Rabu, 29 Mei 2013

Talking "central governor" and performance regulation

Talking the Central Governor and performance regulation with Bobby McGee

Quick video post today, in the midst of travels and papers and other work.  A few months back, I was in Boulder, Colorado, for a few days, and as is 'obligatory' when there, spent a few days with coach Bobby McGee, one of the more inquisitive and stimulating minds in the endurance sports.

He produced the videos below, in which I talk first about the Central Governor concept, explaining why I steered clear of the word, and what it all meant (and didn't mean).

In the second video, I talk lactate myths and theories.

They've very short, just fillers really, and so for more on these concepts, particularly the anticipatory regulation of exercise, here are some articles and research papers you may be interested in:
#1 - Central governor/anticipatory regulation


#2 - the lactic acid concept


Thanks Bobby for the videos, look forward to another visit sooner rather than later!

Oh, and check out Bobby McGee's website for more videos on training and performance.

Ross


Senin, 20 Mei 2013

Sudden cholesterol increase? It may be psychological


There are many published studies with evidence that cholesterol levels are positively associated with heart disease. In multivariate analyses the effects are usually small, but they are still there. On the other hand, there is also plenty of evidence that cholesterol is beneficial in terms of health. Here of course I am referring to the health of humans, not of the many parasites that benefit from disease.

For example, there is evidence () that cholesterol levels are negatively associated with mortality (i.e., higher cholesterol leading to lower mortality), and are positively associated with vitamin D production from skin exposure to sunlight ().

Most of the debris accumulated in atheromas are made up of macrophages, which are specialized cells that “eat” cell debris (ironically) and some pathogens. The drug market is still hot for cholesterol-lowering drugs, often presented in TV and Internet ads as effective tools to prevent formation of atheromas.

But what about macrophages? What about calcium, another big component of atheromas? If drugs were to target macrophages for atheroma prevention, drug users may experience major muscle wasting and problems with adaptive immunity, as macrophages play a key role in muscle repair and antibody formation. If drugs were to target calcium, users may experience osteoporosis.

So cholesterol is the target, because there is a “link” between cholesterol and atheroma formation. There is also a link between the number of house fires in a city and the amount of firefighting activity in the city, but we don’t see mayors announcing initiatives to reduce the number of firefighters in their cities to prevent house fires.

When we talk about variations in cholesterol, we usually mean variations in cholesterol carried by LDL particles. That is because LDL cholesterol seems to be very “sensitive” to a number of factors, including diet and disease, presenting quite a lot of sudden variation in response to changes in those factors.

LDL particles seem to be intimately involved with disease, but do not be so quick to conclude that they cause disease. Something so widespread and with so many functions in the human body could not be primarily an agent of disease that needs to be countered with statins. That makes no sense.

Looking at the totally of evidence linking cholesterol with health, it seems that cholesterol is extremely important for the human body, particularly when it is under attack. So the increases in LDL cholesterol associated with various diseases, notably heart disease, may not be because cholesterol is causing disease, but rather because cholesterol is being used to cope with disease.

LDL particles, and their content (including cholesterol), may be used by the body to cope with conditions that themselves cause heart disease, and end up being blamed in the process. The lipid hypothesis may be a classic case of reverse causation. A case in point is that of cholesterol responses to stress, particularly mental stress.

Grundy and Griffin () studied the effects of academic final examinations on serum cholesterol levels in 2 groups of medical students in the winter and spring semesters (see table below). During control periods, average cholesterol levels in the two groups were approximately 213 and 216 mg/dl. During the final examination periods, average cholesterol levels were 248 and 240 mg/dl. These measures were for winter and spring, respectively.



One could say that even the bigger increase from 213 to 248 is not that impressive in percentage terms, approximately 16 percent. However, HDL cholesterol does not go up significantly in response to sustained (e.g., multi-day) stress, it actually goes down, so the increases reported can be safely assumed to be chiefly due to LDL cholesterol. For most people, LDL particles are the main carriers of cholesterol in the human body. Thus, in percentage terms, the increases in LDL cholesterol are about twice those reported for total cholesterol.

A 32-percent increase (16 x 2) in LDL cholesterol would not go unnoticed today. If one’s LDL cholesterol were to be normally 140 mg/dl, it would jump to 185 mg/dl with a 32-percent increase. It looks like the standard deviations were more than 30 in the study. (This is based on the standard errors reported, and assuming that the standard deviation equals the standard error multiplied by the square root of the sample size.) So we can guess that several people might go from 140 to 215 or more (this is LDL cholesterol, in mg/dl) in response to the stress from exams.

