Alex Hutchinson: Central governor theory, parenting, and the alto sax

Alex Hutchinson is the author of Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. He has a Ph.D from Cambridge, competed as a middle- and long-distance runner on the Canadian national team, is a father of 2, and plays the alto sax. Gary and Alex touch on most of these topics as they break down central governor theory, explore the risks of parenting, and look back at Endure.

Transcript

Podcast112_Hutchinson_v1.mp3

Gary McCoy: [00:00:13] If you're at your local book store or on Amazon, the book Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance is written by Alex Hutchinson. For me, and for anybody interested in this domain, this is a must read. I was excited to get Alex on the podcast, lets go straight to that conversation. Alex, welcome! It's thrilling to have you on the podcast.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:00:26] Thanks a lot, Gary. I really appreciate the opportunity to come and chat.

Gary McCoy: [00:00:29] So, let me start with this. The book pretty much was released [in 2018], I know you had an updated version come out in 2019, which was the version I got a hold of and absolutely loved. It was one of the best reads I've had in probably the last five years in this space. Looking back from the release point to where you are today, is there anything that you think, Boy, now I know this, I would add that to or this topic interest to a chapter. What would you add between book release and now?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:01:03] Yeah, I mean, I could add something to almost everything in the book, right? Like so I think the key, I think about this a lot, and I had to think about this when I brought up the revised edition because like, what would I change? And it's like. There's incremental advances to to every facet or every element of research that's going on. Are there revolutionary advances? That's a that's a harder question and you know, you guys know as well as I do. There's been big advances in things like, you know, artificial intelligence, deep learning, which are just, I think, starting to. To enter into this space in a way that's that's maybe meaningful to like average recreational athletes. So that's like an area that I don't touch on at all in the book that I might have worked into in terms of trying to how how you understand data, how you understand big data. I think that's where some a lot of the exciting stuff has been happening. But it's like, you know, I look back some of the stuff I updated for the updated version. It's like my understanding of nutrition. Like, you know, let's say we knew like we have like five percent knowledge of what we really need to know of what to eat right? And now we're at six percent. So now our understanding of like the role of fat, and I wrote a lot about, you know, I wrote somewhat sceptically about low carb, high fat diets, but I wrote about fat adaptation and about, you know, fasted workouts.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:02:34] And I think my sense is that. Among the people that I talked to, those fads or fads is a value laden word, but those those protocols are maybe less. People have thought, You know what? I'm not sure the pros outweigh the cons. So there's stuff like that where it's like stuff that seemed hot at the time. It's like, maybe it didn't pan out. It's not. It's not that it didn't. It's it's wrong, but it's just like I would emphasise it differently. So that's that's a rambling answer, but it's like, yeah, there's everything I would update, but I'm not sure there's like any. Oh, and you know, brain stimulation is actually the big, probably the biggest thing where I'm like, I would I would like. Halo has gone out of business, which is the, you know, so it's like I devoted a whole chapter to electric brain stimulation, and I'm still not sure. Yeah, I still have the sense that there's a real effect there. But but the the idea that this was going to transform competitive athletics and was going to become a real issue in terms of fairness. It looks like I got that a little bit wrong. And so that's probably a chapter that deserved and I did update that a little bit, but it's like I probably wouldn't have given it a whole chapter based on what I know now, right?

Gary McCoy: [00:03:43] It's really interesting, you know, to see a company like Halo no longer be in the spectrum. And I remember meeting those guys at the MIT Sloan conference years back and starting to try to posture. You know, is this are we too far over the line? Is there too much risk, potentially with this type of technology? And I think there was a lot of fear surrounding it for our listeners. You know, Halo was a technology that you basically wore like a set of headphones over the head that would stimulate brain patterns that we were looking for translation into athletic skills and endeavours. And there was some pretty good and some pretty good compelling research out there that suggested that it was very positive. But it's really interesting because I think the thing about your writing, Alex in the book Endure. Firstly, this natural kind of I call it impatient curiosity kind of came across to me, and I think we live in that space similarly when when working with athletes. The second thing that was like a revisit for me was this whole central governor theory, which is where brain stimulation was being looked at to be part of that equation. If you were unpacking central governor theory into its simplest forms, how do you describe that to somebody who's who's new into running, for example? How do describe it?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:05:03] Yeah, I mean, I think the basic idea is really actually pretty, pretty easy to grasp. It's that when you feel like you've reached your limits, it's your brain. That is. Doing so to protect you, your brain is is is saying, no, you can't run anymore as opposed to like what? You know, another way I put it as like, you put someone on a treadmill and you have them run until they fall off the back. And then you challenge the scientists to say what physiological parameter was maxed out at the moment, this guy fell off the back of the treadmill and for for every any physiological parameter you can come up with. Now it may be that in one given context, yeah, the guy's heart rate was at max or whatever, but you can construct scenarios where someone will fall off the back of the treadmill where that parameter is not at max. So it can't be that heart rate is what forces you to quit. It can't be that lactate levels force you to quit. It can't be that muscle fatigue forces you to quit. So there is no parameter physiological parameter you can that you can point to. That says this is what tells people that they've reached their physical limits. And the central governor theory is basically saying that's because it's your brain that is performing some calculation consciously, subconsciously, like the details get very messy, but the essence is your brain has decided that it's probably wise for you to stop. And so it's making it impossible for you to go on.

