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CHAPTER 4 The Conscious Quitter
ОглавлениеSince the days of Marco Polo, no trip along the Silk Road has ever been straightforward—and Samuele Marcora’s 13,000-mile motorcycle ride from London overland to Beijing in 2013 was no exception. Unlike Polo, Marcora didn’t encounter any dragons or men with dogs’ faces along the route, but he and his trip-mates did spend seventeen hours crossing the Caspian Sea on a rusty Soviet-era freighter; navigate the crumbling roads and stifling bureaucracy of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan (the ’Stans, as he refers to them affectionately); skid along endless soft sand and mud trails in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau, up to 16,700 feet above sea level, for two weeks; and splash through monsoon-drenched roads on the final leg of their journey through China. Oh, and he also broke his ankle in Uzbekistan and shattered a rib on the road from Everest Base Camp, making the bone-rattling corrugated roads of Central Asia even more painful than normal.
In a sense, all of these stressors were part of the plan. Their inevitability was the reason Marcora, an exercise scientist in the University of Kent’s Endurance Research Group, joined the eighty-day expedition, which was organized by adventure motorcycling outfitter GlobeBusters. Packed on the back of Marcora’s BMW R1200GS Triple Black was his “lab in a pannier,” crammed with portable scientific equipment to perform daily measurements of the trip’s mounting mental and physical toll, with himself and his thirteen fellow riders as lab rats: swallowable thermometer pills to record core temperature, “bioharness” straps to record heart rhythms and breathing rate, a finger-mounted oximeter to measure oxygen saturation in the blood, a grip-strength tester to measure muscular fatigue, a portable reaction-time device to assess cognitive fatigue, and more.
Marcora’s interest in adventure motorcycling dates back to his teens. His first long trip, as a fourteen-year-old growing up in northern Italy, was a solo ride of more than 100 miles from his hometown outside Milan to Lake Maggiore, near the Swiss border, to visit his girlfriend. He taped a map to the gas tank of his 50cc Fantic Caballero dirt bike and navigated on back roads, to avoid the highways he wasn’t yet allowed to drive on. But he also nurtured an interest in bikes of the nonpowered variety—and, more broadly, in the enduring riddle of endurance. He trained as an exercise physiologist, and early in his career served as a consultant for Mapei Sport Service, a research center charged with providing a scientific edge for one of the top road cycling teams in the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, publishing research on mountain biking and soccer. His focus, as for thousands of other physiologists around the world, was on figuring out how to extend the limits of the human body by a percent here and a fraction of a percent there.
It was his mother—a very important figure in any Italian man’s life, he says, only half-jokingly—who gave his career trajectory a crucial nudge in a new direction. In 2001 she was diagnosed with thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura, a rare autoimmune disorder that causes tiny blood clots to form in small blood vessels throughout the body. After one attack, she was left with kidney damage that necessitated seven years of dialysis and, eventually, a transplant. What puzzled her son was the seemingly subjective nature of the extreme fatigue that she and other patients with similar conditions endured, which fluctuated rapidly and couldn’t be clearly linked to any single physical root cause—a disconnect reminiscent of other enigmatic conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome. The feeling of fatigue was debilitating, but from the usual below-the-neck perspective of an exercise physiologist, there was seemingly nothing to fix.
This riddle led Marcora to the brain—and to tackle it, he decided he needed to learn more about what brain experts already knew. In 2006, he took a sabbatical from his teaching position at the University of Bangor, in Wales, to take courses in the university’s psychology department. Over the next few years, he formulated a new “psychobiological” model of endurance, integrating exercise physiology, motivational psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. In his view, the decision to speed up, slow down, or quit is always voluntary, not forced on you by the failure of your muscles. Fatigue, in other words, ultimately resides in the brain—an insight as relevant to motorcyclists as to marathoners. As Marcora rolled along the Silk Road collecting data on the mental and physical performance of his fellow adventure riders, he was gathering support for his contention that mind and muscle are inextricably linked—a brain-centered view of endurance, like Tim Noakes’s central governor, but with several key differences.