And the effects above were observed with young medical students, in response to the stress from exams. What about a middle-aged man or woman trying to cope with chronic mental stress for months or years, due to losing his or her job, while still having to provide for a family? Or someone who has just been promoted, and finds himself or herself overwhelmed with the new responsibilities?

Keep in mind that sustained dieting can be a major stressor for some people, particular when one gets to that point in the dieting process where he or she gets regularly into negative nitrogen balance (muscle loss). So you may have heard from people saying that, after months or years of successful dieting, their cholesterol levels are inexplicably going up. Well, this post provides one of many possible explanations for that.

The finding that cholesterol goes up with stress has been replicated many times. It has been known for a long time, with studies dating back to the 1950s. Wertlake and colleagues () observed an increase in average cholesterol levels from 214 to 238 (in mg/dl); also among medical students, in response to the mental and emotional stress of an examination week. A similar study to the one above.

Those enamored with the idea of standing up the whole day, thinking that this will make them healthy, should know that performing cognitively demanding tasks while standing up is a known stressor. It is often used in research where stress must be induced to create an experimental condition. Muldoon and colleagues () found that people performing a mental task while standing experienced an increase in serum cholesterol of approximately 22 points (in mg/dl).

What we are not adapted for is sitting down for long hours in very comfortable furniture (, ). But our anatomy clearly suggests adaptations for sitting down, particularly when engaging in activities that resemble tool-making, a hallmark of the human species. Among modern hunter-gatherers, tool-making is part of daily life, and typically it is much easier to accomplish sitting down than standing up.

Modern urbanites could be seen as engaging in activities that resemble tool-making when they produce things at work for internal or external customers, whether those things are tangible or intangible.

So, stress is associated with cholesterol levels, and particularly with LDL cholesterol levels. Diehard lipid hypothesis proponents may argue that this is how stress is associated with heart disease: stress increases cholesterol which increases heart disease. Others may argue that one of the reasons why LDL cholesterol levels are sometimes found to be associated with heart disease-related conditions, such as chronic stress, and other health conditions is that the body is using LDL cholesterol to cope with those conditions.

Specifically regarding mental stress, a third argument has been put forth by Patterson and colleagues, who claimed that stress-mediated variations in blood lipid concentrations are a secondary result of decreased plasma volume. The cause, in their interpretation, was unspecified – “vascular fluid shifts”. However, when you look at the numbers reported in their study, you still see a marked increase in LDL cholesterol, even controlling for plasma volume. And this is all in response to “10 minutes of mental arithmetic with harassment” ().

I tend to think that the view that cholesterol increases with stress because cholesterol is used by the body to cope with stress is the closest to the truth. Among other things, stress increases the body’s overall protein demand, and cholesterol is used in the synthesis of many proteins. This includes proteins used for signaling, also known as hormones.

Cholesterol also seems to be a diet marker, tending to go up in high fat diets. This is easier to explain. High fat diets increase the demand for bile production, as bile is used in the digestion of fat. Most of the cholesterol produced by the human body is used to make bile.

Kamis, 16 Mei 2013

A minimalism/barefoot fad and inconsequential footstrikes?


Minimalism as a fad and inconsequential footstrikes?

Two articles of interest, both connected to the barefoot running/minimalist shoe debate, and I promised on Twitter that I'd give a few more detailed thoughts.

"It appears this fad is pretty much over" - minimalist shoe sales decline

The first was this article, in Runnersworld, which quotes an industry watcher as saying that the minimalist trend is over.   This is based on the reported stat that in the first quarter of 2013, running shoe sales grew in the high single figures (8%, perhaps), driven largely by sales of motion control shoes (25%) and stability shoes (10% increase).  This overcame a drop in the sale of minimalist shoes, which "declined in the low teens" (so let's call it a drop of 13-14%, perhaps), and which now makes up only 4% of total running shoe sales.  The industry watcher concludes "it appears this fad is pretty much over".

An interesting statistic, particularly when you consider that in previous years, it was minimalist shoes that were the fastest growing segment, while the stability and motion-control categories were stagnant or falling.

