Polly Shorts. It doesn’t sound terrifying, but to a runner in the ‘up’ run of the Comrades Marathon, this 2.5-kilometre hill on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg is the most difficult part of the epic race. It is to the Comrades runner what the Hillary Step on Mount Everest is to the mountaineer. As Bruce Fordyce explains, ‘It is very steep and has a number of deceptive bends, each beguilingly promising the summit and then crushing the hopes of the broken runner.’
Fordyce will tell you that Polly Shorts is by no means the toughest hill in the Comrades. ‘Fields Hill is the monster, and Botha’s Hill, Ashburton and Inchanga are the monster’s offspring,’ he says. ‘All of these hills are longer, steeper and far worse than Polly Shorts. It is, however, the sadistic positioning of Polly Shorts that makes it so tough … Polly Shorts is positioned at eighty kilometres, or fifty miles, and the running spirit is very low when arriving at the hill … For lesser runners, the sight of the hill can break them … Everyone suffers on Polly Shorts.’
Despite these comments, in the 1983 Comrades I watched Bruce Fordyce run Polly Shorts as if it were flat, and I wrote at the time:
The television broadcast bore witness to one of those supreme moments in sport: a vision of athletic perfection that is unlikely to be equalled. I am happy to admit that watching Bruce running up Polly Shorts, with the strains of Vangelis’s famous music in the background, moved me to tears of joy. Never before had the Comrades seen such poetic running, nor had such fast running ever been achieved so effortlessly in the last third of the race. Bruce’s running expressed an intangible beauty: the now great runner, oblivious of the camera, content with his own most private thoughts, proving that man is beautifully made and indeed the wonder of the universe.
I am constantly amazed at the dominant role played by the brain in determining exercise performance. As mentioned, Plato was definitely on to something when he instructed, ‘Avoid exercising either the mind or body without the other, and so preserve an equal and healthy balance between the two.’
I believe that the mind remains the most important frontier for exercise science and, indeed, for medicine, in this new millennium – specifically, an understanding of the way in which the central governor works and the nature of the psychological tricks it plays in order to control us during exercise.
Every single sporting competition, be it a cricket, soccer, rugby or tennis match, or an endurance event like the Comrades Marathon, is influenced by the actions of the brain and the annoying doubts that it expresses, always at the wrong time. The great athletes are those who do not allow doubt to enter their minds; or, if doubt does enter, are able to control their thoughts and not allow them to interfere with performance.
One who understands the importance of the mental component of sport is South Africa’s greatest sportsman of the twentieth century, golfer Gary Player. He has written:
The mental aspect of sport is very important and in many cases the most critical factor in winning. I may not have been the most talented player of my generation, but I was the best prepared both mentally and physically. I loved pressure. I fed off it. I revelled in it. I knew that when the time came for me to hit the shot or sink the putt I needed to, to win, I could do it. The thought of failure was never in my mind – I wouldn’t let myself think that way. If the conditions were horrible I would tell myself that I would love playing in the rain and the wind and I would have a great round. When I heard my competitors complaining about how hard it was to play in those conditions, I knew that I had an advantage. They had already set themselves up for failure.
Before I took up endurance sports, I was never any good at controlling my mind. Only when I started rowing did I begin to learn this control. It probably took four years before I was able to row 2 000 metres without fearing that I might not last the distance. In my last competition, the South African University Championships in July 1972, I rowed in four races in one afternoon for a total of 7 000 metres of racing. We won each event. I had learnt to control my mind. It was the ideal preparation for the more difficult challenge that lay ahead: learning to control my mind for much longer periods – those hours required to complete marathon and ultramarathon races like the Comrades Marathon.
The paradox is that the only way to learn how to control thoughts and emotions once they enter the conscious mind is to evoke opposing conscious thoughts, the nature of which can only be discovered by actually being in the situation. Practice does indeed make perfect.
So I discovered that marathon and ultramarathon running, and in fact all endurance events lasting more than a few hours, lay the athlete bare by pushing him or her to perceived bounds of human endurance. It’s usually at this point that the endurance athlete hits ‘the wall’.
Until fairly recently, ‘the wall’ has not been properly understood. This is because scientists looked for a physiological explanation in the muscles to explain why athletes suddenly slow down so dramatically and feel so awful within a few kilometres. If the brain is the source of these sensations, then the explanations become easier and seem to make better sense.
Mark Allen, the six-time Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon world champion, best summed up the ability of the world’s leading athletes to ‘reprogramme’ their central governor when he said that it is easy to be motivated at the 7 a.m. start of the Ironman but, as the race progresses, ‘It’s like you’re tested to the core of your intent.’