In 2011, I drove 120 miles through Australia’s Blue Mountains from Sydney, where I was living at the time, to an old gold-rush town in the country’s sparsely populated interior called Bathurst. The local campus of Charles Sturt University was hosting an international conference called “The Future of Fatigue: Defining the Problem”—a title that reflected the continuing controversy and confusion surrounding even the most basic concepts in endurance research. “Every time I say the word ‘fatigue’ I have to put it in quotes,” joked one of the hosts, “because I’m not even sure what it means.” Scientists from around the world had gathered to present their ideas and try to hash out their differences. One of the featured speakers, and the main reason I’d decided to make the trip, was Samuele Marcora.
Marcora had made his first big splash two years earlier, not just among researchers but among the New York Times–reading public, with a provocative study of mental fatigue. He’d asked sixteen volunteers to complete a pair of time-to-exhaustion tests on a stationary bike. Before one of the tests, the subjects spent 90 minutes performing a mentally fatiguing computer task that involved watching a series of letters flash on a screen, and clicking different buttons as quickly as possible depending on which letters appeared. It’s not a particularly difficult task, but it requires sustained focus—and doing it for 90 minutes is definitely draining. Before the other cycling test, the subjects spent the same 90 minutes watching a pair of bland documentaries (“World Class Trains—The Venice Simplon Orient Express” and “The History of Ferrari—The Definitive Story”), specifically chosen to be “emotionally neutral.”
Depending on how you look at it, the results were either utterly predictable or, from the perspective of textbook physiology, inexplicable. After the mentally draining computer game, the subjects gave up 15.1 percent sooner in the cycling test, stopping on average at 10 minutes and 40 seconds compared to 12 minutes and 34 seconds. It wasn’t because of any detectable physiological fatigue: heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen consumption, lactate levels, and a host of other metabolic measurements were identical during the two trials. Motivation levels, as measured by psychological questionnaires immediately before the cycling tests, were the same—helped along by a £50 prize for top performance. The only difference was that, right from the very first pedal stroke, the mentally fatigued subjects reported higher levels of perceived exertion. When their brains were tired, pedaling a bike simply felt harder.
The system Marcora used to measure perceived exertion was called the Borg Scale, named for Swedish psychologist Gunnar Borg, who pioneered its use in the 1960s. Though there are many variations, Borg’s original scale ran from 6 (“no effort at all”) to a maximum of 20 (the penultimate value, 19, was defined as “very, very hard”), with the numbers corresponding very roughly to your expected heart rate divided by ten. A Borg score of 13 to 14, for example, corresponds to an effort you’d call “somewhat hard,” which would produce a heart rate of 130 to 140 beats per minute in most people. But Borg viewed the effort scale as far more than a convenient shortcut for researchers whose heart-rate monitor ran out of batteries. “In my opinion,” he wrote, “perceived exertion is the single best indicator of the degree of physical strain,” since it integrates information from muscles and joints, the cardiovascular and respiratory systems, and the central nervous system.
In his talk at the conference in Bathurst, Marcora took this argument a step further. Perceived exertion—what we’ll refer to in this book as your sense of effort—isn’t just a proxy for what’s going on in the rest of your body, he argued. It’s the final arbiter, the only thing that matters. If the effort feels easy, you can go faster; if it feels too hard, you stop. That may sound obvious, or even tautological, but it’s a profound statement—because, as we’ll discover, there are lots of ways you can alter your sense of effort, and thus your apparent physical limits, without altering what’s happening in your muscles. Case in point: getting mentally fatigued increases your sense of effort (by between one and two points on the Borg scale, in Marcora’s protocol) and thus reduces endurance. By definition, the cyclists always decided to quit as their perceived exertion approached the maximum of 20; they just reached that point sooner when they were mentally fatigued.
If effort is the yin of Marcora’s psychobiological model, motivation is the yang. We’re not always willing to push to an effort of 20, which is one reason athletes rarely produce world records or even personal bests in training. In his talk, Marcora offered a now-classic illustration of this, from a 1986 experiment by French researcher Michel Cabanac. Cabanac asked volunteers to sit bent-legged against a wall with no chair for as long as they could, offering varying rewards for each 20-second period they stayed in position. When the subjects were offered 0.2 francs per 20 seconds, their quads gave out after just over two minutes, on average; when they were offered 7.8 francs per 20 seconds, their endurance magically doubled. If the moment of collapse was dictated by a failure of the muscles, how did the muscles know about the richer payoff?
