#matt fitzgerald

[theaestheticmodels]

[fit-as-fxck]

Once a runner finds out that she can suffer more than she thought she could, her perception of effort changes in a lasting way.

- Matt Fitzgerald, 80/20 Running

[w0rldsforgottenb0y]

The Exploding Hearts

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The Exploding Hearts

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[w0rldsforgottenb0y]

[summerfyre]

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of her meltdown at the 1995 Ironman, Paula Newby-Fraser blamed the incident on a late-race nutritional blunder. With Smyers closing in on her, she told interviewers, she had panicked and rushed through aid stations without drinking enough. But later she would admit that she had lost the race before it even started.

“I got greedy,” she told one reporter. “It’s an old flaw in human nature: If you have success, you want more. So you think more is better instead of looking back at what has worked for you. I had a style. I knew what worked for me. But all around me, everyone was doing something else. That new philosophy for 1995 paid off on the bike. But then it bit me at the end when I collapsed.”

Endurance athletes learn early on to equate hard work with improvement. It’s a universal experience: The first bit of hard work a beginner does yields better performance, and a little more hard work produces even better results. But there is a limit to how much hard work an athlete can benefit from. Many lose perspective and exceed their limit. They come to see hard work as the only path to improvement. If they lose a race or fall short of a goal, they respond by working harder. If they begin to feel lousy in their training as a result of working too hard, they work even harder. Hard work becomes a kind of security blanket, a reflexive answer to every question, every doubt.

The problem with drawing an absolute equivalence between hard work and improvement is that it encourages athletes to ignore how they feel. According to the psychobiological model of endurance performance, remember, an athlete cannot improve except by changing her relationship with perceived effort. Training yields improvement by reducing the amount of effort an athlete experiences at any given speed. When an athlete’s training is on track, therefore, she should find that she is able to go faster and faster at the same level of perceived effort. Inevitably, there will be days when the athlete feels lousy and even brief periods of challenging training when everything feels hard, but the overall trend should be toward less effort at the same pace. A trend in the opposite direction indicates that the athlete is training too hard and becoming chronically fatigued. If the athlete ignores this warning and refuses to reduce her training load, her competitive performance will suffer.

In a 2002 study published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, Asker Jeukendrup of England’s Birmingham University put a group of cyclists through six weeks of varied training. During the first two weeks the athletes trained at their normal level. In week three, they were subjected to a massive increase in training load that continued through week four. At the end of that fourth week, the cyclists’ perceived effort at a power output of 200 watts (a relatively low intensity for these individuals) was 8.9 percent higher than it had been three weeks earlier, indicating severe fatigue. Not surprisingly, their time trial performance was down 6.5 percent over the same span.

Any athlete who was silly enough to attempt such an abrupt increase in training load on her own could use the spike in perceived effort that ensued to catch her mistake and then give her body a chance to recover. This was shown in the third part of Jeukendrup’s study, in which two weeks of reduced training caused perceived effort at 200 watts to drop to a level 9.5 percent lower than it had been after week one.

In the real world, athletes seldom double their training load from one week to the next, but they do routinely train a little too hard and ignore patterns of rising perceived effort even in low-intensity workouts. Each athlete has her own optimal training formula that is defined by individual physiological limits. Getting the most out of the training process requires that these personal limits be respected. An athlete gets herself into trouble when, instead of listening to her body and its intuitions, she begins to worry about what her competitors are doing and tries to “outwork” them. The answers to the most pressing questions that athletes face in their day-to-day quest for improvement (“Should I push? Should I back off?”) lie within them.

A coach may either help or hinder this train-by-feel approach—hinder it by forcing a one-size-fits-all methodology on every athlete, or help it by encouraging athletes to share how they feel and by saving athletes from themselves when they are tempted to do too much. But even the best coach cannot completely take the place of an athlete’s gut instincts.

Bernard Lagat is a good example. He began his running career in his native Kenya, where nearly all promising young runners are subjected to severe, unindividuated training that causes large numbers of them to burn out quickly (a system that undermines to some degree the benefits of group training discussed in the next chapter). But instead of putting himself through this meat grinder Bernard chose to emigrate, attending Washington State University, where he was coached by James Li, who shared Tim Noakes’s philosophy of doing the least amount of training that sufficed for goal attainment. Li’s measured program delivered three NCAA Championship titles to Bernard in his final year as a Huskie.

