously we all have certain physical limits. But there's more to it than physics and pure athleticism. For quite some time, exercise physiologist Tim Noakes has argued that there is a "central governor" in our brains that prevents us from giving everything we can, because going too hard can be dangerous. In the magazine The Walrus, writer Alex Hutchinson takes a long look at Noakes's research:

According to conventional physiology, steady pacing is the most efficient way to ration your energy stores. Its logic has been taken for granted since Aesop and his tortoise. But it is inherently limiting: to run at an even pace, you have to decide on your final finishing time, and thus set a ceiling on your potential achievement, before the starting gun fires. As a result, even pacing may produce better results on average, but it is less likely to produce dramatic outliers: jaw-droppingly fast (or slow) times. A 2006 study by Noakes and two colleagues confirmed this suspicion. Looking at the pacing patterns in a sample of men’s world records set at 5,000 and 10,000 metres, they found that the first and last kilometres were significantly faster than any other in sixty-five of the sixty-six records. To break a record, in other words, you must find a way to transcend conventional physiology...read more