The value of setting a goal may be simply that it programmes the central governor to accept a greater maximum effort before it senses danger.
In being the first to break the four-minute-mile barrier, Roger Bannister was able to convince his central governor that it was achievable, while the Australian athlete John Landy was not able to do so. Landy could only achieve this once someone else had provided the clear evidence that this ‘impossible’ performance was indeed achievable. So after he had run the mile in four minutes and one second seven times in competition, eventually in January 1954 Landy wrote: ‘Frankly, I think the four-minute mile is beyond my capabilities. Two seconds may not sound much, but to me it’s like trying to break through a brick wall. Someone may achieve the four-minute mile the world is wanting so desperately, but I don’t think I can.’
Yet forty-six days after Bannister had run the mile in 3 minutes 59.4 seconds, Landy ran three seconds faster than he had ever run when he reduced Bannister’s mile record to 3 minutes 58 seconds.
The top athletes have different ways of accomplishing this mental control, especially before a race. Bruce Fordyce locked himself away in his hotel room before a big race, and Paula Newby-Fraser, voted the Triathlete of the Millennium, would read a long and engrossing novel for the last two to three days before a big event. The end result, I think, is that the really exceptional athletes don’t place the same subconscious limits on their performance as the rest of us do. Their belief in their capacity to achieve is extraordinary. This ‘manipulation’ of the central governor opens up an entirely new field of study in the exercise sciences. All sorts of possibilities in the psychology of exercise and of competing become conceivable.
It explains how, as genetically superior as Bruce Fordyce is for long-distance running, other psychological elements also played a role in how he programmed his central governor. Bruce recalls how a good friend, Gordon Howie, gave him the best advice he has ever received: ‘He told me, “Get used to winning. Become accustomed to the fear, pressure and loneliness of leading. Run time trials, fun runs, anything, but get used to being in front.” He was right. Winning is another country – far away and very foreign. It isn’t fun, except for the bit when you break the tape. Winning hurts a lot, and a potential Comrades winner has to become familiar with the feeling and embrace it.’
There is also the potential of top athletes to use their understanding of the central governor to ‘psych out’ their opponents. For example, the central governor needs to know the duration and expected difficulty of the exercise for it to programme the body for the task ahead. So what happens when something unexpected is thrown into the mix? A hill that you did not know was part of the race that suddenly appears before you when you were expecting a flat stretch?
The great Comrades runner Alan Robb used this to good effect in the 1982 Comrades. Fordyce recalls how, as the lead pack of runners passed the fifty-six-kilometres-to-go mark, Robb shouted out, ‘Okay boys, only the Two Oceans marathon to go.’ Just the thought of what still lay ahead was enough to ‘psych out’ the majority of the competition that day. The central governors of most of those athletes couldn’t process this new information, and they fell by the wayside as their minds allowed them to become intimidated by what Robb had pointed out – except, of course, for the indomitable Fordyce. Fordyce and Robb produced one of the epic battles in Comrades Marathon history, which Fordyce eventually won.
Fordyce was himself expert at manipulating the mental state of his opponents. In the 1984 Comrades, he eventually caught up to a strong-running Bob de la Motte. Bruce admitted that he had underestimated De la Motte’s potential. As he passed De la Motte with less than ten kilometres to go, he said, ‘Bob, you are running like a star.’ Bruce will most likely tell you that he was showing genuine admiration for the performance of De la Motte, but any sports psychologist will tell you that in De la Motte’s mind would have been: ‘If I’m doing so well, how come you’ve just passed me?’
So when it comes to athletic performance, the body is controlled by the mind. The mind itself has a central governor doing all of this controlling, and the central governor can be programmed according to the will of the athlete. In this last statement lies the great beyond in exercise sciences – self-belief.
In my work with great sportsmen and women, and some great teams, I have seen how important a role self-belief plays in performance. Yes, like us, they all have that stop button in their brains. The difference is that they never get to the point where they push it.
It is 15 July 2007, and I am cold. But I am nowhere near as cold as Lewis Gordon Pugh. Or, rather, as cold as Pugh is about to get.
We are standing on the edge of sea ice at the North Pole. I am wrapped up in the latest cold-weather clothing. Pugh is wearing a Speedo and a pair of swimming goggles. Even the polar bears think he’s mad. The water temperature is –1.7 °C. Pugh has set himself the goal of swimming one kilometre in the coldest ocean on earth. My role is to make sure that he doesn’t die in the process.
