Алекс Хатчинсон – Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance (страница 2)

In 1991, Michael Joyner, an ex-collegiate runner from the University of Arizona who was completing a medical residency at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, proposed a provocative thought experiment. The limits of endurance running, according to physiologists, could be quantified with three parameters: aerobic capacity, also known as VO₂max, which is analogous to the size of a car’s engine; running economy, which is an efficiency measure like gas mileage; and lactate threshold, which dictates how much of your engine’s power you can sustain for long periods of time. Researchers had measured these quantities in many elite runners, who tended to have very good values in all three parameters and exceptional values in one or two. What would happen, Joyner wondered, if a single runner happened to have exceptional—but humanly possible—values in all three parameters? His calculations suggested that this runner would be able to complete a marathon in 1:57:58.

The reactions to his paper, which was published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, were mostly quizzical. “A lot of people scratched their heads,” Joyner recalls. The world record at the time, after all, was 2:06:50, which the Ethiopian runner Belayneh Densimo had run in 1988. A sub-two-hour marathon was not on anyone’s radar—in fact, when Joyner first presented his ideas in the mid-1980s, the idea was considered so preposterous that his paper was initially rejected for publication. But the seemingly outrageous time was not a prediction, Joyner emphasized—it was a challenge to his fellow scientists. In some ways, his calculation was the apotheosis of a century’s worth of attempts to quantify the outer limits of human endurance. This is how fast a human can run, the equations said. So what explained the chasm between theory and reality? Was it simply a question of waiting for the perfect runner to be born or the perfect race to be run—or was something missing from our understanding of endurance?

Time passed. In 1999, the Moroccan runner Khalid Khannouchi became the first person to dip below 2:06. Four years later, Paul Tergat of Kenya breached 2:05; five years after that Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia broke 2:04. By 2011, when Joyner and two colleagues published an updated paper in the Journal of Applied Physiology titled “The Two-Hour Marathon: Who and When?” the idea no longer seemed ridiculous. In fact, the journal published an unprecedented thirty-eight responses from other researchers, speculating on the various factors that might bring the barrier closer. In late 2014, shortly after Dennis Kimetto of Kenya posted the first sub-2:03, a consortium led by a British sports scientist named Yannis Pitsiladis announced plans to break the two-hour barrier within five years.

Still, two minutes and fifty-seven seconds remained a substantial gap. Also in 2014, Runner’s World magazine asked me to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the physiological, psychological, and environmental factors that would need to come together for someone to run a two-hour marathon. After reviewing mountains of data and consulting experts around the world, including Joyner, I presented ten pages of charts, graphs, maps, and arguments, concluding with my own prediction: the barrier would fall, I wrote, in 2075.

That prediction leapt immediately to mind in October 2016, when I got an unexpected call from David Willey, then the editor in chief of Runner’s World. Nike, the biggest sports brand in the world, was preparing to unveil a “top-secret” project that aimed to deliver a sub-two marathon in just six months. We were being offered the opportunity to go behind the scenes to cover the initiative, which they’d dubbed Breaking2. I didn’t know whether to laugh or roll my eyes, but I couldn’t say no. I agreed to fly to Nike’s headquarters, in the Portland, Oregon, suburb of Beaverton, a few weeks later to hear their pitch. If someone had to debunk an overhyped marketing exercise, I figured the research for my earlier Runner’s World piece had left me as well equipped as anyone.

As my guest spot on the television broadcast wraps up, Kipchoge hits twenty-three miles. It’s May 6, 2017, exactly sixty-three years to the day after Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile. I’m nearly frantic to get track-side now—but I’m not sure how to get down from my lofty perch in the broadcast booth. Peering over the edge, I briefly contemplate swinging myself over the railing and risking the drop. But a stern glance from a nearby security guard dissuades me. Instead, I head back over the causeway that connects the broadcast booth to the main building’s multistory maze of dead-end hallways and unlabeled doors. I don’t have time to wait for a guide. I break into a run.

CHAPTER 1

The Unforgiving Minute

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it … .

—RUDYARD KIPLING

On a frigid Saturday night in the university town of Sherbrooke, Quebec, in February 1996, I was pondering—yet again—one 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 world’s 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 straightaway—just 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 “nearly man.”

But Landy’s enigma isn’t that he wasn’t quite good enough. It’s that he clearly was. In pursuit of the record, he had run 4:02 on six different occasions, and eventually declared, “Frankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound much, but to me it’s like trying to break through a brick wall.” 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 fifth of a second in that era), cleaving almost four seconds off his previous best and finishing 15 yards ahead of four-minute pace—a 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, I’d been pursuing my own, lesser four-minute barrier—for 1,500 meters, a race that’s 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 I’d 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 we’d heard, possibly apocryphal, was that the job of designing the Sherbrooke indoor track had been assigned to the university’s engineering department as a student project. Tasked with calculating the optimal angles for a 200-meter track, they’d plugged in numbers corresponding to the centripetal acceleration experienced by world-class 200-meter sprinters—forgetting 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 couldn’t 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 women’s 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?