After graduating, Bernard surprised many by staying with Li and continuing to train rather gently by elite standards. Unlike most of his peers, he ran just once a day, and every fall he took a five-week break from training. This balanced formula resulted in a remarkably extensive record of achievement that included 11 world championship medals between 2001 and 2014, and Olympic medals in 2000 and 2004. Bernard improved year after year without training harder, recording a career-best 12:53.60 for 5000 meters at age 36 and three years later becoming the oldest runner to win a world championship medal in a distance event, taking silver in the 3000-meter indoors.

In a 2011 interview for Flotrack, Bernard credited his prolonged greatness to moderation in training. “My coach always tells me, ‘We do not need to do unnecessary mileage,’” he said. “‘We do only the mileage that is going to benefit you.’ My body reacts so well to that kind of training. I feel strong the entire way. At the end of the season, I feel, ‘I can still do this, I can still run,’ because I did not burn myself out.”

How do athletes like Bernard Lagat manage to avoid the trap of the “hard work security blanket” while others, such as Paula Newby-Fraser, get suffocated by it? Research by Michael Mahoney of the University of California and other psychologists has shown that certain personality (or coping) traits are more common in athletes who allow themselves to become overtrained. One of these traits, perhaps not surprisingly, is compulsiveness; the other is perfectionism.

Psychologists distinguish two types of perfectionism: adaptive and maladaptive. Adaptive perfectionism is a never-satisfied mindset that can have a positive influence on performance. Maladaptive perfectionism, on the other hand, often leads athletes to engage in self-destructive behaviors such as overtraining. This variety of perfectionism is known to be associated with low self-esteem and insecurity. Athletes who harbor a general feeling that they are never good enough are prone to overtrain in their unending quest to prove their worth. Confident athletes tend to be much more able to shape their training on the basis of rational internal observation.

Bernard Lagat and Paula Newby-Fraser both conform to this pattern. Bernard, as anyone who has met him will attest, radiates self-assuredness. Paula, however, has battled insecurity throughout her life. A lack of self-confidence fed into her disastrous 1995 training experiment, and she knew it.

“Parents and schooling turned me into a total archetypal over-achiever,” she said in a 2010 interview for slowtwitch.com. “I came from a totally different culture. Back home in South African schools, every flaw was exposed. You were held to such a high standard. My mother was a very accomplished person and I was always filled with insecurity. I didn’t think I was good enough. I always felt like I could not live up to my parental influence. If I did well, I thought, ‘Shoot, I have to do it again.’ I do not think my success [in triathlon] was a fluke. I was not a one-off. But a little voice kept insisting that maybe I was.”

The coping skill that is required to avoid overtraining is self-trust. An athlete must base her decisions on whether to push or back off on the messages that she receives from her own body rather than on what other athletes are doing or on a generalized fear of resting. This can be difficult for athletes who are lacking in the coping trait of self-assuredness, but understanding the psychobiological dynamics of overtraining—its true cause and cure—makes it easier. If Paula Newby-Fraser was to walk away from the sport of triathlon on top, she would have to draw the right lesson from the lowest moment of her career and start trusting herself.

PAULA WANTED TO GET as far away from triathlon as she could after the 1995 Ironman. That meant getting far away from San Diego, her adopted home and the center of the triathlon universe. A decade earlier, Paula had spent a year in London, and she remembered it fondly. She decided to return. She rented an apartment in the city and spent a month riding the underground, attending the theater and the ballet, and neglecting her training.

The time alone—and away from her usual routine—gave Paula space to reflect, and reflection brought her heart and mind to a new place. London did not cure Paula of insecurity (she says she still struggles with the issue to this day), but it did grant her enough self-insight to know what her next step should be—what felt right. Paula realized how lucky she was to have a job as a professional triathlete, a rare and fleeting opportunity that she wasn’t quite ready to give up. But no longer would she race to impress others or allow insecurity to influence her training.