Pugh and I first met in my office at the Sports Science Institute in Cape Town several years earlier. As part of his dream of becoming a pioneer swimmer, he had developed the idea of swimming around the Cape Peninsula, from the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront to Muizenberg. It would be a gruelling 100-kilometre journey – broken down into thirteen swims on consecutive days – in some of the roughest seas on the planet, not to mention the possibility of predators. And, of course, there was the cold water.
By the time he stepped into my office, Pugh had already been told by a number of local swimmers that it was not humanly possible – worse, he would probably die in the process. He later wrote in his book Achieving the Impossible:
One person whose view interested me greatly was Professor Tim Noakes’s, a world-famous exercise physiologist … Although we had once shared a walk on Table Mountain with a mutual friend, Alan Danker, I didn’t really know Professor Noakes.
After making an appointment, I showed up at his office … fearing he might be about to end my Cape Peninsula project. My feeling was that Professor Noakes knew what was and wasn’t possible physiologically; if he said it wasn’t possible, I doubt I would have tried it.
I remember our first meeting quite clearly. Pugh stepped into my office and said, ‘Professor Noakes, I want to swim around the Cape Peninsula. Nobody has done it before. The water temperature, as you know, will be cold, and on some days it may get to nine or ten degrees; on other days the wind will make the sea rough and progress will be slow. So, can my body handle it?’ He looked at me, and I do believe that I saw in his eyes trepidation that I was going to join his list of doomsayers and tell him that he was mad and that it was impossible; indeed, too dangerous even to consider. But throughout my career I have seen what the challenge of the impossible does to some athletes’ minds – once their minds accept that the impossible is achievable, their bodies soon follow.
So I gave him my answer in just one word: ‘Yes.’
According to Pugh, ‘That was good enough for me.’
Then I told him how he was going to do it. I told him to train with us at the Sports Science Institute, where I could guarantee him access to great physical trainers who would make sure that he was where he needed to be physically. I also planned to monitor his progress. Because of the mental fortitude I recognised in Pugh, I had no doubt that he would be successful. And he was.
While he was doing the swim, Pugh did not tell me how he was going. But when he reached the beach at Muizenberg, he phoned me. I was surprised that he had already finished the swim. He said simply: ‘I could not have done it without you.’ I did not understand what he meant, so I asked him. His answer was simple: ‘You believed in me.’ So it was that I began to understand the important role that the ‘coach’ plays in sport. If the athlete is to succeed, the athlete must believe absolutely in his or her coach. This is perhaps even more important than the training programme provided by the coach.
A few months later, Lewis Pugh visited me again, proposing a new challenge. He planned to swim in the sea of Spitsbergen, an island that forms part of the Norwegian archipelago called Svalbard. He explained to me that at its northern tip, Spitsbergen is 80 degrees North. The Arctic Circle begins at 66 degrees North. There was no doubt that the water there would be unbelievably cold – anywhere between 4 °C and –1.7 °C. He wished to improve on the ‘furthest north’ swim record that he had established in 2003, when he swam off the North Cape, the most northern coast of Norway.
Again, he provided me with all of this information as we sat in my office. ‘Can I do it?’ he then asked.
I paused and asked him what the water temperatures were likely to be. After he had told me that the temperatures would be between 0 °C and 4 °C, I said, ‘I am sure you can do it. But I am not so sure that you will live!’ My view was similar to that of his close friend and swimming partner Dr Otto Thaning, a heart surgeon who took Pugh aside and told him that he was convinced that a one-kilometre swim in 0 °C water would be life-threatening. He began to have serious doubts. So he went away and thought about it before visiting me again.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it so happens that at the time you are planning to do this, I am giving a lecture in Norway that ends the day before you plan to go to Spitsbergen. Why don’t my wife and I extend our trip by a little and go with you to Spitsbergen?’
Pugh was thrilled with the idea of our joining him, as I would act as both his doctor and his scientist. I do remember giving him one proviso. I told him that I would only do it if he could convince my wife, Marilyn, to join me. My work had taken me to many overseas destinations, and I had discovered that I hated being away from her for an extended period. This I learnt during the 1996 Cricket World Cup in Pakistan – I had returned and told Marilyn I would never again travel out of the country for a prolonged period without her.
So while Pugh gave me the task of ensuring that he didn’t die while trying to become the first human to swim a long distance so far north, I presented him with what I believed was the far more daunting challenge of convincing my wife that it would be fun to join us on this trip!
