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CHAPTER 2
TRAINING YOUR BRAIN, MUSCLES, AND METABOLISM
In one of the most famous photographs of Albert Einstein, taken in Santa Barbara, California, in 1933, the happy-looking genius is having a merry time riding his bike. He was once quoted as saying, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
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Einstein is known for a lot of mindbending concepts that have altered our understanding of the universe, but he also has a special place in the world of endurance. I bet you didn’t know that. It involves the meaning of time. Time is not static. He used the metaphor of a moving clock on a speeding train to help explain the basic principles of time, space, and light. Time can speed up or slow down, depending on how fast you are traveling. For endurance athletes, speed is indeed relative. Furthermore, we have an inner clock mechanism hardwired into our brains.
The same is true for animals. Migrating birds are able to prepare for and successfully complete their airborne endurance events, with some species traveling thousands of miles, by eating properly and storing sufficient fat for long-term energy. Despite not wearing a watch or being given mile splits, birds can pace themselves in a highly accurate manner. Humans also have a highly precise internal clock that runs subconsciously, and during an endurance race it’s quite accurate, and even helps us race the final part of the event faster. This clock’s accuracy is based partly on experience of all previous races and training, with seasoned athletes usually being most accurate. Even in a race with mile markers inaccurately posted, for example, the brain’s relationship to the passing of time can accurately be maintained in disagreement with the markers. While these relationships are well known scientifically, most experienced athletes are also aware of them, if not consciously, then subconsciously. This is also intricately related to our pacing ability. Most experienced athletes can swim, bike, or run at a given pace just by intuition and feel, and usually maintain good accuracy.
Einstein once said, “Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.”
The brain’s internal clock is important in a race because it helps us with overall strategy. In particular, endurance athletes should be able to speed up after 90 percent of the race is complete, as the brain has planned for this final kick. This time relationship, called scalar expectancy theory, allows the brain to pace the body through this point in the race with sufficient energy to go faster at the end.
Because our diet can significantly influence the brain’s chemical messengers—the neurotransmitters—food can have a large impact on our sense of time. A healthy brain that’s well nourished without adverse influence from fluctuating blood sugar levels and diet factors (such as vitamin and mineral levels) will function best, and, in the case of racing, will pace the body through the event in the most effective way possible.
While most endurance athletes focus on distance, the time element in training is often neglected. While we consciously train our body, we often forget to train our relationship with time, and it can work against us. That’s because in most endurance events, time is the primary factor. I’m not just talking about the time for each workout or checking splits, but the big picture of time and how your brain can relate to it in a helpful way.
Whether you’re just beginning your endurance career or training for the marathon, Einstein’s notion that “time is relative” has special significance. Of course, he was postulating about space and time, not 26.2 miles. A spacecraft leaving earth and traveling near the speed of light for twenty years would return to earth with a different record of time elapsed than that on earth. Comparing two identical clocks, one on the spacecraft and one on earth, the spacecraft clock may show ten years had elapsed, but the clock on earth would show twenty years had passed. Moreover, the passengers on the spacecraft would have aged only ten years while those on earth would have aged twenty years in that same time. This view of two clocks providing us with different times of the same event can be useful in endurance training and competition. We all know the human body can sense and react to time differently in a given situation. A successful race seems to pass more quickly than one in which you are struggling. “Time is not a constant thing by any means,” says Olympic marathoner Lorraine Moller of New Zealand. “When you’re in a good race, everything comes together. Time flies when you’re having fun.”
Time can be experienced as a nonflowing, isolated part of any performance; the event does not take place as most see it, but differently. This view of time is most evident when we’re falling in love, meditating, or in a trance. As Dr. Larry Dossey observes in Space, Time, and Medicine, “These experiences suggest that an alternative to the ordinary means of experiencing time lies within all of us.” In our fast-paced society, we always seem to run out of time too easily. That forces us to squeeze training into smaller spaces. This creates unnecessary stress—which is detrimental for all athletes.
“A lot of coping with time,” says Lorraine Moller, “is just learning to relax.” You might try relaxing in front of a clock with a large second hand that clicks off the seconds. Stare at it. Notice that some seconds seem longer or shorter than others. And if you “play” a little, you may find you can “hold” the second hand in one place for what would seem to be more than one second.
If you’re rushing through your workouts, not “taking the time” to enjoy them, this stress may eventually have a negative influence on your overall fitness and health. I once had a patient whom I will call Tim. He had been running regularly for five years, and at age thirty-seven was training for his fourth marathon. He was hoping to break the elusive three-hour barrier, which he had been close to in his three previous marathons. His training schedule included the traditional long Sunday run of two hours, and would soon increase so that his longest run would be two and a half hours.
But how would Tim relate to the time it would take him to run the three-hour marathon? Two hours was a long run, two and a halfhours his longest. Was three hours reasonable for him to achieve? I helped Tim modify his training and thinking so that he wouldn’t fail to attain his goal. He had to relate both psychologically and physiologically to three hours in a different manner.
Einstein was able to understand and relate to complex issues, but how could I help Tim in such a relatively simple quest as breaking three hours? It required using two “clocks” to control time more effectively.
Tim wanted his marathon clock to read less time than the observed time; in other words, he wanted the race to feel more like an hour. Because he was using his longest run to train for an event that would take more time than the training run itself, Tim had to experience a workout of more than three hours, without overtraining, so the marathon would be relatively shorter. He also had to learn how to manipulate time at will.
Walking was one potential solution to both of these time problems. By adding more time to his long run, by walking the first and the last half hour, Tim could increase the total time of his long training session without risking overtraining. Walking also relaxed him in a way running never did.
After three of these longer workouts, Tim learned how easy it was to manipulate time. His total workout of three and a half hours (a half hour walk, two and a half hour run, and a half hour walk) enabled him to either make the time go faster, or, because he didn’t want the now-enjoyable workout to end, go slower. These workouts would reorient Tim, making the marathon shorter, relative to the long workout. On marathon day, he would be able to make the marathon go by quickly.
This is exactly what happened; Tim ran his race in two hours and forty-eight minutes, saying afterward, “It felt like an easy long run.”
These identical time tactics helped ultrarunner Stu Mittleman attain his world record in the 1,000-Mile World Championship Run. This event required a modification of the relationship of time to enable Stu to cope with the 1,000 one-mile laps. Averaging approximately eighty-six miles a day, Stu successfully manipulated time so that the eleven and a half days were psychologically and physiologically less demanding. “By the fifth day,” said Stu, “if you’d ask me how many days went by, I’d say two.”
I used these same time strategies to train Paul Fendler who, in his first-ever ultramarathon distance, became the New York Metropolitan Athletics Congress 50-mile champion in 1987. “All of a sudden, in the beginning of the race, time ceased to be an existing factor,” said Paul, “and it was the walk/run workouts that taught me how to control time.”
Learning time management is, at its most fundamental level, understanding how to train your brain. Too many athletes think about only training their muscles. But the three most important facets of performance are the brain, muscles, and metabolism.