At the beginning of 1996, Paula announced that she would go back to Kona, but with “no expectations.” She dusted off her old, minimalist training methods and found a more appropriate daily training partner in her friend Heather Fuhr. The young Canadian pro was a weaker cyclist than Paula, but instead of forcing Fuhr to ride at her tempo, Paula slowed down. In return, Fuhr, the stronger runner, held back for Paula when they ran together.

These changes were complemented by a deepening of Paula’s long-standing involvement in Buddhist practices. While she did not engage in daily meditation sessions, she read Zen literature and engaged in nonjudgmental self-observation during solitary activities such as gardening. She was beginning to see that her development as an athlete was tightly bound to her personal growth.

“Obviously, I am not ready to sit still and contemplate some of the big issues in my life,” Paula told a writer for the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. “I sit for short periods and deal with the more external things, but there are other issues that require deeper work.”

Through her spiritual explorations, she was becoming more centered in herself and less reactive to external judgments and expectations, an evolution that she was certain was helping her as a human being and that she hoped would help her as an athlete also.

While the steps Paula took at this point may have been small ones, her public statements demonstrated a growing self-awareness and self-acceptance. In Hawaii, she sat down in front of a video camera for a pre-race interview to be shown during NBC’s coverage of the 1996 Ironman World Championship. Her tone was strikingly different from the year before. “I’d like to think I’m a little wiser and just a little softer towards my sport,” she said. “I don’t feel I come at it in such a hard way. You know, ‘I have to go sub-9 hours. I’m here to set course records. I’m here to dominate.’ It’s okay not to win.”

Sunrise on race morning revealed whitecaps on Kailua Bay. When the starting cannon thundered, more than 1,400 racers hurled themselves into choppier waters than Ironman had ever seen. Smyers was back to defend her title, and she handled the rough seas better than Paula, who reached the boats marking the turnaround point of the swim course more than 30 seconds behind her rival. By the end of the swim, the gap had swelled to 1 minute and 19 seconds.

In the transition area, Paula strapped on a helmet decorated with an American flag graphic, a tribute to her new status as a U.S. citizen. She moved without hurry despite having been apprised of her usurper’s lead. Paula had gone less than 10 miles on her Felt B2 when a race official flagged her for following a male racer too closely and ordered her to dismount before continuing the race. Paula would have to sit for an additional 3 minutes inside a penalty box at the bike-run transition. She shrugged off the setback and kept going.

At 20 miles, Smyers took over the race lead. After turning around in Hawi, she met Paula head-on and was delighted—and more than a little surprised—to discover that her 79-second advantage at the start of the bike leg had grown slightly.

Paula had been holding back, however, and on the return trip to Kailua she began to push. As she approached the 70-mile mark, Smyers heard a helicopter moving ever closer from the rear and knew Paula was coming. The Queen of Kona sped up as she made the pass in a bid to demoralize Smyers, but Smyers knew the game and wasn’t fazed.

When Paula wheeled into the Kona Surf Hotel parking lot, she handed her bike to a race official and calmly walked into the penalty box, where she drank Gatorade, stretched, and even answered a few questions for an NBC Sports reporter. While Paula was relaxing in the “sin bin,” Smyers came into transition. She was still in the changing tent when Paula entered. They did not speak.

Smyers started the run 20 seconds ahead of Paula, but she was not the race leader. A rookie competitor, Natascha Badmann, had blasted through transition more than a minute earlier, having recorded the fastest women’s bike split of the day. A 29-year-old former smoker with a teenage daughter and no prior athletic background, Badmann, who wore a girlish smile continuously as she ran and offered frequent thumbs-up and hang-ten gestures to spectators and fellow competitors, was a complete unknown to Paula.

In the previous year’s Ironman, Smyers had felt almost magically strong on the run course. On this day, she did not. Paula passed her at 4 miles. Two miles later, Paula passed Badmann, noting the uncharacteristically strained grin the Swiss parvenu gave in response to her collegial nod. By the time she had passed through Kailua Village and reentered the lava fields, Paula was 45 seconds ahead of Badmann and 4 minutes ahead of a drain-circling Smyers.