Marcora himself produced a similar mind-over-muscle demonstration with a group of elite rugby players who competed in a time-to-exhaustion cycling test. At an average target power of 242 watts, which corresponded to 80 percent of their peak power, the players lasted for about 10 minutes, with cash prizes to ensure they fully exhausted themselves. As soon as they gave up—within three to four seconds—they were asked to see how much power they could generate in a single 5-second burst of pedaling. Curiously, although they had just declared themselves incapable of producing 242 watts, they managed to average 731 watts during this five-second sprint. It follows that the subjects didn’t stop the test because their muscles were physically incapable of producing the required power; instead, the researchers argued, it was perception of effort that mattered.
At the exercise physiology conference in Bathurst, Marcora laid out his case with characteristic zeal. Amid the mostly uniform crowd of tracksuit-clad ex-athletes, he cut a swashbuckling figure, with untucked shirt, perma stubbled jaw, and casual asides about his plan to motorcycle along Australia’s Great Ocean Road after the conference. At one point, he showed a bewilderingly complex slide taken from a recent paper describing the conventional model of endurance fatigue—a flow chart with forty-four different boxes ranging from heart rate to “mitochondrial density/enzyme activity”—and then compared it to the equations for general relativity and quantum mechanics. “Physicists can explain the whole universe with two theories, and they’re not happy with that,” he said. “Endurance performance is complicated, but it’s not more complicated than the entire universe!”
The simple alternative, Marcora argued, is that anything that moves the “effort dial” in your head up or down affects how far or fast you can run. All the usual physical cues—dehydration, tired muscles, a pounding heart—contribute to how hard an effort feels. Athletes train their bodies to adapt to those cues, and over time the effort of running at a given pace gets lower. But less obvious factors, like mental fatigue, also contribute to how hard your run feels—and trying to hold marathon pace for hours and hours, for example, is pretty taxing on the brain. This, Marcora told the conference, leads to a radical idea: If you could train the brain to become more accustomed to mental fatigue, then—just like the body—it would adapt and the task of staying on pace would feel easier. “I have an eye for things that at a superficial level seem crazy,” he said. “If I tell somebody, okay, I’m going to improve your endurance performance by making you sit in front of a computer and do things on a keyboard, you will think I’m nuts. But if something can fatigue you, and you repeat it over time systematically, you’ll adapt and get better at the task. That’s the basis of physical training. So my reasoning is simple: We should be able to get the same effect by using mental fatigue.”
This was an unexpectedly bold prediction, so I cornered Marcora during a break after his talk to find out more. He was designing a study to test whether “brain endurance training”—weeks of doing mentally fatiguing computer tasks—could, without any change in physical training, make people faster. I pestered him for details and asked if I could try it. He patiently answered my questions, then added a warning. “People who have done these mental fatigue studies—it’s not nice,” he said. “It’s really bad. They hate you at the end of the task.”
In June 1889, as the academic term at the University of Turin drew to a close, a physiologist named Angelo Mosso conducted a series of experiments on his fellow professors before and after they administered their year-end oral exams. He attached a two-kilogram weight to a string, and asked the professors to raise and lower the weight every two seconds by flexing their middle fingers, and then repeated the task using electric shocks to force the fingers to contract. The number of contractions they managed after three and a half hours of grilling their students was dramatically reduced compared to their baseline performance—a clear indication that “intellectual labor” had sapped their muscular endurance.
Mosso’s results, which were collected in an influential text called La Fatica (“Fatigue”) in 1891, were the first scientific demonstration of the physical effects of mental fatigue. Like later fatigue researchers such as A. V. Hill and David Bruce Dill, Mosso was motivated by concerns about industrial working conditions. For Mosso, the working-class son of an impoverished carpenter, the conditions in sulfur mines and Sicilian farms, particularly for child laborers, amounted to an injustice “worse than slavery, worse than the dungeon.” Just as mental fatigue sapped physical strength, he argued, physical fatigue stunted mental growth in overworked child miners, so that “those who survive become wicked, villainous, and cruel.” By rigorously measuring the effects of fatigue, he hoped to encourage the passage of laws to protect the vulnerable—for instance, by limiting the workday of children between nine and eleven to at most eight hours.
