RUN: The Mind-Body Method of Running by Feel by Matt Fitzgerald

Author:Matt Fitzgerald [Fitzgerald, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781937716110
Publisher: Ingram Distribution
Published: 2010-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

HOW RECORDS ARE BROKEN

* * *

Most of us make the mistake of

going medium-hard all the time.

—Michael Sandrock

WE DO NOT KNOW WHEN the first timed running race occurred, but whenever, wherever, and however it happened, this race was a seminal event. While there is surviving evidence of formal running races taking place as early as the eighth century B.C., the first footrace timed in the way we are accustomed to—in hours, minutes, and seconds—probably did not happen until sometime in the sixteenth century in Europe. Clocks capable of keeping time in such small increments did not exist until then, but human nature being what it is, it was likely not long before someone thought of using these new clocks to time footraces. Running became a popular betting sport in England in the seventeenth century, and there are abundant surviving records from that era of winning times and of record times for races of various distances. For example, we know that by the 1690s, runners challenged themselves to run as far as they could in one hour. Times for the mile run began to appear in the 1700s.

The reason I say that the first timed footrace was a seminal event is that runners run differently when they are timed than they do when they are competing against others or running as hard as they can alone without timekeeping. So the advent of timed races created a whole new way of running. Specifically, it made runners run faster. How so? Well, before the advent of timekeeping, a runner could do no better than run faster than everyone else in a given race. After the advent of timekeeping, runners could aim higher: They could try to cover a given course or distance faster than anyone had ever done before. And while only the fastest of the fast could aim so high, runners of all ability levels could now try to run faster than each individually had ever done before. Indeed, before timekeeping there was not much point in racing if a runner was not capable of winning (which is probably why most races in eighteenth-century England were one-on-one matches staged for betting purposes). But with timekeeping, anyone interested in running had a motive to run hard.

The reason that runners are generally able to run faster in timed than in untimed races has to do with how the brain regulates running performance. As we have seen, in events in which a runner wishes to complete a defined running task in the shortest time possible, the brain’s job is to ensure that the runner completes the task in the shortest time possible without any serious harm. Through communication with the rest of the body, the unconscious brain has a sense of the absolute physiological limits of the muscles and other organs and tissues. During hard running it monitors the proximity of the various physiological systems to their ultimate limits. As necessary, the brain acts to prevent these limits from being reached by reducing muscle activation and by making the runner feel miserable.

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