Things seemed well in hand. But at the halfway point of the marathon, Badmann skated by Paula as effortlessly as Paula had earlier overtaken Smyers on the bike. Lead changes during the Ironman run leg are usually permanent. Indeed, in her 10 previous Ironmans, Paula had never taken the lead back from a woman who had passed her during the marathon. Knowing this, she now had to make the most important decision of her career. One voice, that voice, told her that she’d better go with Badmann—that if she let her get away, she would never see her again. But her instincts, her deepest intuition, told her to continue running her own race, guided by perception of effort—to stick to the highest speed she felt capable of sustaining to the finish. She let Badmann go.

Over the next several miles, Badmann stretched her lead out to a full minute, singing quietly under her breath at one point as her waifish body glided over the hot pavement. Badmann and Paula met face-to-face on an out-and-back spur of the race route. Badmann’s smile was now easy and unforced. Seeing this, Paula reminded herself that she had come here not to win but to do her best. And yet, doing her best meant trying to win, if she felt capable, so she dug deep to chase down the rookie.

Badmann’s advantage stopped growing and then began to shrink. Paula caught her 5 miles from the finish line. Badmann lifted her pace, refusing to go down without a fight. The veteran surged several times over the next 3 miles, but she couldn’t shake her younger challenger. If Paula was worried, though, she didn’t show it. The very last hill on the course lay at the edge of Kailua village, 1.5 miles from the end. Paula threw everything she had left into one more surge and at last broke Badmann.

Minutes later, Paula came upon the spot where she had sat down on the curb in humiliated defeat a year before. As she passed it, she lifted her hands in the same “What the hell is happening to me?” gesture she had made back then, but this time she wore a self-mocking grin. She crossed the finish line at 9:06:49 to claim her eighth Ironman title.

It would be her last. After 1996, Paula’s athletic focus broadened to encompass other interests, including trail running and mountain biking. When she took her final bow at Ironman in 2001, it was just to see what she could do at age 40. She finished a respectable fourth, well behind Natascha Badmann, who won her third of an eventual six Ironman titles that day.

In 2009, Paula’s venerable Ironman course record was finally broken—Englishwoman Chrissie Wellington lowered the mark to 8:54:02. Four years later, Aussie Mirinda Carfrae took it down to 8:52:14. Prior to this performance, Paula had offered Carfrae some advice in a recorded conversation.

“To me the greatest lesson as an athlete and in training is just don’t get greedy,” Paula said. “Know that you have to get up and go again the next day. Always save a little bit. I think that is what’s precluding a lot of athletes from longevity and causing a lot of injuries right now. Everybody wants more. And the media is going to push you and hype you. And so is everyone else. You have to just have faith in yourself, and faith in [your coach], and just believe. Don’t keep looking for more. When it’s working, it’s working. Don’t mess with success, right?”

It was the deeply felt counsel of an athlete who had learned the hard way to look for answers inside herself.

—Matt Fitzgerald en "How bad do you want it"

[summerfyre]

Flow

IF CHOKING IS A condition of heightened self-consciousness that intensifies perceived effort and hampers endurance performance, then its opposite would be a mental state in which self-consciousness disappears, reducing perceived effort and boosting performance. Does such a thing exist? It does.

The psychologist Mihály Csikszentmihalyi called it “flow” and defined it as a state of complete immersion in a purposeful activity. Endurance athletes describe the flow state as one in which they seem to become the thing they are doing. The part of the mind that normally watches the part that is focused on the task at hand vanishes, leaving the athlete’s consciousness directed externally in a way that feels right and yields exceptional performance. Siri Lindley’s choking problem was essentially an anxious tendency that kept her from racing in a flow state in the most pressure-packed races.

Neuroscientists have observed that several changes in brain function tend to accompany the flow state. The brain’s electrical activity always unfolds in wave patterns. Normal consciousness is associated with a high-frequency beta wave pattern. In the flow state, brain rhythms drop down to the borderline between low-frequency beta and theta waves. Flow is tied also to sharply reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that gives rise to a sense of self and that includes the aforementioned dorsolateral prefrontal cortex—the brain’s internal critic. And at the molecular level, several neurotransmitters, or brain messenger chemicals, are released during flow. Among these are norepinephrine, which enhances mental focus, and endorphins, which are the source of the famous “runner’s high.”