Gary McCoy: [00:06:15] So from a from a sports science context, I always say there's two laws in sports science. There's availability in a broad sense, we want to de-risk an athlete from injury and then this capacity. Are we optimising the genetic potential of that athlete? And the good news on that second one is we don't know what that genetic potential is, right? We don't know what it looks like, and it's those ceilings that we try to work in and work towards in terms of even shunting those higher and higher. There's a ton of methodologies out there to kind of do that, but one of the interesting parts of that equation I've always looked at is and it's kind of the truth/perception relationship, right? I had someone say to me once there's no such thing as truth is only perception. And when you understand that and the environments to which you are raised and train in that, there's this kind of imprinting that is happening on the human system, right? It could be from when we were little kids. Our parents kind of put barriers to risk in front of us. But that whole kind of balance between perception of risk of injury and perception of improving capacity performance. For me, that's a fine balance. Do you look at it the same way?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:07:33] Yeah, And you know, so look, my sport is running, so I'll talk, my analogies will come from from Endurance sports or from running. Yeah, and lots of runners get injured. You know, risk is a real thing in that context, but you can also think of risk in the sense of not am I going to like, blow out my hamstring? But am I going to make it to the finish before hitting some sort of wall where, you know, so it's a competitive risk? And so the the there's a lot of very interesting research that is in a sense that doesn't have to doesn't rely on any sort of mystical central governor. It's just about pacing. How do you pace yourself to to maximise your performance? And this becomes it ends up being just a fascinating kind of test lab to understand how people are operating. And so for me, in writing Endure, one of the interesting things for me was reading about all this research and then going back and reflecting on my own career and saying, Right, how did I race, OK? Think of all my best races at various distances. I always ran the second half faster than the first half. Now there's there's there's some very interesting research that shows that even world record holders speed up in the last kilometre, let's say, of a 10k race.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:08:46] So they're holding something in reserve. But for me? And everyone's on a spectrum. It's like there are some people who just are totally fearless or what I would have called, you know, stupid. They're like, you know, the gun goes and they're sprinting. And it's like, Dude, you know, it's a 10 kilometre race. How come you're you're sprinting the first like, how many races have you run? You run like a hundred. How do you not learn that you're going to blow up, but they're just wired that they're they're letting it all hang out in the hope that one day they're going to it's all going to click and they're going to hang in all the way and for some time for some of them, it does. Like, I've seen it happen where people who are for years, it's like, Oh, that guy always does that. And then one day it's like, Oh man, he held on. He won the race in it. And and whereas I was on the other end of that spectrum of like, I am going to intellectualise this, I'm going to think very carefully about what what I should be capable of, what the odds are. I mean, you know, I wasn't explicitly doing like game theory calculations, but I just the fact is I in a long career of running 1500 metres, I never ran the first, the first 800 in faster than two minutes, even though my personal best was considerably faster than than a Four-Minute mile pace.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:09:59] And so I look back now and I'm like, that was a big mistake because I didn't give myself a chance. I didn't. I didn't accept that even the sort of 30 percent risk of blowing up. I mean, accept that 30 percent risk and run five races. And then maybe you're going to you're going to make it so sorry, I'm wandering away from your question. But the the point is that that reflects my personality. But like you said, it also reflects how I grew up, how I was coached, how which served me well in some contexts, but maybe put ceilings that I wasn't aware of at the time because not just like, am I going to get injured? But how do I how much am I willing to let it? How much am I willing to fail? And the right answer is different in different sports and for different people like maybe in some sports, consistency is rewarded in other sports. The occasional like, you know, grand slam home run is rewarded and so you have to. Exactly. There's no right answer, but there's context and there's understanding that you are making decisions even if you don't feel like you're making decisions.