Unlike Marcora’s results 120 years later, Mosso’s mental-fatigue studies weren’t seen as particularly surprising. This was before the idea of the “human machine” had become entrenched, so the idea that physical performance might depend as much on willpower as on muscle power seemed natural. As time passed, though, Mosso’s insights were mostly forgotten and discussions of the brain’s role in endurance dropped out of exercise physiology textbooks. The torch passed instead to psychologists, who in the late 1800s began turning their attention to sports.
An 1898 study by Indiana University psychologist Norman Triplett, in which he explored why cyclists ride faster with others than alone, is often pegged as the debut of sports psychology as a distinct discipline. In addition to the aerodynamics of drafting—what Triplett termed the “Suction Theory” and the “Shelter Theory”—he considered psychological explanations such as “brain worry” for the link between mind and muscle, as well as the idea that heavy exercise “poisons” the blood, which in turn “benumbs the brain and diminishes its power to direct and stimulate the muscles.” He even speculated that a cyclist following behind another cyclist might become hypnotized by the motion of the wheel in front of him, producing performance-enhancing “muscular exaltation.” The field didn’t take off immediately: the first dedicated sports psychology lab in the United States, founded in 1925 at the University of Illinois, petered out in 1932 due to a lack of interest and funding. Still, by the second half of the twentieth century, sports psychology was established as a legitimate sub-field, with its own entirely separate body of knowledge about the brain’s role in endurance.
When I was in university, in the 1990s, our track team giggled through group sessions with a sports psychologist who introduced us to an arsenal of techniques meant to help us perform optimally—visualization, relaxation, and so on. We memorized a five-step self-talk technique for stopping negative thoughts that might arise during a race: Recognize, Refuse, Relax, Reframe, Resume. That’s what we would yell to anyone who started to drift off the pace during a long, grueling workout. It was a joke to us. None of us actually tried to apply these techniques with any seriousness—because victory, we knew, was the straightforward result of pumping the most oxygen to the fittest muscles.
This schism between psychology and exercise physiology is what Marcora, trained as an exercise physiologist, was hoping to address when he spent his mid-career sabbatical term studying psychology. A truly universal theory of endurance, he felt, should be able to use the same theoretical framework to explain how both mental and physical factors—self-talk and sports drinks, say—alter your performance. And in the psychobiological model that he came up with, the link between old-school sports psychology techniques and actual physiological outcomes suddenly seems much more plausible. After all, the perception of effort—the master controller of endurance, in Marcora’s view—is a fundamentally psychological construct.
For example, a famous 1988 experiment conducted by psychologists at the University of Mannheim and the University of Illinois asked volunteers to hold a pen either in their teeth, like a dog with a bone, which required activating some of the same muscles involved in smiling; or in their lips, as if they were sucking on a straw, which activated frowning muscles. Then they were asked to rate how funny a series of Far Side cartoons were. Sure enough, the subjects rated the cartoons as funnier, by about one point on a 10-point scale, when they were (sort of) smiling. This illustrates what’s known as the “facial feedback” hypothesis, an idea that can be traced back to Charles Darwin: just as emotions trigger a physical response, that physical response can amplify or perhaps even create the corresponding emotion. Related experiments have extended this finding to clusters of related mental states: smiling, for instance, makes you happier, but it also enhances feelings of safety and—intriguingly—cognitive ease, a concept intimately tied to effort.
Does that also apply to the effort of exercise? Marcora used EMG electrodes to record the activity of facial muscles while subjects lifted leg weights or cycled, and found a strong link between reported effort and the activation of frowning muscles during heavy exercise. A subsequent study by Taiwanese researchers also linked jaw-clenching muscles to effort. It’s no coincidence, then, that coaches have long instructed runners to “relax your face” or “relax your jaw.” One of the most famous proponents of facial relaxation was the legendary sprint coach Bud Winter, who had honed his ideas while training pilots during World War II. “Watch his lower lip,” Winter instructed a Sports Illustrated reporter who visited one of his practices in 1959, as his star sprinter streaked past. “If his lower lip is relaxed and flopping when he runs, his upper body is loose.” Then Winter offered a first-hand demonstration of the optimal running face. “Like that,” he said, flicking his tension-free lower lip with his fingers. “It’s got to be loose.”