Pugh knew that Marilyn loves to paint flowers, so he researched the Arctic’s flora and found out that it is rich in flowers that would be in bloom while we were there. So Marilyn was easily convinced to come along. As for me, I was looking forward to studying the physiological effects of swimming in extremely cold water. I had already challenged the conventional thinking around exercising in the heat, and I sensed something equally worthwhile for science in this project.
There was essentially no research on the effects of swimming at such low temperatures. There was certainly a great deal on English Channel swimmers, but that was in water temperatures of between 12 °C and 18 °C, very much warmer than the water in which Lewis would be swimming.
There was other research, but unfortunately it was tainted with the horrors of Nazi Germany. German scientists in the concentration camp of Dachau used their Jewish prisoners as a means to study the effects on humans of immersion in cold water. Of course, many of their subjects died. This was a horrifying atrocity against the Jewish people and, as such, it forever contaminated any similar studies.
But I knew that there was something important here for science, so I applied to the Ethics Committee at the University of Cape Town for permission to study Lewis Pugh in this project. They granted it.
I had the privilege of working with an elite athlete in supreme conditions. He would be perfectly prepared for such an undertaking, offering our scientific team the best possible chance to study the physiological effects of immersion in such cold water. Pugh was a firm believer in science benefiting the athlete, and embraced the idea that we could contribute to the advancement of knowledge in this field. In fact, he went even further. He realised that there was no water in Cape Town that would be as cold as that off Spitsbergen. So he developed his own cold-water training centre at the Waterfront in Cape Town. He knew that the fish trawlers leaving the Irvin & Johnson Ltd (I&J) facility at the Waterfront use massive amounts of ice to keep their catches cold. So he asked I&J to supply him with enough ice to cool the water in a Portapool to the temperatures of the Arctic Ocean. They agreed, and Pugh suggested that he be studied as he immersed himself in the water for progressively longer periods of time at progressively lower temperatures, until he reached the temperatures he was likely to face in the Arctic. I asked three of my students, Lara and Jonathan Dugas, and Ross Tucker, if they would like to be involved. They readily agreed, and our scientific adventure began.
Owing to the limited time left before the first swim in the Arctic, we were able to complete only two test swims in ice-cold water. The results were exciting – during a twenty-minute exposure to a water temperature of 6 °C, Pugh’s core body temperature fell by only 1 °C while he was in the water. (His temperature continued to fall a further 2 °C after he exited the water, but this did not concern us, since by then he was safely out of the water.) Since we were pretty certain that Pugh would be able to swim one kilometre in about twenty minutes, we were encouraged to believe that he would not die in his attempt to swim so far north in water temperatures of between 0 °C and 5 °C.
Travelling to the most north-westerly point of the Norwegian archipelago, we eventually found ourselves in a small bay in the Magdalene Fjord. I decided that this would be the perfect place for Pugh to attempt his one-kilometre swim, and suggested that he swim it in two 500-metre legs. The water temperature was 4 °C, but Pugh completed the swim successfully, covering the one-kilometre distance in 21 minutes 30 seconds to become the first human being to do the most northerly long-distance swim.
As serious as our endeavour was, we also shared some wonderful laughs. Before leaving Cape Town, Pugh begged me to remember to bring K-Y Jelly with me. You see, to ensure his safety during the swim, I had to monitor Pugh’s core body temperature. I did this by using a specially designed thermometer, which was inserted into Pugh’s rectum and then connected to a radio sender and antennae that fed the data to my laptop.
As Pugh said, without the K-Y Jelly, that thermometer probe is not your friend. When I arrived on the island of Spitsbergen, Pugh was horrified to learn that I had forgotten the K-Y Jelly. I thought it was quite funny, and the rest of our team had a good laugh about it as well. But, as Pugh commented, ‘Everyone saw the funny side except the poor guy who would have to have the plastic thermometer inserted where the sun doesn’t often shine.’ The result was that he took the responsibility to find some K-Y Jelly when we arrived on the island of Spitsbergen. The problem was that no one in our team knew the Norwegian name for K-Y Jelly or its equivalent. Later we discovered that the Norwegians call this product ‘gliding cream’. I am still wondering about the meaning of the look on the face of the Spitsbergen chemist when he sold the tube of ‘gliding cream’ to Pugh and me.
But Pugh’s ultimate goal was a swim in the sub-zero temperatures of the North Pole, which he attempted in July 2007. Three days before he was to do the swim, he was given permission to do a practice swim. The captain stopped the Russian ice-breaker and our team was flown onto the ice in a helicopter. Pugh completed a test swim of five minutes, during which his fingers became so cold that they swelled considerably, causing him substantial pain.