Gary McCoy: [00:11:02] It's really interesting to, I know that there's some research and study going into like children. It's like second child has almost the opportunity to develop into a world class athlete as opposed to first child in many situations. I don't want to speak in blanket terms, but part of the rationale and some of the long term athletic development individuals I've spoke to around the world, they tend to think that it's that parental. It's learning to be a parent, right? First kid, I remember driving home from the hospital, doing 40 miles an hour on a freeway, scared right that something was going to happen. And there's all these things that kind of you learn and adapt as a parent in terms of the boundaries that you set on a child. And then when that second child comes along, those boundaries are a little bit less. And those risks can be elevated slightly. So, to me that like there's so much leading into the capacity and central governor subconsciously. And to your point, because you're your own lab ride as a runner, as an athlete, consciously as well, because like as you indicated, right, you're you're setting up going into a race trying to reserve what you've got for that second half of the race. So the subconscious conscious balance is at self-talk that our athletes who are listening could say, Yeah, look, I've got to have better self-talk. Is that maybe step one? I know we can't go back and get another set of parents or change our change our upbringing. What do you what are those methods to to begin that journey on raising capacity?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:12:43] So, just to pick up your earlier point about kids, it is funny to say that my kids are five and seven now and it's like, you know, when I let my older daughter start to cross the street by herself, it was like, Well, we just treat them the same. So every, every sort of offence that I give my older daughter, my younger one gets it two years earlier. And you know, who knows the effect will? Maybe she'll be a world class athlete. Maybe she'll be hit by a car like, I don't know. Well, we'll hope it's the the. We'll hope it's the first one. Yeah, yeah. But but yeah, it's definitely true. And you're right, that's a fascinating area of research. And there's also like just wandering slightly off tangent. There's some really interesting research I wrote about a year or two ago that looked at like you. You ask parents, OK, here's a list of like 20 things. It some kids are allowed to do and others aren't. Tick off the ones that your kid is allowed to do and. Then fast forward, I can't remember how many years it was, let's see which kids are overweight and which aren't. And it's like you look at and the kids who have more freedoms and tend to be healthier, the ones who were allowed to walk down the street to find their friends or to the park the ones who were allowed to cross the road a little bit earlier.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:13:55] And they have like a list of like if you have six or more of these affordances by the age of whatever, your risk is dropped by X percent. And that had a big effect on me in terms of thinking about precisely these things in the context of of parenting of like. Yeah, as much as I am aware of the risks, I also want to give kids freedom. That's parenting is a whole other topic. So let me see if I can remember what you actually question. Actual question to us. Oh yes. How do you how do you start to to raise the raise the ceilings? One of the responses I got to to endear a lot is like, Wow, really interesting stuff. You really identified a lot of interesting problems. Why don't you tell us how to solve them? And it's like, Well, because I don't know otherwise I would be a coach. Yeah, well, that's that's another career or another personality. Like, like the yeah, that's another point I often make is like, if I knew how to coach people, I would be coaching people. That's a skill set that's beyond knowing research, and there's a lot of relation relationship stuff that goes into coaching. But anyway, to actually answer your question, as you hinted, the first answer I can come up with is is motivational self-talk.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:15:07] Not necessarily because that's the only or the best approach, but because it's the one that people have tested empirically in. So, I as a as a guy who has not built up my own database of like, I've tried this with a thousand athletes, and here's what seemed to work for me. All I can do is say, tell me what has been tested in a in a it's it's hard to randomise psychological interventions, right? Like it's hard to do RCT randomised controlled trials of like feelings. But to the extent that people have tried, this is what I can say. You know what? There's some pretty interesting evidence that if you take some time to work on your thought patterns and it's important to emphasise it's not if you decide that in the middle of a competition, you're going to tell you you're going to suddenly tell yourself to, you know, recognise negative thoughts and change them. It's you do the work beforehand to try and change the how you're framing situations and what your automatic response. You can predict what it's going to feel like halfway through a 10k or a Marathon. Like, it's not a surprise. It's going to feel like a surprise when you're in the race like I had. I did not remember it was this unpleasant, but you know, before that, it's going to be like that.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:16:17] So if you can change your responses, you know, like from this really sucks and I'm an idiot to it's hard. But this is why I chose to be here. This is what I want to do, and I trained for this and this is my opportunity. You know, there's different things work for different people. So, to me, that is like in terms of practical like things you can do in two weeks. That's that's like the first thing I would say broader. It's really hard to recommend mindfulness because it's such a buzzword and has been recommended for everything. But the more I, the more I sort of get into it, the more I think that sort of mindfulness approach, the non-judgmental awareness of what you're feeling and understanding and understanding. Going back to what we were saying about central governor the the, you know, how do you how do you change central governor? I really think knowing that it exists, is a powerful first step that so that when you when you feel that feeling that I can't go any further, that doesn't mean you can just decide to go further. But you can understand this isn't like a physiological crisis. I'm not dying. I'm just now in the hard part of the battle with with myself.

Gary McCoy: [00:17:29] So, yeah, it's amazing the high performance models that I've worked in and learn from and gleaned in terms of systems. There's really when when I look at athletes centric models, I always begin. I teach coaches this that the absolute foundation is the emotional presentation of that athlete. On top of that is the cognitive decision making. Because the first affects the second, then we can pass out physical systems, look at those technical ability, tactical use, strategic use over the course of a time period or sequence. And that strategic outcome generally feeds back into the emotional framework. So it's the cycle that is continuing to build. The emotional side of the equation is probably the hardest as you indicate it probably the hardest to measure, but may be probably the thing that could have potentially the most effect on not only the rate of perceived exertion, but then in terms of future modelling central governor.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:18:29] Yeah. And I think it's also the emotional part is, is the part that's hardest to get people to buy into. Or at least again, speaking from my own personal experience, at least it's like everyone's different, right? Like, not everyone has the same mindset as me, but certainly for me and for a lot of my friends, it was, you know, what can we measure? What can you show me matters? And so the other stuff I'm not going to worry about, and I didn't, you know, I didn't worry about that, about how I was feeling about a race, how I was feeling about myself. You know, how I was feeling about my preparation. And yeah, and to some extent, it's like. It's like if only someone had told me, but yeah, people did tell me like, it's, you know, it's not it's not like nobody knew about sports psychology in the 1990s. It's that people were telling me and I was like, Yeah, whatever, like, yeah, thanks for thanks for your book. So, so that's that's I think one of the big challenges is is is not just. Knowing the right answers, but thinking carefully, and I think this is kind of what you're what you are suggesting and saying is how do we kind of integrate that from an early place so that people are are receptive and rather than sceptical to even though these ideas are can be? It's not like as simple as like, well, if you run this many miles at this many pace at this, at this pace, you'll you'll achieve this physiological state. It's, it's tricky.

Gary McCoy: [00:19:57] It is. And I think most practitioners, most coaches who are out there when they're looking at individual physical systems, you know, whether it's cardiovascular system, which has been predominant in our world for a long time or whether it's, you know, the biomechanics of running, whether it's running power, whether it's false production force impulse, the kind of all these independent measures we've kind of always known or have always postured that it's it's not one plus one plus one equals three, it's one plus one plus one equals five six, right? There are multiples in terms of the interrelationships between physical systems and how they are set up to develop this athlete. At the end of the day, you know, it's it's like that old saying, if you believe you can or you believe you can't, you're right. And to that end, I think once you're getting into that writing like a computer code to accept the challenges that potentially exist and seeing them positively on outcomes, there's that adaptation. I think that could potentially spiral up. But I don't see a lot of people, Alex, that are even looking at this, measuring it or adding it as a critical portal to athlete development.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:21:12] I think, you know, just as you're saying that one of the thoughts that's popping in my mind is one of the tricky things is that. There are far more roads to like for everything that I can when I think about, OK, so let's say, should a coach be screening for this sort of emotional component? It's like, well, yeah, for every trait that I would say, these are the things you should look for. There are examples of, you know, fantastic athletes who are the opposite, you know, for every calm, stoic athlete, there's a fiery angry athlete and that's...