So, a reversal of sorts, but one that should not be surprising, given how overhyped the barefoot movement had been post "Born to Run".  Also of note is that the end of the article makes mention of a shift away from the barefoot style minimalist shoes towards more conventional shoes that are lighter and lower to the ground than in years past.  This may be the lasting legacy of the 'barefoot bubble', because it has driven the realization that the bulky, heavy and excessively cushioned shoes were not necessary and probably didn't do what they purported to.  The shoe industry as a whole has adjusted its paradigm, and that is certainly a good thing, in general.

The end result, once the dust settles further, is that we've been pulled more towards the middle, which is always a good place to be when it comes to the complex physiology and biomechanics of individuals.  This is an oft-repeated point here on the site, I've said it too many times, but the notion that one solution would work for everyone is clearly false, and one of a few current examples of trying to swing the pendulum from one (wrong) extreme to the other equally wrong extreme (the 10,000 hours vs genes, and low-carbohydrate diet debates are the other two).

An expanding bubble and a sustainable niche

At the New Balance South African launch of their minimalist shoe in about 2009, I remember sitting in the audience, and a journalist asked the question of whether minimalism might just be a fad?  My response to that was that it would not die out like a fad, because it was clear that many people were achieving great success in the barefoot shoes, and that this group, however small, would sustain the market segment.  Whether or not it continued to grow at the rates it was back then would depend on a) the relative success people achieved in minimalist/barefoot shoes, and b) the strength of the scientific evidence and how well it was communicated to runners.

It's clear that now, admittedly only 4 years on, that the scientific evidence has not provided a compelling enough case to drive the companies into an even bigger push for minimalism, but has helped inform the shift to ligher, flatter traditional shoes.  The evidence is, at best, ambiguous, and the field still needs a long-term, prospective injury study.  The unanswered questions of 2009 remain unanswered, and a few tenuous links between loading rate and injury prevalence based on footstrike will not be enough to change the direction of a multi-billion dollar shoe industry, which has too much inertia for the anecdotes of a few (however outspoken) success stories to knock off course.

The former requirement, people's success, is a more interesting phenomenon.  I do believe that the hype of minimalism, driven by the almost evangelical (and irresponsible, I have to add) volunteer sales job being done by many of those who had succeeded, spawned a movement of "barefoot/paleo" runners, many of whom were destined to fail.   Why?  Because they may simply not be suited to minimalist running in the first place, and perhaps this is a group who needs shoes as much as the successful minimalist runners do not.

That's probably a radical idea for some, but as much as we have heard arguments for how 'evil' the shoe industry was for advocating that everyone needed cushioning, air, gel, pro-moderater, roll bars and the like, I wonder if any have considered that when you swing the pendulum in the opposite direction and advocate barefoot/minimalism, you are doing exactly the same thing?  The reality is that some people may well belong at the extremes, but many more belong somewhere in the middle, and there has been little nuance in the discussion.

Perhaps the market figures are beginning to reflect that nuance, with the realization that not everyone will succeed without the cushioning provided by traditional shoes.  Just a thought.  The point is, the market was expanding so rapidly that the uptake of barefoot and minimalist running was bound to claim its fair share of casualties.

The trouble is we don't know these numbers.  What proportion of runners have tried and failed, compared to those who have succeeded?  Given the downturn in sales of minimalist shoes, and that only 4% of the market is minimalist shoes, I'm guessing that the latter group is smaller than the former - more fail than succeed.  The problem is that those who try and fail slink off to the store and go back to traditional shoes, whereas those who succeed become outspoken, leading to a large reporting bias.

I can, at this point, pre-empt the response to these injured runners and minimalism failures: "Those people obviously didn't reduce their training enough, and allow their feet and bodies to adapt to the new style".  And of course, this is likely to be true in many of these instances.  Running injuries are caused by running - there is a threshold for injury, and when it is exceeded, the runner breaks down.

The point is that the shoes were marketed as a way to reduce the injury risk.  That is, they would change the injury threshold, so that a person could do the same training as before without injury.  And yes, it would be unreasonable to expect a person to go straight from traditional shoes into minimalist shoes, maintain the same volume, and get the promoted upside.  So there was an inevitable period of 'compromise' where the runner would need to drop training volumes and invest in learning the skill.

My problem with this is three-fold.  First, there's no guarantee of an upside to begin with.  For some individuals, it works, without question.  For others, it may not, and for reasons we don't understand, some people may be incapable of running without traditional shoes, regardless of how long they take.  There is little recognition of the fact that some people may be unable to learn the skill, or adapt, but the tool was never to blame, only ever its user.

