Faster, Higher, Stronger by Mark McClusky

Author:Mark McClusky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-05T16:00:00+00:00

8

WHAT GETTING TIRED MEANS

Lactic Acid, Nobel Prizes, and the Power of the Mind

It must have been quite a sight as Professor A. V. Hill and his colleagues arrived at an eighty-five-meter-long grass running track in Manchester, England. It was the early 1920s, and Hill, a professor at Manchester University, was hoping to better understand the relationship between the speed a runner could maintain and the amount of oxygen the runner used. The experimental subject that day? The good professor himself.

Hill had already established himself as one of the leading scientists of his generation. He was born in Bristol, England, in 1886, to a poor family, but managed to excel academically and eventually won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. While there, Hill began to study how heat was produced by muscle contraction, using dissected frog muscles and sensitive temperature-measuring equipment. He proved that heat is produced by muscles not only when they contract but also when they are relaxed or recovering. His experiments showed that this heat production takes place even when there is no oxygen present, which was contrary to the prevailing theory at the time. He won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1922 with German biochemist Otto Meyerhof for work stemming from this discovery.

Hill didn’t just have an interest in the cellular level of muscular function. He was also curious how that function was manifested in athletic performance. Today, we call that sort of science exercise physiology, but back in the twenties, there wasn’t even a name for it. Hill was actually a fine athlete himself. His personal best of 4:45 for a mile is excellent (if you don’t think so, just go try and top it), and in one of his own papers, he reported a VO2 max of 57 ml/kg/min, which would project out to a sub-three-hour marathon. In other words, he was one fit physiologist.

So it wasn’t surprising that Hill chose himself as the subject at that grass track. He strapped a bag-and-valve apparatus to his back, so that as he ran the gases he exhaled could be captured and later analyzed. Hill ran the track at a constant speed (with cues from a timekeeper to ensure he wasn’t speeding up or slowing down), and at thirty-second intervals, he breathed into the valve. He started the trials at a moderate pace, and then did three more sets, each at a progressively faster speed. After analyzing the gas he had exhaled, and doing a lot of fancy slide rule work, Hill and his team were able to plot the amount of oxygen he consumed over the course of his runs.

As Hill’s speed increased, he used more oxygen to fuel his efforts, as one might expect. But his oxygen consumption eventually reached a plateau of sorts, where no matter how much faster he ran, his oxygen consumption remained the same. Once he reached that plateau, he simply couldn’t sustain the pace for very long. Hill pondered the implications of this finding, and came up with the following explanation: Every runner had a certain critical speed.

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