Gary McCoy: [00:21:48] Borg vs.McEnroe, I just watched that.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:21:50] Oh yeah, I haven't watched that yet. But but it's like, there's no like when you talk about the cardiovascular system, nobody is saying, well, for some people, having a really low VO2 Max can be an advantage. It's like, no, it's like, Yeah, more is better. Like, yes, at the at the really extreme end, there may be some trade offs between the last few percent of VO2 Max and efficiency. Maybe you can't. You have to choose between. But fundamentally, like, yeah, more is better. Whereas there really is. There really are different roads to success, you know, psychologically and and in terms of understanding, you know, getting angry versus, you know, being totally passive and or being positive versus negative. Like any time I talk about some of the motivational self-talk literature, I'll have people who are like, You know, I have my best race when I'm, you know, when I have a chip on my shoulder, when I'm angry and it's like, Yeah, I know people like that. And who knows, could they be? Could their patterns be retrained such that they would be even better? Maybe, but maybe not. And so I think that's one reason that it it's it remains a sort of under or neglected aspect of athletic preparation is that there is never going to be just one answer because that part of us is too complicated to to codify.

Gary McCoy: [00:23:09] It's amazing to think about emotion as a fuel source. Our president of our company, Cory Paddock, is a former energy trader and lived in that sector and one of the quotes I we were posturing the other week is anger is, you know, this endlessly renewable energy source if it's tapped into and used correctly, right? So, yeah, the foundations, the foundations of it made it just absolutely fascinating. And I think, you know, we've got to get away from looking at the like analysing the body like it's a car and using that and analogy across the line. I think, while it's provided some good education to the layperson about how things work, it's also kind of set us up for some of the parts failure in many ways as well. And I think it's more like we've got to look at the body like in a computer code and an operating system versus the various softwares we put on top of that operating system. And what is the capacity of your operating system? How much RAM are you running on for VO2, right? How does that all contextually come to par? But you know, it's it's it's I think one of the beauties of this industry is I often term it optimum genetic potential. We don't know what that is. We don't know. And that's that's the problem and the beauty of it. Every time, every time I'm coaching, that's a problem and the beauty of the software.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:24:31] Yeah, I mean, just thinking of the car analogy, and it's like the reason it's so sticky, I think, is that. Given a diverse group of people, if you want to have a quick screening to figure out who's going to be the best athletes, there's some very simple physical tests that are going to get you 99 percent of the way there, and it's only really once you get to the everyone's got similar physical attributes that then that last percent, all the other stuff, all the stuff we're talking about becomes the difference maker. But it's like, you know, on a high school team, you'd rather have someone who who was born with a high VO2 Max and is willing to to run 50 miles a week than someone who's a born winner. But you know, who is that? Yeah, there's still there's always it's always great to have someone who has that psychological killer instinct, but if they don't have if they're just, you know, completely not built for the sport and not willing to train, they're not going to get there. And so that's why I think people stick with that purely physical framework because it is like, let's you. You know, the unanswerable question is always, well, how much is physical, how much is, is, is, you know, mental or psychological. These other sort of circles and it's like, well, it depends on the context. And, you know, in a random sample of the population, it's ninety nine point nine percent physical at the Olympics. I don't know what the number is, but it's like it's the mental side is huge. And so that's that's where it gets interesting. But it's hard for people to intuit because they all have the experience of like, you know, I trained pretty hard in high school and some guys showed up one day and he had never run before, you know, any, and he was way faster than me. So how could you know that clearly wasn't mental? Or maybe, maybe it was.