Second, the sacrifice to succeed may be unreasonable.  You have to ask whether it is reasonable to expect a person to reduce themselves to beginner status for months, when there is no guaranteed benefit, a very large potential downside or risk, and when the alternative - cut training volume by 20% and get stronger in the supporting muscles - might be equally effective within weeks?  I don't believe this is reasonable, and so for some, it may not be a viable alternative, given questions of leverage and time.

And third, and the reason I think it has been irresponsibly promoted is because you can't advocate a change and not understand the dosage for it.  A few months back, a study was published where the scientists prescribed barefoot running over 10 weeks using the guidelines of a minimalist shoe maker to the letter.  The result was that 10 weeks later, every single one of the runners had indications of stress fractures in their feet, some with full blown stress fractures.  To that, I recall the response was that the "advice was not conservative enough".  This is the ever-shifting goal post of barefoot running advice, and to me, the point is that we just don't know who succeeds, or how much (or how little) training they require.  That's why it's irresponsible for the zealous few who succeed (at most 4%, remember) to be so vocal about it.  They change their names to "Barefoot XYZ" and drag everyone with them, blaming the end-user for their failures.  It's just not a viable product, and sales figures support that.

That said, it's clear that there are people, perhaps many, who have succeeded and they should continue to run in minimalist shoes.  I count myself as one of them, for the record, lest it seem that this is an attack on minimalism.  I've nothing against the concept, just its advocacy and the obnoxious way it is pushed on people (as I feel about carbohydrate hunters).  I tried every extreme, from straight barefoot (did Mount Kilimanjaro barefoot, just to check!) to flat racing shoes, and I think I've found a balance that works for me.  I would not advocate it to anyone.  Rather stick to education, and let people discover what works for them.  As for the industry, they've recognized the shift, and responded to it with lighter, more flexible shoes, and that's definitely a good thing.  For most people.

"Neither footstrike is advantageous" - a study on footstrike and injury

The second interesting piece of news was Amby Burfoot's piece on a study just done in the US Army, where researchers tracked injury prevalence and performance in 342 recruits.  The Army often produce very important studies on injury, because potential confounding factors and risk factors for injury are so much easier to control effectively.  The study is being presented at the American College of Sports Medicine meeting in a few weeks, and so should be in a journal soon.  Then it will be possible to review more substantially, but a surface reading shows some interesting findings to discuss for now.

It found no difference in performance between the heel-strikers (87% of the group) and the non-heel strikers (that is, mid and forefoot), and no difference in injury prevalence or severity (measured as days off training, as is typically done in the field).  The trend was for the non-heel strikers to report more injuries, in fact, which is interesting because the last few years have seen a rise in the "heel striking is bad" argument.

The link between barefoot running and footstrike, incidentally, is that very early on in the evolution of the barefoot running idea, it was proposed that it's not necessarily what you wear on your feet that matters, but how you land.  This was based on the observation that when barefoot, most runners adopted a forefoot landing.  Ergo, forefoot/midfoot is better, heel-striking to be avoided. I won't point out how circular that logic is, but I will make the following points, which I believe explains the Army study results.

First, not everyone responds the same way to a change in footwear.  Some people, when running barefoot, continue to heelstrike.  These people show enormously high loading rates and impact forces, and so every (admittedly theoretical) link we have with injury says that they will have increased risk of injury when barefoot.

Second, the interesting thing is that when you put these people in shoes, their loading rates and impact forces come down to the same level of a barefoot runner landing on the forefoot/midfoot.  To give you some numbers, they go from about 400 BW/s to 100 BW/s.  The runners who one would consider "good" barefoot runners because they land on the midfoot are at 80 - 100 BW/s.  Peak ground reaction forces look similar.

The point is that shoes make a huge difference to this risk factor, and they do this for a very particular subset of runners only - it's only the runners who are heel-strikers when barefoot who see this benefit.  When you put a midfoot striker in shoes, they show basically no change compared to when barefoot.  And that is interesting, because it points to a benefit of shoes, at least with respect to the narrow link between kinetics (forces) and injury.

Third, and most interesting, is that in these runners, the ground reaction forces and loading rates come down despite even greater heel-striking than when barefoot.  In other words, you put them in cushioned shoes, they land even further back, with a more dorsiflexed ankle, and their force profile improves relative to when barefoot.  It improves so much that they are actually similar to barefoot runners, and the foot-strike doesn't matter.