In fact, smiles and other facial expressions can have even more subtle effects, as one of Marcora’s most remarkable experiments showed. With his colleagues Anthony Blanchfield and James Hardy, of Bangor University in Wales, he paid thirteen volunteers to pedal a stationary bike at a predetermined pace for as long as they could. Such time-to-exhaustion trials are a well-established method of measuring physical limits, but in this case there was also a hidden psychological component. As the cyclists pedaled, a screen in front of them periodically flashed images of happy or sad faces in imperceptible 16-millisecond bursts, ten to twenty times shorter than a typical blink. The cyclists who were shown sad faces rode, on average, for just over 22 minutes. Those who were shown happy faces rode for three minutes longer and reported a lower sense of effort at corresponding time points. Seeing a smiling face, even subliminally, evokes feelings of ease that bleed into your perception of how hard you’re working at other tasks, like pedaling a bike.
With these results in mind, the idea that sports psychology can also alter your sense of effort no longer seems quite so far-fetched. To prove it, Marcora and his colleagues tested a simple self-talk intervention—precisely the approach my teammates and I had laughed at two decades earlier. They had twenty-four volunteers complete a cycling test to exhaustion, then gave half of them some simple guidance on how to use positive self-talk before another cycling test two weeks later. The self-talk group learned to use certain phrases early on (“feeling good!”) and others later in a race or workout (“push through this!”), and practiced using the phrases during training to figure out which ones felt most comfortable and effective. Sure enough, in the second cycling test, the self-talk group lasted 18 percent longer than the control group, and their rating of perceived exertion climbed more slowly throughout the test. Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.
As Marcora and his fellow motorcyclists rumbled across Europe and Central Asia, they were gradually becoming fitter: losing weight, increasing grip strength, gaining aerobic fitness. But they were also getting increasingly tired. Before and after each day’s ride, Marcora administered a Psychomotor Vigilance Test to his subjects, who had to tap a button as quickly as possible on a small handheld device in response to an irregular series of flashing lights. On average, their reaction time slowed from about 300 milliseconds in the morning to 350 milliseconds after nine or more hours in the saddle—a significant decrease if you’re whipping around a blind corner on a mountain road or swerving to avoid a wandering goat. The decline was most pronounced as they crossed the Tibetan plateau, where the thin air magnified the effects of mental fatigue: average end-of-ride scores on the Psychomotor Vigilance Test ballooned to 450 milliseconds.
Fortunately, Marcora had a potent countermeasure. Tucked into his pannier of lab equipment was a stash of Military Energy Gum, a chewing gum containing 100 milligrams of caffeine that is quickly absorbed through the inner lining of your mouth. Half of the gums were the standard-issue rocket fuel; the other half were specially prepared caffeine-free placebos. Starting after lunch each day, Marcora chewed six pieces of gum, having organized and disguised them so that even he didn’t know if he was getting caffeine or not that day. When he crunched the data after the trip, the results were striking: the slowdown in reaction time between the beginning and end of the day was completely eliminated on the days his gum contained caffeine.
Caffeine’s perk-up powers aren’t exactly a secret—without even considering coffee, caffeine pills are already one of the most widely used legal supplements among athletes—but the results illustrate how, in Marcora’s view, everything comes down to the perception of effort. There are several theories about how caffeine boosts strength and endurance. Some argue it directly enhances muscle contraction; others suggest it enhances fat oxidation to provide extra metabolic energy. To Marcora, the most convincing explanation relates to caffeine’s ability to shut down receptors in the brain that detect the presence of adenosine, a “neuromodulator” molecule associated with mental fatigue. Warding off mental fatigue, in turn, keeps your sense of effort lower, allowing you to exert yourself harder and longer.