Gary McCoy: [00:26:14] But historically, through your career as an athlete, what runners do you admire? Who do you look up to? Is, is there somebody that you say, Yeah, this is the pinnacle for me. I I if I could go back and model that training program, model that individual athlete or is it somebody that's just, you know, at the old Prefontaine statement of Pure Guts Runner, right? Who do you look up to?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:26:36] You know, for a long time, I think my hero was really Roger Bannister, and I, you know, I had a copy of his biography or autobiography Next to My Bed for for many years. That and once a runner and I would just every night, I would read a random chapter from one of those books. And there's a lot of things I I liked about Roger Bannister, but I think I think I was also heavily influenced, maybe ironically enough, by Tim Noakes, who's his original The Lore of Running, which I got when I was in high school. One of the things is Tim Noakes, you know, for for better or for worse, he has evolved a lot over time and has been he has continued to challenge new ideas. One of the one of the themes that I don't know how much he still espouses this, but back in 1990, he was big on doing the most you can on the least training you could so like maximising the sort of the efficiency of your training output. And with the rationale that this is going to minimise your chances of needless injury or or overtraining. So it's like wait till you've maxed out on 30 miles a week before you move up to 40 miles a week. And, you know, figure out. And I think there is some. Some really nice logic to that in terms of learn how to race, don't. Don't just think you can solve every problem by training a little bit harder because you're going to reach a point where you're running 100 miles a week and someone still beats you and you're like, Well, I better run 110 or 120 and then you're going to get get hurt.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:28:11] Yeah. And Bannister was a sort of paragon of that. There's a lot of things about Bannister, but he was a sort of minimalist trainer, a smart guy, a thoughtful guy he was he ended up being a neurologist. He was absolutely ahead of his time in terms of thinking, like for him when a race didn't go well, it wasn't a question of I'm going to go back and punish myself with with, you know, twenty four hundreds, it was I'm going to go up to Scotland and spend a few days rock climbing and get my head back on and then I'm going to come back and two weeks later, I'm going to break the four minute mile. And so there was a lot of what I liked about his. His belief was fundamental like, whereas compared to John Landy, his rival, Landy was a seriously heavy trainer, and he kept running for, oh, two or four hundred one, and he would go back and train harder and harder and harder and bannister. To him, the answer wasn't trained harder and harder. The Timna answer was look within like, take a rest, figure out how you can get everything out of yourself on the day of the race. And so I was a big believer. What I loved about Bannister, which I. To some extent tried to emulate in my career, was if there was a guy, if you were to, if you were to take all the runners in the world and have them do a standardised workout, predict their times and then have them do a race, who's going to have the greatest ratio, the greatest overperformance ratio that compared to what he's capable of doing in training when the chips are down and were competing, who is the one who finds that magic? What we would now talk about who, who dials, who's able to turn the dials of the central governor to 11 to the most? And I loved that.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:29:48] Now, having said all that, I will say. My idolisation of Roger Bannister probably meant that I kept my mileage lower than I should have throughout my career, and one of my regrets is, you know, I never ran 100 mile week like I was a pretty good 1500 and 5000 metre runner. It's like I was running like 40 miles a week when I ran my 1500 bests like, and you know, it's not that I was stupid. I understood it would be good to run a little more, but I was very cautious in moving up. And I did have some injury problems and it's like if you want to get to 100 miles a week and if you're a little bit delicate, you need to start early like you can't wait till you're 28 and say, Oh, maybe I should try mileage. So anyway, that's the long answer to your question.

Gary McCoy: [00:30:27] Yeah, great, great answer and insightful and segues me over to a discussion on ageing a little bit and one of our friends of Kinetyx and working with our company right now, a little bit as Malindi Elmore, you know, who finished ninth in the women's marathon from Canada and the crazy we had her on the podcast a few weeks back. Yeah. And so he's here's somebody who has ran. She pretty much ran 1500 in her entire life. Now she turns up to the Olympics and goes, Hang on a minute. Now I'm in the Marathon at the Olympic Games, and it seems to me that she gets better with age and her capacity is is staggeringly changing over this period of time to go from one distance to the other. And it's back to that that that question that we kind of danced around a little bit earlier, right? Is it nature or is it nurture? Or is it the combination thereof? Somebody like Malindi Elmore? Is it her environment that enables her? Is she de-risking capacity changes in her environment? Or is it? Is it biological ageing and the slowness of it for her genetically that is potentially enabling outputs like this? I mean, to your point, we don't know. Right? But if you had to lean on like an area, I kind of think that it's, you know, these these work hand in hand, you know, that genetic imprint is fuelled by our environmental choices.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:31:57] Yeah. And for sure, I agree. And I would say with Melinda, there's a couple of things that that you have to be there that are like, there are two miracles at least going on at the same time. One is that someone who is an Olympic 1500 runner runner turns out to be a top 10 Olympic marathoner now that that's unexpected and unusual, even if you're like 28 years old. I mean, it's not unprecedented. Like, like Eliud Kipchoge was a world champion at 5000 metres and became but and you know, everyone who's a world class marathoner was pretty good at the shorter distances. But Malindi was an Olympic 1500 metre runner, should have been a two time Olympic 1500 runner, but Canada had some bogus selection policies and left her off the team. So she she was an elite 1500 metre runner for, you know, a decade at the highest level. Right. So normally someone who has who has the potential to be a great marathoner, they're going to get a bunch of signs that it's like, Hey, when I ran cross-country at Stanford, I I was, you know, I was really better at 6K than I was at 1500.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:33:06] Or why don't I do tempo runs with with other 1500 runners? I smoke them. So it's like either she was ignoring the signs that she was born for the marathon or she's unusually versatile. And then you throw in what you mentioned, which is the ageing, which is like, she didn't, you know, she had a couple of kids, didn't compete, you know, ran some Ironmans for fun. You know, I'm putting air quotes there and and ran remarkably fast and then said, Oh, maybe I should take it seriously and runs Olympic standard. And in fact, runs a Canadian record. And so the and then she qualifies for the Tokyo Olympics and then Tokyo gets delayed by a year and you're like, Well, that's too bad because we had this remarkable comeback story. And now she's going to be I think she was 41. Like, it's like, Well, you know, she's obviously, you know, at that age, the the slope is so steep that she's losing like 2 minutes every year and she comes 9th. So, yeah, there's a bunch of mysteries, I think.