We know this because we've just finished a study looking at this exact thing - a PhD student of mine,  Nicholas Tam, has just submitted a paper looking at this individual variability as a key to the shoe prescription debate, and we believe it would explain why foot-strike doesn't matter in the shod, but not barefoot, condition.  This, like the benefit of barefoot running, has probably been oversold.

Once Nic's first paper is published, I'll go into much more detail about what we did and found, but the key points are:

  1. There is huge individual variation in the biomechanics response to barefoot running.  Some people go in totally the "wrong direction" with respects to the kinetics that are supposedly linked to injury
  2. Those individuals, the barefoot heel-strikers who don't seem to adjust at the ankle to help absorb landing forces, may be unsuited to barefoot running, but benefit from cushioning provided by shoes, to the point that they are similar to barefoot runners or midfoot strikers, shod or not
  3. The footstrike doesn't affect the injury risk factors in shoes, only when barefoot
So, returning to the Army study, there are of course many factors other than footstrike related to injury. But the way that the footstrike has been overplayed as a cause is perhaps exposed by this finding, and it can be explained anyway as the possible beneficial effect of shoe cushioning.

Ultimately, injuries will be caused by exceeding a threshold of adaptation, and footwear, biomechanics and factors like flexibility and muscle strength may contribute to this threshold.  It can be shifted, higher or lower, but not in a manner that is yet predictable or formulaic, because it's too complex to link A to B.  The Army study reveals, through the lack of a finding, that the paradigm of A to B is over-simplified, and the drop in sales of minimalist shoes further suggests that we're now seeing the pendulum settle somewhere towards the middle, away from the extremes, which do tend to embrace over-simplified paradigms and theories.

Quite where this leaves us is difficult to say.  It's not attractive to say "each to his own" and that we should embrace complexity and nuance.  "Born to Run" sold well, in part, because of its extremism, just like the low-carb diet and the 10,000 hour concept work when they exclude every other reasonable possibility.  It's go big, go alone, or go home science.  It's also wrong.  

In the shoe debate, we still need the long-term prospective study on injuries, and I'd still argue that everyone should try "less shoe", in the sense that more flexible and lighter is probably better.   At worst, it becomes a training modality.  At best, a new way to run.

Ross

Senin, 06 Mei 2013

Trip to South Korea: Hidden reasons for the leanness of its people


In September last year (2012) I went to South Korea to speak about nonlinear data analysis with WarpPLS (), initially for business and engineering faculty and students at Korea University in Seoul, and then as a keynote speaker at the HumanCom 2012 Conference () in Gwangju. Since Seoul is in the north part of the country, and Gwangju in the south, I had the opportunity to see quite a lot of the land and the people in this beautiful country.


(Korea University’s main entrance, Anam campus)


(In front of Korea University’s main Business School building)

Korea University is one of the most prestigious universities in South Korea. In the fields of business and engineering, it is arguably the most prestigious. It also has a solid international reputation, attracting a large number of highly qualified foreign students.

I wanted to take this opportunity and try to understand why obesity prevalence is so low in South Korea, which is a common characteristic among Southeast Asian countries, even though the caloric intake of South Koreans seems to be relatively high. Foods that are rich in carbohydrates, such as rice, are also high-calorie foods. At 4 calories per gram, carbohydrates are not as calorie-dense as fats (9 calories per gram), but they sure add up and can make one obese.

Based on my observations, explanations for the leanness that are too obvious or that focus on a particular dietary item (e.g., kimchi, green tea etc.) tend to miss the point.

Let us take for example a typical South Korean meal, like the one depicted in the photos below, which we had at a restaurant in Seoul. If you are a foreigner, this type of meal would be difficult to have without a local accompanying you, because it is not easy to make yourself understood in a traditional restaurant in South Korea speaking anything other than Korean.


(Main items of a traditional South Korean meal)


(You cook your own meal)

The meal started with thin-sliced meat (with some fat, but not much) and vegetables, with the obligatory side dishes, notably kimchi (). This part of the meal was low in calories and high in nutrients. Then we had two high-calorie low-nutrient items: noodles and rice. The rice was used in the end to soak up the broth left in the pot, so it ended adding to the nutrition value of the meal.