It is not necessary to measure brain waves or neurotransmitter levels to figure out if an athlete is operating in the flow state. You can just ask. Athletes know when they are in flow because the feeling is unmistakable—it’s that sense of absolute unity with one’s effort that Siri Lindley experienced in the 2001 ITU Triathlon World Championship. Perception of effort does not disappear during flow. Hard work still feels hard in this state, but the feeling becomes enjoyable in a way that is difficult to put into words.

A handful of studies have supplied evidence that the more flow an athlete experiences during an endurance test, the better she performs. One such study was conducted in 2012 by Alan St. Clair Gibson and his colleagues and published in the International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. Eight trained cyclists were asked to complete a pair of 20-km time trials on stationary bikes on separate occasions. It is exceedingly unlikely that any athlete will ever complete consecutive time trials of the same distance in exactly the same time, and sure enough, none of these athletes did. Some of the cyclists performed slightly better in the first time trial, others in the second. Gibson and his colleagues collected physiological and psychological data during both time trials in an effort to ascertain why the cyclists performed better in whichever one they completed faster. They found no major differences in any of the physiological variables. But what they did find was that the cyclists consistently reported higher levels of positive affect—a sign of flow—in their better ride.

As this study hints, flow is not entirely controllable and hence cannot be regarded as a coping skill in itself. It appears that a number of factors have to line up just right for flow to occur. Insofar as flow is controllable, anything that helps an athlete race less self-consciously promotes the flow state. And flow, in turn, is the ultimate prophylactic against the self-sabotage of choking. Learning how to exploit these flow facilitators, therefore, is a vital coping skill for all endurance athletes.

Physical preparedness is one such factor. Research has demonstrated that people are more likely to experience flow when performing tasks in which they have a high level of mastery. Other investigations have revealed that well-trained athletes exhibit reduced activity in parts of the brain that are related to physical self-consciousness. These things are linked. Well-trained athletes have an easier time achieving flow because they are less physically self-conscious.

Any factor that tends to increase self-consciousness during a race makes flow more difficult to attain. One of these factors is negative thoughts. In a 2014 study that appeared in Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, a team of scientists led by Samuele Marcora invited volunteers to pedal stationary bikes to exhaustion at high intensity on two occasions separated by two weeks. Between the tests, half of the subjects were trained in the use of positive self-talk, a coping skill that many athletes use instinctively to neutralize negative thoughts and preserve flow during competition. The remaining subjects received no training in positive self-talk. When the endurance test was repeated, the subjects trained in positive self-talk improved their time to exhaustion by 17 percent. Even though both tests were performed at the same intensity, these subjects reported significantly lower ratings of perceived effort in the second test. The subjects in the other group did not improve between tests and their perceived effort ratings did not change.

Some athletes are especially prone to negative thinking in competition. Athletes who lack self-belief, as Siri Lindley once did, have a harder time tamping down their internal critic in races. Many of the negative thoughts that such athletes experience issue from excessive focus on the desired outcome. All athletes begin their races wanting to achieve their goals, but those lacking self-belief are so anxious about their goal that it pulls their attention away from the task of the moment. They feel that if only they can achieve their goal, then they will have self-belief to carry into the next race. But it doesn’t work like that. The self-belief has to come first.

So where does it come from? It comes from letting go, as illustrated by Siri’s surrender to Brett Sutton’s methodology. Counterintuitive though it may be, caring a little less about the result of a race produces better results. An athlete who believes in herself whether she succeeds or fails is able to put her goal out of mind and race in the moment, and to race in the moment—in flow—is to race better. The athlete who lacks self-belief can gain it by consciously pushing her goals and the worries that surround them out of her mind and teaching herself to stay focused on the task of the moment throughout the training process that leads up to the next big race. The progress that issues from this head-down, “just do it” approach cultivates self-belief in a way that no amount of visualizing the perfect race can.

Siri learned this lesson through her work with Brett Sutton. Self-belief cannot be manufactured through obsessive yearning toward one’s goals or through the elimination of all “distractions.” In fact, it requires the opposite: an empty mind and total immersion in the process that builds the proof of potential that is the only solid foundation for true self-belief.

“Real confidence comes from real results and real training,” Siri told writer Timothy Carlson in 2014. “It must be truthful.”

—Matt Fitzgerald en "How bad do you want it"