Gary McCoy: [00:34:03] Yeah, exactly.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:34:05] Yeah, it's got to be everything like you because she she clearly had more potential as a long distance runner than she realised as a. When she was hammering out 1500s, and I guess the problem was she was so good at 1500 that it's like, why move up when you're going to the Olympics? But to add one last point, maybe, thinking about like how we set limits for ourselves. Let me just spitball all this that. Malindi dreamed of going and you know, I know Malindi, but I don't know well enough to know what was going on in her head. But let me just suggest this hypothetical, which is that she dreamed of going to the Olympics. Yeah, she was running 1500 because that's where kids start, at least in Canada. She was good. And so she realised she could make the Olympics. So she she followed that path and and made the Olympics, and I'm sure she won. I think she ran 4:02, and I'm sure she I'm sure she dreamed of breaking four and stuff. But maybe making the Olympics was enough that it was it was read for her as a success. She was so good she was going to make the Olympics. And maybe in another context, maybe if she was born in Kenya, where 4:02 gets you, you know, a handshake and a ham sandwich, maybe she would have said, I need to move up to another distance. Maybe I need to keep exploring, you know, David Epstein, whose books I really, really respect. His most recent book was called Range and one of the things it's all about being journalist.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:35:35] But one of the things he talks about is the sampling period in sports long term development that people who make it to the top often they didn't choose the choose their sport. When they were six, they were playing every sport. They were the Roger Federer, they were playing all sorts of sports. And so they found the one that they were best suited for. And so when they decided to then apply their grit and go all in, they found the sport that they were perfectly suited for. So you could argue, and I definitely don't mean this to read as a criticism of Malindi, but you could argue that she didn't find her right fit because she was good enough at the 1500. And if she'd been forced to have a different, a higher aspiration, she would have said, well, for two is pretty good. But if I really want to make it, if I want to be able to feed my family, I need to find a I need to see if there's something I'm better at. And she might have discovered that she was better at the Marathon. I don't know. I really want to be sensitive to not suggesting that that that making the Olympics in two different events is somehow a failure or something. But but just in terms of how you perceive your ceiling and whether you've succeeded by making the Olympics or being competitive at that level maybe affects what you try.

Gary McCoy: [00:36:36] Yeah, it's yeah, exactly. And it certainly feeds into that result or outcome based rebuilding, rewriting the code for somebody, right? I mean, it certainly feeds into that discussion, but it's incredible because one of the things I've always noticed that as we age, we tend to our movement is less and I don't know whether that's societal societally induced, whether it is just technologically induced, right? The fact that I can shoot you an email means I don't have to handwrite you a letter Mate and go and stick the stamp on and walk down to the mailbox. I mean, everything we do that appears to be an advancement is actually detrimental to human movement and the human body. I mean, for me, biologically, we are designed to bio locomote within a gravitational field. We are built to move and everything we do as we age is to deconstruct that movement and kind of shut it down. So I think it's that, again, that wonderful question of nature and nurture, but it brings into mind something you spoke about in the book, and I don't want to put you on the spot here, but I will, because it's the Australia coming out in me, the Nike breaking two project, having been done a little bit of early stage work many, many years ago with Alberto Salazar, who was leading that project or one of the leads in that project was was interesting for me to watch it from afar. I think you unpacked that programme a lot. Let's step back. Let's go back maybe 5-10 years. If you were in charge of the Nike Breaking2 or anybody's Breaking2 project, how would you set that up?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:38:23] I wouldn't, because I would say it's stupid. There's no one. No one's going to break 2 right like this, this was the, there's there's a lot to say about the break to project both positive and negative. But on the positive side, like. It was audacious. Now I think it's important to say there is another sub-2 project headed by Yannis Pitsiladis, in Britain that was a few years earlier, announced a few years earlier. That was really and it actually had some of the same people who ended up working for, like Andy Jones in particular, who then moved over to the Nike project. Mm-hmm. You know, I didn't take Yannis Pitsiladis project seriously, and I say that with, you know, with regret, it just seemed too ludicrous. You know, you can harness all the, you know, biomechanics and various other things. And is there some low hanging fruit by getting the course better? Yeah, but the world record at the time was what it must have been 2:02:57. Or maybe it was even slower when Yannis set up the project. So 2:03? It just didn't seem plausible to me. And that's maybe that's that's my sort of species level central governors speaking that it just it just seemed like, come on, don't you know, don't insult me by by making outlandish predictions.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:39:40] And then when Nike did it and you know, they announced I, they invited Runner's World to cover it. So I got to sort of sneak preview before it was announced to the world. And there were there was really just two possibilities in my mind. One is that it was a giant publicity stunt and it was, you know, was silly and that I should deconstruct it and and make it clear how silly it was or two was that they had something that nobody else had. And that turned out to be the shoes, the Vaporfly shoes, which had the stiff carbon fibre plate in them. And so in a sense, in that sense, I think my instinct was not wrong that that just shaving around the edges was not going to get them three minutes. They had something which was going to give get them partway there. But there's still even even if you if you time machine to be back and made me a Nike employee in 2015 or something like that and said we've got these shoes that are just doing stupid things on, you know, in the lab, what should we do? I don't know that I would have. Thought of such an audacious goal, and I think that, you know, of of two minutes or two hours, rather for the Marathon, I think that took a real imaginative leap.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:40:54] And then to commit a bunch of money to it. And I think when Kipchoge ran in the Nike race 2:00:25 more so than when he actually broke two minutes when he made that that big like two and a half minutes faster than the then world record that like it turned my head, you know, 360 degrees. And I think it really changed how everyone was thinking about the marathon, and it was one of those. Even though we all knew that it was done with the aid of a whole bunch of, you know, pacing and drafting and shoes. It absolutely changed my conception of the limits of how fast people can run, and I think it changed other people's. I think it changed everything, you know, virtually everyone's and so that that that that takes something that I think great athletes and you know, the people behind great athletes are willing to to make those imaginative leaps that I don't know that I would have even even given the same set of tools. I don't know that I would have made that leap.