The demands of riding a motorcycle may seem far removed from typical tests of endurance, but in fact they closely mimic the demands encountered by soldiers, Marcora points out. In both cases, you have to maintain high levels of focus and concentration for hours at a time while doing moderate physical activity in bulky, poorly ventilated gear. And in both cases, even a brief lapse can be fatal. As a result, much of the funding for Marcora’s research, from caffeine gum to “brain endurance training,” comes from Britain’s Ministry of Defence, who are interested in ways of fighting both mental and physical fatigue.
Closely linked to the sustained attention required by adventure motorcyclists and soldiers is another cognitive process called “response inhibition”—the ability to consciously override your impulses. This is one of the skills that Stanford University psychologist Walter Mischel tested with his famous “marshmallow test” in the late 1960s. The experimenters offered preschoolers a choice between one treat right away, or two treats if they waited for fifteen minutes. Over decades of follow-up, the children who resisted temptation the longest ended up with better test scores, more education, and lower body-mass index. Other studies have linked low response inhibition to higher risk of outcomes like divorce and even crack cocaine addiction.
No one has checked whether the kids who aced the marshmallow test were more likely to become champion endurance athletes—but they should. For motorcyclists and soldiers, impulse inhibition matters because you have to suppress the urge to let your mind wander, and a similar challenge faces marathoners and other endurance athletes. Think of it this way: If you stick your finger in a candle flame, your natural response will be to yank it out as soon as you start feeling heat. The essence of pushing to your limits in endurance sports is learning to override that instinct so that you can hold your finger a little closer to the flame—and keep it there, not for seconds but for minutes or even hours.
Marcora and his colleagues tested this idea in an experiment in 2014, using a technique called the Stroop task to tax their subjects’ response inhibition. The task involves words flashing on a screen in various colors; you have to press a particular button in response to each color. What’s tricky is that the words themselves are colors: you might see the word green in blue letters, and you have to overcome your initial impulse to press the button corresponding to green instead of blue. In the study, subjects performed the task twice: once with the words and colors mismatched, requiring response inhibition, and once with the words and colors matched, as a control. In both cases, after 30 minutes of the cognitive task, they ran a 5K as fast as possible on a treadmill.
The results were clear. Even though the subjects weren’t aware of any mental fatigue, they started their 5K slower after the response inhibition version of the task, rated their level of effort higher throughout the run, and finished with times 6 percent slower. That suggests that response inhibition really is an important mental component of endurance—and that it’s a finite resource that runs low if you use it too much. Holding your finger to the flame (or simply focusing on a tricky computer task) takes mental effort, and that effort is just as real as the effort of moving your legs.
It has long been a cliché that the best athletes are defined as much by their superior minds as by their muscle. With response inhibition, we have a way of testing this, which is what a team based at the University of Canberra and the neighboring Australian Institute of Sport, working with Marcora, decided to do. They recruited eleven elite professional cyclists and compared them with nine trained amateur cyclists. All the volunteers completed two 20-minute time trials, one preceded by a 30-minute Stroop task to deplete their response inhibition, the other preceded by a control task of simply gazing at a black cross on a white screen for 10 minutes.
The first interesting finding was that the professionals were significantly better at the Stroop task, amassing an average of 705 correct responses during the 30-minute test compared to 576 for the amateurs. In other words, to the list of measurable traits that distinguish the pros from the rest of us—the size of their heart, the number of capillaries feeding their muscles, their lactate threshold, and so on—we can now add response inhibition.
The second interesting finding was how the cyclists performed in the time trial after completing the response-inhibiting Stroop task. The amateurs, depleted by the mental effort of focusing on all those flashing letters, produced 4.4 percent less power than in their control ride. The pros, on the other hand, didn’t slow down at all. They were able to resist the effects of mental fatigue, at least in the doses produced by a 30-minute Stroop task, and cycle just as fast as when they were fresh.
