The Curiously Elastic Limits of Endurance | Hacker News Reader

The Curiously Elastic Limits of Endurance

outsideonline.com

99 pointsanarbadalov33 comments

I ran in a couple of trail 50k's last year and decided to focus more on my training for next year's races so started working with a coach who has trained numerous olympic nordic skiers. I quickly realized that my training was completely incorrect and ineffective previously. He focuses maniacally on long hours of low intensity aerobic effort with very strict heart rate constraints mixed with strength and only occasional high intensity effort. I have seen impressive results after only 2.5 months. Here's an article he wrote: https://www.outsideonline.com/2270151/what-everyone-gets-wro...

A lot of amateur endurance athletes will hear about elite coaches or athletes saying things like "quality over quantity" or "less is more" and not realize that the context of those comments is something like: "I was training 40 hours a week but I realized if I did better if I dropped it to 30 hours a week with more specificity or harder hard days". They then use that to justify not doing more than their comparatively tiny workload, which is psychologically natural since you don't want to do more!

But until you get up to the point where more is too much, which is usually more than you imagine, more is usually more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZ48AE3TOI

I have a cousin that is in his 50's and runs 100K and 50K trail runs multiple times throughout the year. The guy ran from Santa Barabara to San Diego to his son's wedding! I don't have much point other than to say if you are anything like him and the people he runs with, you're crazy! ;)

I can relate to this.

I'm a master's swimmer, but I'm only really now picking up pace after having to take a couple of years off to properly build strength in my shoulders to carry on after a rotator cuff injury.

Around May 2016 I decided to try jumping back into the squad training after just under a year of rehab. It was my first session back; I was massively unfit. At the end of the session the coach got us to do a 100m race. I was up against a couple of guys who'd been faster than me in the session and was determined to show I hadn't slipped that much. I ended up swimming a 1:07 for the 100m free beating one of the faster guys. I couldn't believe the time. I don't really know what happened, but I REALLY wanted to win this race and just went for it. A few weeks after this my shoulder wasn't holding up to the training volume and I had to drop back into more gym rehab type stuff.

I finally got back into the pool properly around May of last year. The best time I've swum in a similar scenario since has been a 1:07 and I'm the fittest and strongest I've been for years.

Swimming is great because it doesn't reward effort as much as it rewards form. I came to swimming from a running / cycling background, and I quickly realized that extreme exertion was not the key to getting better speeds. It's only when I started to consciously focus on form and accepted being slower during training, that I saw much improvement.

Also, congrats on the 1:07! I'm not even close to that speed yet.

I don't agree with this sentiment, but I came to swimming from a swimming background. Maybe I just had the form down when I was so young I only ever had to think about the effort.

Was going to say that :) Once you get technique then you just have to hammer at it but with more technique

It applies to running, too. I've improved a ton after realizing the importance of training at low speeds as long as form (and yes, cardio endurance) continue to improve.

This sounds a lot like what Tim Ferris says about Total Immersion method / Terry Laughlin. So I'm curious if that was influential on you.

A 1:07 is really impressive after taking a year off. When I peaked as a club swimmer in high school I did :58 but that was while doing 9 practices a week. Definitely couldn't jump in a pool today and go anywhere near 1:10.

One thing I noticed was that my best races, especially distance races like the 500 or mile, were total statistic outliers relative to my other races. One year I swam the 500(SCY) for my school and averaged ~5:40 +/- 5 seconds. One night I had a really hot heat and stepped up to go 5:18. By the end of the season though I only had one race out of 10 go under 5:30.

I was never able to isolate what enabled me to unlock that extra something that night, but back then I was a teenager who rolled my eyes at 'the inner game of tennis' aspects to sports.

I swam the 500 as my main event and was fairly decent at it. It is crazy how mental that race is. I found drastically different results based on who was doing my card (for those that don't know, longer events use a plastic number to show the swimmer and the ref what lap swimmers are on). I knew a couple of people who could hold a 1:10 100yd pace for a T30, but couldn't get a 5:30 on a 500. Swimming is such a weird sport and the people are even weirder (mostly in a good way).

William James' essay The Energies of Men has some remarkable stories of endurance, and bodily transformations under extreme circumstances, in it.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Energies_of_Men

Thanks for this, I had never seen it before. I love William James' writing style - somewhat typically Victorian and ornate, but underneath the style, an incredibly lucid and original mind. From the linked essay:

Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

That one starts unusually ornately. But that's such a classic sentence:

To crown the whole pleasant catalogue, I was worn to a shadow by a constant diarrhœa, and consumed as much opium as would have done credit to my father-in-law.

Not bad for the 1907 Philosophical Review. My favourites are On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings (which led me to Stevenson, who's an even greater essayist) and its sequel What Makes a Life Significant?, but there are many great ones. The Ph D Octopus, The Moral Equivalent of War, etc etc or the very funny one On Some Hegelisms about when on nitrous oxide he recognized it as the key to Hegel's thought. And his book on religious experience, textbook on the principles of psychology, and other books are still well worth reading and very enjoyable reads.

'...brain and body are fundamentally intertwined, and to understand what defines your limits under any particular set of circumstances, you have to consider them both together'.

The 'considering' is at the foundations of many mystical and meditative traditions going back thousands of years.