Gary McCoy: [00:41:56] You know, the interesting part of that, too, is the fact that, you know, if you don't succeed in getting that sub two time, I mean, therefore, we've got what could be packaged as a negative outcome, right? Or a failure point? And what does that do to potentially suppress the long term central governor ability, right? It's all feeding in to that central central network.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:42:18] So, you know, like there were a lot of people leading up to the sub-2, including like some of my good friends and colleagues who were predicting, you know, like they're going to pay if they try and go out at 60 Minutes for half way, they are going to run 2:04-2:05 because the Marathon is unforgiving and will crush you if you, you know, any hubris will be will be punished tenfold. And that was really the way people thought about marathons for a long time that you have to treat it with respect. And the first crack in that in that facade was Sammy Wanjiru in at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It was like a billion degrees out super hot. He went out at just like breakneck pace, and you can hear the sort of bemusement in the commentators saying, well, young Sammy Wanjiru, like he's going to get, he's going to learn something today, and he ran 2:06.

Gary McCoy: [00:43:12] Yes.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:43:13] And so nobody understood that race is still won. When you when you sort of do the conversions for the heat and the conditions that day, that's one of the greatest marathons ever run. And so that was like, oh, he didn't get punished, even though he he, you know, he taunted the Marathon. And it's not that no one has ever done this before back in the 80s Steve Jones set a world record like 2:07 off a 61 first half, which but that people forget about that and it gets to be like, Man, if you don't, if you don't respect the Marathon, it'll punish you. And so I think that that breaking down some of that mystique around the Marathon. And but as you say, so as you say, had had breaking too had they run 2:05. That would have reinforced rather than broken down barriers, and it would have probably meant that other so sorry to give you a long, rambling answer. But after the 2008 Olympics, when Sammy Wanjiru ran that stupid, stupid, stupid race to win it. I did an analysis once for in the context of progress towards a step to Marathon like what happened at major marathons after the 2008 Olympics. And sort of there was a step change where all of a sudden on average major marathons were going out a minute faster because this younger generation of athletes was coming in and they just they weren't scared.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:44:30] So they were going out faster. And you get 15 guys going out a minute faster, 13 of them blow up, but a couple of them hang on and you start getting faster times. And so I think sub-2 the Breaking2 and the subsequent Ineos race has led to a similar thing. There's a lot of races now that go out 61 and there's a lot of suffering in the last 10k of these of these marathons. But people are running fast times partially because of the shoes, but partially because they're being aggressive because the mystique has been broken down. And in your alternate history, which was close, you know, there were three guys in the Breaking2 race and one of them ran like, I can't remember what the times were 2:04 and 2:12 or something or two or six like they blew up. They paid the price. And so at halfway, it was only Kipchoge left on pace. And all of a sudden they were like, Man, this is going to be one expensive, embarrassing failure if Kipchoge doesn't hang on. And he did. But if he hadn't, if he had tripped or if, you know, had it shoelace malfunction, oh my gosh, then maybe we'd be sitting in an era of like 2:06 marathons because people would have been like, Yeah, man, if you try and run sub two, you're going to you're going to pay the price.

Gary McCoy: [00:45:32] Yeah, amazing. I wonder if anyone's going to take future risks in this category, right? If there's going to be other programmes or other perceptions of right limiting systems or even technology that we could adapt and bring into the into the sport so that we can get get through that barrier because at the end of the day, it's like in my sport of baseball, which I, by the way, I did run one marathon. I said, when I forget the pain of that Marathon, I'll run another. I did the marathon in thousand twenty one years later. I still remember that pain, so I'm still not running another one. But at at any point, it's it's such a race that requires respect is what that requires. And it's it's at a level, I think, you know, you just can't start out running a marathon, right? You just can't. There's so much that has to be even emotionally founded to understand your own feedback points, not failure points, but feedback points, so you can continue that journey. It just absolutely fascinates me because I think to your point earlier, I think it comes down to the mental side of the equation. You know who's who's got it, who's got it mentally? Who's who's you know, if all these physical systems measure out with some sense of similarity? Who's who's going to?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:46:55] It is interesting, and I'll say a couple of things on that. One is that I agree that if you just start out and a lot of people do like recreational runners, they'll be like, I want to run a marathon, so they'll start running on the run on marathon. I don't think you're going to be able to push yourself. For the most part, if you haven't, that's too big a bite to start with. If you haven't started with like 5ks and 10Ks and learnt, if you have to learn to find where your edge is in manageable bites before, you can really hope to be sitting on the edge for a whole marathon. But conversely, there's a there's a phenomenon which is I don't know if it's imaginary. Tim Noakes wrote about it in his 1990 version of Lore of Running, and there's been speculation about it ever since. But the idea is that for many people, their first marathon is their fastest. And we're talking about people not who get up off the couch and decide to run a marathon. But elite runners who have like Malindi have excelled at shorter distances and then move up. It's not always the case, and Eliud Kipchoge has been an exception to that. But in a lot of cases, they don't get a lot faster after their first. And one explanation for that in the sort of central government context is that the marathon is is different from every event.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:48:07] Below it, like between a 1500 and a half marathon, are far more similar than a half marathon in a marathon. You get into a different regime in in those last like 10k, and so it's a surprise for many people just how bad it is. And so the central governor is not correctly tuned for the marathon. If you're a very experienced runner accustomed to what pain is supposed to feel like, four events up to the half marathon you like, I can handle this, I can handle this, and then you go into the marathon. You're like, I can handle this, you know, I'm just adjusting for it's twice as long. And then you discover this world of hurt in the last 10 miles or whatever, you know, five miles and your central governor adjusts and says, OK, next time we're running that far, we're going to keep it a little easier because otherwise we're going to go through that horrible thing. And, you know, obviously, not everyone is like that. Some people get faster and faster, but I think there is some truth to the fact that, like you said, you'll go back when you've forgotten the pain of the marathon. And if you're an elite runner running to marathon two marathons a year, you don't have time to forget how bad the last one was.