There are two ways to explain these findings. One is that the pros were born with superior response inhibition and resistance to mental fatigue, and that’s one of the reasons they’ve ended up as elite athletes. The other is that long years of training help the mind adapt to resist mental fatigue, just as the body adapts to resist physical fatigue. Which is it? I suspect a bit of both, and the smattering of evidence that exists supports the idea that these traits are partly inherited but also can be improved with training. And this, in turn, raises the really big question: What’s the best way to boost your mental endurance? Marcora’s idea, as he proposed back in 2011 at the conference in Bathurst, is that specially tailored cognitive challenges like the Stroop task, repeated over and over, constitute a form of “brain endurance training” that can give athletes an edge. As I’ll describe in Chapter 11, I visited the University of Kent for a brain-training boot camp, and then tried out the technique for twelve weeks while preparing for a marathon. Marcora has also run a series of military-funded trials of the technique—and the initial results suggest he’s onto something big.
The studies described in this chapter make it clear that we can’t talk about the limits of endurance without considering the brain and perception of effort. But they don’t necessarily mean that Marcora’s psychobiological theory is right. In fact, not everyone agrees his theory is even new. Tim Noakes, when I asked him about Marcora’s ideas in 2010, dismissed them as a minor variation of his own central governor model: “The only distinction between our model and his model—and he has to differentiate, obviously—is that everything is consciously controlled,” he said.
The distinction between conscious and unconscious has become a bitterly contested flashpoint between the two camps, but the differences aren’t as great as they appear. Marcora does indeed argue that the decision to speed up, slow down, or stop is always conscious and voluntary. But such “decisions,” he acknowledges, can be effectively forced on you by an intolerably high sense of effort. And crucially, they can still be influenced by any number of factors that you’re not consciously aware of, as demonstrated most clearly by his own experiment with subliminal images. Noakes and his colleagues, on the other side, don’t dispute the importance of effort, motivation, and conscious decision making. When you run a marathon, it’s not the central governor that prevents you from sprinting for the first 100 meters (a fact demonstrated by the enthusiastic souls who do, in fact, sprint at the start of marathons and later pay the price).
It’s true, though, that there are some real contrasts between Noakes’s and Marcora’s theories, and they’re most obvious at the limits of total exhaustion—a state most people rarely, if ever, encounter. Imagine going to the gym, setting the treadmill to 10 miles per hour, and deciding to run for as long as you can. For most people, the decision to step off will be purely voluntary, a simple result of the effort becoming greater than they’re willing to tolerate. But if, instead, you’re running the final mile of the Olympic marathon, neck-and-neck with a rival for the gold medal, it’s harder to accept that the runner who slackens first does so because the effort feels too great or because she’s not motivated enough. Noakes would argue that the runner’s brain is overriding her conscious desires, reducing muscle recruitment in order to prevent damage to critical organs—and that process is not only unconscious, but is flatly contradicting the runner’s conscious decisions. To anyone who has raced seriously, it’s the latter explanation that feels right.
Of course, the other option is that such scenarios of truly maximal effort and motivation push you to plain old physical limits—that, as A. V. Hill would have argued nearly a century ago, it’s muscle fatigue or the limits of oxygen delivery that hold you back in the final mile of the Olympics. When I first started planning this book, in 2009, it was going to be all about Tim Noakes and how his ideas had upended the conventional body-centric view of endurance. Then I discovered Marcora’s work, and realized that no explanation of endurance could be complete without considering the psychology involved. And then, as I dug deeper, I got to know some of the physiologists who don’t believe either of them, and whose views of human endurance are still rooted in the heart, lungs, and muscles—like University of Exeter physiologist Andrew Jones, who helped guide Paula Radcliffe to a marathon world record and whose Breaking2 lab data suggests Eliud Kipchoge is capable of a sub-two-hour run. And I discovered that they, too, have some powerful evidence to back their views.
So who is right? The short answer is that scientists are currently fighting about it, strenuously and sometimes bitterly, with no end in sight. The longer—and to me, more interesting—answer is that, as the comparison above between running on a treadmill in the gym and racing in the Olympics illustrates, it depends. In Part II of the book, we’ll explore how specific factors like pain, oxygen, heat, thirst, and fuel define your limits in different contexts. We’ll encounter situations that seem to confirm Noakes’s view, like sports drinks that boost your endurance even if you don’t swallow them. We’ll explore whether it’s really possible for a panicked mother to lift a car off her child. And we’ll see what happens when an injection in the spine temporarily removes the limits imposed by the brain, allowing athletes to push their muscles all the way to the brink—a dream scenario that turns out to be more of a nightmare.