Separately, for years when I ran I would time myself and stress about going faster over the same route, and enter races for the medal, t shirt and ranking amongst finishers. I realized that was not a useful way to get the most out of running and that I should try to make it a far more meditative, relaxing experience, and was surprised to find (when I did time myself one day out of curiosity) that I was running at the higher end of the elapsed times I had stressed about previously

In case anyone else is curious, the author's 1500m Olympic trial is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dSLUVmK1Ik

Alex Hutchinson, #251.

I always liked the story about the breaking of the 4 minute mile. It shows how easily our brains can box us in to particular views of reality, and how they act to further perpetuate this "reality". I bet that if a minute was, say, 65 seconds instead of 60, we still would have hit a "wall" trying to break the 4 minute mile.

The article states that the popular telling of that story is incorrect, it took 20 years after Bannister did it for 300 people to run sub-4 minute miles. And Landy might well have broken it on the day that he did even if Bannister hadn't done it.

I think there's actually something to the idea that 4 minutes is a real biological limit that can only be overcome through the right training, the right technique, and the right mindset, and that it took until recently to figure out how.

What's curious to me is how it lines up. I suspect that this is like something you see on Numberphile, where a seemingly unrelated geometric problem ends up getting solved through number theory. What a 'minute' is, exactly how much time it is, dates all the way back to prehistory. I don't think we should be that surprised that a biological limit should line up that neatly with our units of time.

It being a biological limit is certainly possible; your post is interesting and I don't want to discount it. But I really do think psychology plays a huge role in these stories. From my personal experience running track and field this phenomenon occurs rather frequently. All it takes is one person achieving a long-standing milestone for the rest of the team to quickly follow suit. I've seen similar things happen in non-physical competitive games, like chess and dota 2, at the highest level.

Maybe there is some kind of safety mechanism built into our brains preventing us from doing things that we've never observed or heard of being done. Brain: "No one's ever run sub-4 minutes, so I don't know for sure whether doing so would kill me or not. Better not try."

I wonder whether this may even dovetail with Tim Noakes’ “central govenor” theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_governor

Thanks, that's really interesting, including the Criticisms section. I think that there must be a mix of psychological and physiological factors at play.

Not sure how directly relevant this is but I used to get dead-tired if I had any less than eight hours of sleep. I had spent most of my life hearing about how I "needed" at least eight hours. Then I had a period of insomnia where I would regularly get three hours a night which challenged this deeply-held belief. My functioning was impaired, of course, but it was comparable to how I functioned on 7 hours of sleep prior. Now I can sleep six hours a night without problems, having broken through some psychological barrier.

What about the mile, is that lining-up unsurprising too?

A mile, historically, was defined as 1000 paces for reasons that were probably intrinsically tied to human endurance. So yeah.

You know I think you may be onto something here.

The human heart gets into trouble above 200-220 bpm. So a four minute mile is 1000 ‘paces’ in 800-880 beats. And for 4 minutes perhaps (for a marathon, definitely) you have to stay below your aerobic threshold which is probably below 160 bpm if you are good. That’s probably closer to 1.5 or two strides per heartbeat.

To run so fast a cheetah pumps its lungs in time with its gait. If the human leg has to, at the limits of endurance, synchronize with the diastolic pressure of circulatory system, I don’t think we would be too surprised.

In fact runners and cyclists already know that cadence matters and most amateurs start with a very low one.

And what is magical about 1000? Some very wooly thinking here.

the 4 minute mil started getting broken more often when people started using pacers.

then tracks got faster due to new materials

we started having more full time pros.

The mental barrier thing is possibly not a first order cause of any of this.

What I find the most interesting, is sometimes there a person who comes along, completely unaware of that limit, of the supposed difficulty or scale of the challenge (common knowledge among the others), and breaks that limit seemingly without effort. The story of George Dantzig is just one example that comes to mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig).

I think the vast majority of what we perceive as limits aren't real limits at all. Maybe that's a controversial statement, but there's little in the way of me doing most of I want to do except various fears and (largely) illusory limitations, conscious or not. I think this can apply to the HN crowd pretty easily -- for example, guys who don't apply to Google or who freeze up during the interview and don't know why.

Edit: I realize this sounds like a passage from a self-help book or motivational speech, but really, I've come to accept this as truth as I've gotten older, and I have many regrets over things I didn't do. I've also become skeptical over any kind of consensus regarding what is possible.

When talking about endurance running, my mind immediately jumps to Courtney Dauwalter. In Oct of 2017 she run the Moab 240 mile race by 10+ hours. She's had other "super hero" stories such as pushing through temporary blindless to finish another race. I don't know of any particular feature that allows her to achieve these feats of endurance but the "brain/body" connection seems to be huge part of it since her training volume/intensity doesn't seem to be that much different than her peers.

Being better at running a long way than peers at the same training volume is also easily explained by plain physical talent, which varies enormously.

The British military has funded studies of computer-based brain training protocols to enhance the endurance of its troops, with startling results

Anyone have anymore details on this?

https://www.runnersworld.com/sweat-science/brain-training-bo...

It's based on the Brain Endurance Training (BET), by Samuele Marcora of the university of Kent, who is quoted in the OP's article (for his definition of effort).

https://www.kent.ac.uk/sportsciences/people/profiles/marcora...

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