Because we started the meal with the low-calorie high-nutrient items, the meat and vegetables, our consumption of noodles and rice was not as high as if we had started the meal with those items. In a meal like this, a good chunk of calories would come from the carbohydrate-rich items. Still, it seems to me that we ingested plenty of calories, enough to make one fat over the long run, eating these types of meals regularly.

A side note. As I said here before, the caloric value of protein is less than the commonly listed 4 calories per gram, essentially because protein is a multi-purpose macronutrient.

In our meal, the way in which at least one of the carbohydrate-rich items was prepared possibly decreased its digestible carbohydrate content, and thus its calorie content, in a significant way. I am referring to the rice, which had been boiled, cooled and stored, way before it was re-heated and served. This likely turned some of its starch content into resistant starch (). Resistant starch is essentially treated by our digestive system as fiber.

Another factor to consider is the reduction in the glycemic load (not to be confused with glycemic index) of the rice. As I noted, the rice was used to soak up the broth from the pot. This soaking up process significantly reduces the rice’s glycemic load, because of a unique property of rice. It has an amazing capacity of absorbing liquid and swelling in the process.

This was one of several traditional Korean meals I had, and all of them followed a similar pattern in terms of the order in which the food items were consumed, and the way in which the carbohydrate-rich items were prepared. The order in which you eat foods affects your calorie intake because if you eat high nutrient-to-calorie ratio foods before, and leave the low nutrient-to-calorie ones for later, my experience is that you will eat less of the latter.

Another possible hidden reason for the low rate of obesity in South Korea is what seems to be a cultural resistance to industrialized foods, particularly among older generations; a sort of protective cultural inertia, if you will. Those foods are slowly being adopted – my visit left me with that impression – by not as quickly as in other countries. And there is overwhelming evidence that consumption of highly industrialized foods, especially those rich in refined carbohydrates and sugars, is a major cause obesity and a host of other problems.

Cultural resistance to, or cultural inertia against the adoption of, highly industrialized foods among pregnant mothers limits one’s exposure to those foods at a particularly critical time in one’s life – the 9-month gestation period in the mother’s womb. This could have a major impact on a person’s propensity to become obese or have other metabolic derangements later on in life. Some refer to this phenomenon as a classic example of modern epigenetics, whereby acquired traits appear to induce innate traits across generations.

Another reason I was excited about this trip to South Korea was my interest in table tennis. I wanted to know more about their table tennis “culture”, and how it was influenced by their general culture. China dominates modern table tennis, with such prodigies as Ma Lin, Ma Long, Wang Hao, Wang Liqin, and Zhang Jike. South Korea is not far behind; two of my all-time favorite South Korean players are Kim Taek-Soo and former Olympic champion Ryu Seung-Min.

Another side note. The best table tennis player of all time is arguably Jan-Ove Waldner (), from Sweden. I talked about him in my book on compensatory adaptation (). Waldner has been one of the few players outside China to be able to consistently beat the best Chinese players at times when they were at the top of the games, including Ma Lin ().

But, as I soon learned, as far as sports are concerned, it is not table tennis that most South Koreans are interested in these days. It is soccer.

A nice surprise during this trip was a tour in Gwangju in which we visited a studio that converted standard movies to stereoscopic three-dimensional ones (photo below). These folks were getting a lot of business, particularly from the USA, in a market that is very competitive.


(A standard-to-3D movie conversion studio in Gwangju)

Let’s get back to the health angle of the post. So there you have it, two possible “hidden” reasons for the low prevalence of obesity in South Korea, and maybe in other Southeast Asian countries. One is the way in which foods are prepared and consumed, and the other is cultural inertia. These are not very widely discussed, but future research may change that.

Sabtu, 04 Mei 2013

Pacing, fatigue and the brain. Lessons London taught us

Pacing, fatigue and the brain.  Lessons from London

I owe you two posts, promised a few weeks ago while I was attending the London Marathon and presenting at its associated Medical Conference.  Time and other work commitments prevented that, and soon I'm off to London again, this time for Sevens Rugby and another conference.  More on that, in the weeks to come, but let me combine those previous two posts into one, and share some thoughts, as well as my presentation on Fatigue and the Brain from the conference.  

I realize I'm well off the news timelines as far as London goes, but the race, co-incidentally, did a lot to provide context to the question of pacing and the limits to human performance (that is, fatigue), so it's a lead in to the presentation which is at the bottom.

