Ya Gotta Believe!

Gina Kolata of the Times presents a fascinating article about tricking athletes into a peak performance:

The trained bicyclists thought they had ridden as fast as they possibly could. But Kevin Thompson, head of sport and exercise science at Northumbrian University in England, wondered if they go could even faster.

So, in an unusual experiment, he tricked them.

In their laboratory, Dr. Thompson and his assistant Mark Stone had had the cyclists pedal as hard as they could on a stationary bicycle for the equivalent of 4,000 meters, about 2.5 miles. After they had done this on several occasions, the cyclists thought they knew what their limits were.

Then Dr. Thompson asked the cyclists to race against an avatar, a figure of a cyclist on a computer screen in front them. Each rider was shown two avatars. One was himself, moving along a virtual course at the rate he was actually pedaling the stationary bicycle. The other figure was moving at the pace of the cyclist’s own best effort — or so the cyclists were told.

In fact, the second avatar was programmed to ride faster than the cyclist ever had — using 2 percent more power, which translates into a 1 percent increase in speed.

Told to race against what they thought was their own best time, the cyclists ended up matching their avatars on their virtual rides, going significantly faster than they ever had gone before.

At this point I was thinking about Roger Bannister and his famous claim that the barrier to the four minute mile was mental.  Et voila!

What limits how fast a person can run or swim or cycle or row? Is it just the body — do fatigued muscles just give out at a certain point? Or is the limit set by a mysterious “central governor” in the brain, as Timothy Noakes, professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, has called it, that determines pacing and effort and, ultimately, performance?

Until recently, exercise physiologists have mostly focused on the muscles, hearts and lungs of athletes, asking whether fatigue comes because the body has reached its limit.

But athletes themselves have long insisted that mental factors are paramount. Roger Bannister, the first runner to break the four-minute mile, once said: “It is the brain, not the heart or lungs that is the critical organ. It’s the brain.”

Not surprisingly, there is a limit to this added reserve:

He used the same method as before: Cyclists on stationary bikes raced an on-screen avatar going a bit faster than the cyclist’s own best time. In one group, the only variable was competition. Cyclists were told that the avatar would be going 2 percent faster or 5 percent faster than the cyclist had ever gone.

The other group was deceived. Each cyclist was told to compete against an avatar that would be moving as fast as that athlete had in his best effort. Actually, the avatar was programmed to race 2 percent harder or 5 percent harder. (A 5 percent increase in power translates into a 2 percent increase in speed, Dr. Corbett said.)

The cyclists in the first group gave up from the start when they knew the avatar would be moving faster than they ever had — even when the avatars were going 2 percent harder than the cyclists’ own best times. Instead, the athletes matched their own best efforts.

As had been observed in previous experiments, cyclists in the second group, who were deceived, kept up with their avatars when they were programmed to perform 2 percent harder than each athlete at his best. But 5 percent was just too much: The athletes kept up for about half the race, then gave up.

I would say this is of interest to "effort" sports, like football, basketball or hockey, where a roaring hme crowd might help an athlete find his motivation.

Comments

[Iggy]

Think what they could have done if they'd had a Ferrari avatar in front of them.

[Daryl Herbert]

Or a vehicular avatar behind them.

[Danube of Thought]

I remember where I was when Bannister broke four minutes, and I remember very well what had gone before and what came after, although I was twelve or thirteen at the time.

Before he broke the barrier, there were a number of guys who got agonizingly--almost asymptotically--close. It seemed to lend credence to the notion that there was, in fact, a physiological barrier to what the human body could do, and that one of those barriers was running a mile in four minutes.

I'm doing this without Google, but I sure remember Wes Santee, who got down to something like 4:00:08. John Landy was another.

Once Bannister did it, the floodgates were open, and everybody could do it.

[MJW]

Sounds like somebody wasn't giving a hundred and ten percent!

[Soylent Red]

I have always said that it is not how fast you can go that determines success. It's how fast you are willing to go.

A stronger and faster athlete operating at less than full effort can be beaten by an athlete who uses everything s/he has. The trick is to get yourself to honestly give 100%, which can be difficult when the discomfort and urge to hurl are telling you you're maxed out.

Sounds like somebody wasn't giving a hundred and ten percent!

15 pieces of flair is the minimum. You don't just want to do the minimum do you?

[MJW]

AFAIK, the pardon authority is unlimited.

The President's power to pardon is limited to "Offenses against the United States." He has no power to issue pardons for state crimes. As the US Pardon Attorney says:

Under the Constitution, only federal criminal convictions, such as those adjudicated in the United States District Courts, may be pardoned by the President. In addition, the President's pardon power extends to convictions adjudicated in the Superior Court of the District of Columbia and military court-martial proceedings. However, the President cannot pardon a state criminal offense. Accordingly, if you are seeking clemency for a state criminal conviction, you should not complete and submit this petition. Instead, you should contact the Governor or other appropriate authorities of the state where you reside or where the conviction occurred (such as the state board of pardons and paroles) to determine whether any relief is available to you under state law. If you have a federal conviction, information about the conviction may be obtained from the clerk of the federal court where you were convicted.

[MJW]

Oops, wrong thread for my previous comment.

[srp]

When I'm dying on the last few minutes of my elliptical run, I ask myself "if someone paid you a million dollars to finish, could you do it?" The answer is invariably "yes" and I finish the damn routine.

[peter]

Bob Beamon's broad jump (now long jump) record at the 1968 Olympics at Mexico City broke the existing record by a foot and a half, and took decades to break.