Gary McCoy: [00:49:06] No, no. 100 percent, Alex wearable technology Do you use anything yourself personally? Is there anything that kind of is a must have?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:49:16] So, I have a complicated relationship with wearable technology, and it's it's not because I don't appreciate it, it's because I'm too much of a data hound like to give you context, I in the 90s, back in the day I used to, you know, wake up in the morning, take my heart rate, stand up, wait 10 seconds, take my heart rate. Take that data plotted on Lotus 123 plot the running averages and the gap, because that was supposed to be some indicator of, you know, whatever. And so and I did that with my mileage and my shoe use and every every piece of data I could get. I analysed and probably over analysed. And so I'm very conscious right now, especially since I'm sort of post-super competitive that I love data too much. So I experiment with wearables, with, you know, gait analysis and things like that. I like it, but I I when I run on a day to day basis, I have a Timex Ironman watch that tells me how many seconds I've been running for. So and I do think there's there's a role for cycling in and out of of of of various streams of data so that you're never fully dependent on one stream of data to be able to run.

Gary McCoy: [00:50:28] Phenomenal answer. And too many, I think people grab onto a technology and just try to run with it and just say, Hey, you know, this is going to provide some answers before they've even tried to figure out what questions they're trying to answer. Right. They get the kind of horse and cart relationship there askew very often. Mate in our homework on you, I'll just close out on this. Firstly, I want to hear about the alto sax. I hear this is we want to unpack this. We want to dive into this a little bit part of the balance of being an athlete, music. How did that come about and how does it is it balance the reason that you are involved there? Tell us a little bit about that because I'm with your success as an author. I'm just waiting for the first, you know, getting on iTunes. And here's Alex on the Alto sax.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:51:17] So I think you've probably found a somewhat older bio. I finally took that out recently because the truth is, since my kids have since I've been a father, I've had less time to play. And so what I play jazz. And so for me, it's it's there is solo like for me to go in my room and play. My sax is is OK, but it's not the same as playing with a quintet or, you know, a group of other people, because with jazz, the interactions are what's crucial with improvisational music. You're responding to what's around you and the people around you, so I can put on a recorded piece of music and jam with that. But it's it's it's not the same as with other people. And so I haven't found a context here in Toronto since I moved back seven or eight years ago. But ultimately it's a, you know, it's a form of expression. And I will say I had a two year knee injury at one point in my 20s, and I was so grateful to have something else to be able to, you know, pour that passion that I had that was not able to go into running into into that

Gary McCoy: [00:52:23] Alex it appears you have limitless capacity yourself. I mean, you're involved in so many things, you know, from from the research that you read to the to the journal journalistic, you know, stuff that you produce as an author, and as a parent. How do you manage all that time? Do you have a secret to that or is it just, you know what, I've just got to chip these things off one at a time. Do you maintain a really rigorous game?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:52:49] I manage it very inefficiently and poorly, and with great with great stress. I would say the biggest challenge in my life is email. I keep struggling to figure out an algorithm to not take like a month to reply to emails, and I haven't I haven't managed it. So so the answer is, honestly, it's like the duck. you know who's trying to appear smooth on the surface of the water, but is paddling like hell underneath the water. So, you know, I try to focus on the things that that bring me happiness, but we all struggle with the logistical side and anyone who's got it, anyone who I was going to say, anyone who's got it figured out is probably lying. But then as well, if they've got to figure it out, then I want to hear what, what, what the solution is.

Gary McCoy: [00:53:32] Yeah, it's like if you remember being at Woodstock, you probably weren't there right.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:53:36] Exactly.

Gary McCoy: [00:53:36] It's the same analogy. You're right. Yeah, happiness is a phenomenal currency. And I think, you know, that's the one thing, you know, I try to teach my kids the whole time is, you know, that's the currency you want to work towards is happiness. Alex, where can people find you? What's the best place to learn more about? You work and where can we buy the book Endure? Where's the best place to get a hold of you?

Alex Hutchinson: [00:53:55] Probably the easiest place to find me is on Twitter. My handle is @sweatscience, and I write for a variety of publications, mainly for Outside magazine. But I will always post any article I write on on Twitter. So that's the good, good place to start. I do have a website AlexHutchinson.net, but it's pretty static. I updated it once every decade or so. And in terms of buying books, Endure should be available at fine bookstores everywhere. I would encourage people to, you know, check out their local bookstore and any. If they don't have it, they'll be happy to order it. But Amazon is certainly fine to and from my perspective, it makes no difference. But of course, you know, just in terms of supporting local communities, bookstores do play a huge role in promoting literacy and things like that.

Gary McCoy: [00:54:39] Our time is up. But Alex, I can't thank you enough on behalf of our entire team in Kinetyx as we're moving forward into this space with what we call The Human Kinesome Project trying to unpack, you know, what are those limits of human performance? You've certainly give us some guiding light and some thought that we never had prior to to picking up your book. So I'd encourage all our listeners to get out and get this book and read it because it's it's game changing for so many people. So, Alex, thank you so much.

Alex Hutchinson: [00:55:05] Well, thanks for the conversation, Gary. I really enjoyed bouncing all these ideas around, but thanks for the kind words.

Gary McCoy: [00:55:10] Thanks for listening to the Human Kinesome project. Team, the game is just beginning.

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