London Marathon - pacing precision

First, London.  Won by Tsegay Kebede, the time of 2:06:04 the slowest since 2007, the race was notable for an attritional second half that saw the lead change five or six times, clear breaks come back and eventually, the athlete who died least, possibly because of a stitch at around 25km which prevented him from responding to the early surges, came through to win.

The story is in the 5km splits shown below.  Kebede's splits are shown in blue, while those of Emmanuel Mutai, who finished second, are in red.


The first 10km in London is always fast, but this year was particularly quick.  The result was that even with a slight drop in pace from 10km to 20km, the  split at halfway was 61:34.  That's not necessarily a disaster, but it was constructed "badly" in the sense that it was a little too fast early and was produced slowing down.  Interestingly enough, I spoke to one of the pacemakers at the Official after party, and he said that they were asking for the pace to be slowed, but Emmanuel Mutai was driving them to go faster.  He said that a 62:00 at halfway would have been perfect.

But, 61:34 it was, and then the race's ultimate slow time was created, because the pace was actually lifted.  A 14:30 split (1:59:28 marathon pace, so a significant ramp up in pace) from 20km to 25km broke the race open, and from then on, it was always going to be a matter of survival.  14:49 for the next 5km is what saw the big time gaps appear, and Kebede was actually dropped, later blaming a stitch for his inability to follow that pace.  That's where their lines part company in the graph above - 19 seconds was the gap at 30km, because Kebede dropped off faster and was outside the top four.

At the front, Emmanuel Mutai, then Biwott and Abshero and Lilesa, and then Mutai again, all took turns in the lead, making what appeared to be breaks, but they were reeled in, despite a progressively dropping pace.  When you see a lead that keeps changing even though the overall pace is getting slower and slower, then it means that leads are being established not because of breaks, but rather because of failures, and that in turn means it's a matter of time before the wheels fall off in a major way.

That happened to Lilesa, then Biwott (they lost 1:05 and 2:35 in the final 7km), but Kebede was able to hang onto something like a respectable pace over the final 7km.  You'll see in the graph that from 25km to 35km, he was slower than Mutai, losing time.  But from 35km to 40km he clawed some of it back, and then the big change happened in the final 2km, where Mutai really did fall apart.

Mutai's final 2.2km were run in 7:46, and that's where a lead of 28 seconds was turned into a deficit of 29 seconds by the finish line!  For comparison, Priscah Jeptoo, who won the women's race, covered this segment in 7:23.

So, the men really did pay for the fast early start, but more than that, it was the attack at 20km, off that fast start, that did the damage.  It remains a fact that only once in history has a man run both halves in a marathon in under 62 minutes.  That was Patrick Makau, who broke 62 min twice on route to his current world record.  Others have run negative splits with a 61:xx second half, but the London race highlighted just how precise the pace needs to be before it becomes 'suicidal', at least for record purposes.  Racing is a different story, of course.

The physiology of pacing strategy, and the limit to performance

That then leads into a discussion of pacing, fatigue and the limits to performance.  At the London Marathon conference, a fellow speaker, Doug Casa, and I had some great discussions about athletics, and while we agree on many things, one that we diverged on was the possibility of a two-hour marathon.  Doug firmly believes it is imminent, and that he'll see it soon (Doug also believes women will go under 4-minutes for the mile soon, which is absolutely not possible in this lifetime).  

My opinion is different - I told him that unless he can figure out how to cryogenically freeze himself and watch London in maybe 80 years from now, he has no hope of seeing that happen!  Even then, I'm not convinced.

The basis for my saying that is at least partly found in the graph above.  It shows us that even the very best fail when they don't get the pacing right, and that means they are right on the limit of performance.  If you consider the pace in London, you had 61:34 at halfway.  That was set up by 14:23 and 14:33 splits for the first 10km.  Too fast, but by how much?  Perhaps 10 seconds per five kilometers, so we are talking a margin for error of about 2 seconds per kilometer being the difference between a complete blowout of the world's best runners, which reduces 2:05 runners to running 17:30 5km pace, and maintaining the pace to run something under 2:05.  

Now, if that is what happens when they run at 2:03 pace, and then surge to a 2:00 pace, imagine how much longer we will have to wait to see a runner capable of running every single 5km segment at 2:00 pace?  It is, for now, inconceivable that anyone can run 14:30 per 5km eight times consecutively.  In London 2013, that happened twice and it broke one of the best fields ever assembled into splinters.

Remember, you didn't have one runner fail at 61:34 pace with a 14:30 surge.  It was everyone.  Maybe seven or eight of the best 15 men in the world pushed their physiology over the edge with that racing strategy, and not one was able to come through it without some damage.  Kebede was the best survivor,  but even he "limped" home with a 64:28 second half (and final 10km of around 32:00).  A 2-hour marathon is nowhere near imminent, it's a long way away, and breaking the race down into its component paces is one way to show that.  

The other is to recognize that a runner who is capable of running back-to-back half marathons in 59:59 will be a guy capable of running a single half marathon in about 57 minutes.  Currently, a 59 min half marathon runner can hit 62 min in a half and maintain the pace.  So, until there is a 57 min half marathon runner, don't hold your breath.  And of course, a 56 min half marathon runner is capable of running back-to-back 10km races in about 26:30.  That is a runner who would be able to run a 10km in about 25:40.  So when we start seeing 10km and 21km times drop to 25:40 and 57 minutes, then I'll agree with Doug and the other 2-hour marathon advocates!

What pacing means

Back to pacing, which leads us to the question of how that precision is achieved?  What physiological basis is there for such a "fragile" line between optimal and 'failure'?  What is the body responding to in order to slow a runner down when the difference between holding the pace and crashing is as small as 1% too fast early on?

The theory is that we pace ourselves because we are selecting the optimal exercise intensity that allows us to:
  1. use our available energy at the optimal rate, not too fast or too slow
  2. gain heat slowly enough that we'll finish, but not so slowly that we aren't performing at a high enough intensity
  3. accumulate metabolites at a low enough rate to not be overwhelmed by them
  4. meet oxygen requirements of muscle, brain and other tissues
  5. compete with other runners, the clock or whatever other motivational factors impact on performance
Pacing, then, is the physiological equivalent of sticking to a budget.  There is a plan, one which we are not fully aware of, but which covers all aspects of physiology, every system in the body.  It then manages our intensity, by adjusting how much muscle we are able to activate (we measure this as EMG, as you will see in the presentation below), so that we don't deplete reserves or accumulate limiting heat or metabolites.  Doing that would result in, in order:
  • A failed performance because we'd reach a critical level of hyperthermia, or energy depletion, or metabolite accumulation (or any other factor, depending on the context of exercise, see slides below) before the finish line.  That's called a bad day out, and it happens because performance is ultimately going to be limited by one of more physiological systems.  Pacing aims to ensure that this never happens
  • Bodily harm.  In theory, it is possible to push so far beyond those performance limits that we run ourselves into physiological trouble.  The line for this is higher than it is for performance - we would fail at exercise before our bodies fail, but it does happen.

    In fact, a really good opinion insight on this has just been written by pacing researchers led by Zig St Clair Gibson and Carl Foster, and it's called "Crawling to the Finish Line: Why do Endurance Runners Collapse? : Implications for Understanding of Mechanisms Underlying Pacing and Fatigue".  I recommend it as a good discussion of this very topic
The presentation - pacing, performance limits and fatigue

As for the rest, they are details.  Fascinating details, of course (in my biased opinion), and they're the subject of the presentation I gave in London, which you can see below.  My focus is on heat, because that's a great model to illustrate the difference between a regulated system and a limited system.  In exercise physiology, both exist, but understanding performance regulation is the recognition that pacing has a physiological purpose, and that we don't 'dumbly' run to the point of collapse.

I also devote quite a bit of time in the talk to some really interesting studies by Amman et al, who have shown that the body is trying to defend peripheral muscle function, and that if you block Type IV afferents, you can play havoc with pacing strategies and those muscle properties.

These presentations require talking, and so they may not quite make sense when being viewed like this.  The gaps can always be filled, however, and hopefully this introduces the concepts of pacing and fatigue and how various factors, including motivation, competition, emotional state, and of course the various physiological inputs affect our performance limits and pacing.

Here is that talk, enjoy!



Ross



More reading and forthcoming attractions!

And, for some more reading on this, two reviews I wrote, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine:
And here's that paper from St Clair Gibson et al, published just last month:  Crawling to the finish line

And finally, as mentioned, I'm off to the UK again next week, first to join the SA Sevens team for the season ending tournament, and then at the invitation of the English Rugby Football Union for a symposium on talent ID and development.  I'll share what I can, when I can.

Ross