He admitted that that test swim shattered his self-belief. ‘In attempting to swim at –1.7 °C, had I pushed myself beyond the limit of human endurance? It was less difficult to climb Mount Everest after Edmund Hillary had done it; it was easier to run the mile in under four minutes after Roger Bannister. No one had done a long-distance swim at –1.7 °C.’
And, again, as was the case that first time I told him I believed he could survive a swim around the Cape Peninsula, Pugh said to me, ‘Prof, I have the courage to do this swim because you have the courage to believe in me.’
Pugh was exceptional throughout that swim. I watched every second of it and was astounded by what he achieved. To keep out the negative thoughts and the doubt that had crept into his mind, he imagined a Rottweiler standing at a gate and barking viciously every time a negative thought popped into his head. It reminded me of the tactic employed by Gary Kirsten when he went out to bat and left Fear at square leg.
Afterwards, I saw a visible transformation in Pugh, and was reminded again of the power of a single event to change a sportsperson’s life radically. I have witnessed this twice in my career – once when Joel Stransky kicked the winning drop goal in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final, and now with Pugh’s North Pole swim. Both became more complete and confident people after achieving such sporting milestones.
Pugh, like so many great athletes, knew that his would be a battle that would be won in the mind and not by the body. As he wrote in his book, ‘If my body fails me, I will almost certainly die. But this is not simply about my body but also about my mind – if it takes me to the right place, I will survive … Without doubt, the best motivation comes from within yourself and the desire to be as good as you can be … Over time, I learnt to rely more on and put greater trust in the motivation that came from within.’
While I take great pride in having helped Lewis Pugh to achieve his goals, I take even greater satisfaction in having helped to raise the standard of rugby at my university. To achieve this, we had to overcome significant hurdles, including a history of chronic underfunding of sporting activities at UCT, based on the belief that the sole purpose of real universities is to educate the mind. The irony was that only by engaging totally and absolutely the minds of these most physical athletes were we able to reverse a historic attitude that accepted second-best as good enough.
It all began in October 2007, when my future son-in-law, John Dobson, came to see me. At the time I was barely aware that he was dating my daughter or that he had serious intent. The challenge he posed was simple. ‘Prof, a new competition for university rugby has been started, called the Varsity Cup,’ the rugby coach said. ‘It involves a two-month-long competition that will be shown on national television every Monday evening. Eight universities will take part. We have been included, but we are seeded last. We have been warned that there will be promotion/relegation play-offs at the end of the first season of competition and that we should not expect to be in the competition after the end of the 2008 season.’ He continued, saying, ‘There is a real risk that we will be beaten by at least forty points by the traditional rugby-playing universities of Stellenbosch, Pretoria, Free State, Potchefstroom, Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg. If we are relegated, it could mean the end of competitive rugby at UCT. We have no resources and no money to pay coaches, players or support staff. Our facilities are the worst of any team in the competition. Nor do we recruit players to come to UCT. Worse, our entrance requirements are the toughest of any university.’ He then asked me, ‘What can we do?’
I took a deep breath and considered my response. ‘Coach,’ I said, ‘we have to teach your players to believe in themselves.’ Under my breath, I added that we would also have to teach them to believe in miracles. ‘If they believe that they are going to lose by forty points a game to the other teams, then that is exactly what is going to happen. We have to teach them to believe that they can beat all the other teams in the competition.’ He responded instantly, ‘Prof, when can we start?’
We began with a talk at the Sports Science Institute in November 2007, in which I introduced the concept of beginning with the end in mind. I told the players that the outcome of their first year in the Varsity Cup would be determined by what they wanted for themselves. If they wanted to be successful, they would need to train over the next two months as if their lives depended on it. They had to train as if it were their destiny to win the 2008 Varsity Cup. If they trained with any other goal in mind, then, I assured them, that is exactly what the outcome would be. So they had somehow to develop the training intensity of champions, based on the belief that that would be the only way they would ever become those champions.
By chance, in January 2008 I had been invited to give a talk at a conference organised by the Irish Association of Sports Medicine in Dublin, hosted at Croke Park Stadium. I chose as my title ‘Beyond the VO2 max – the role of self-belief in superior athletic performance’. I chose the title for two reasons: first, the Springboks had just won the 2007 Rugby World Cup, in part because of the self-belief that they had developed; and, second, I knew that in the audience would be another speaker who was particularly dismissive of the central governor theory. Indeed, in an article published that very month, Dr Ben Levine from Dallas, Texas, had written in praise of Hill’s model of the VO2 max concept. He saw no value in the ‘vague actions’ of a ‘mystical central governor’. I knew that the best offence in this case would be to show the audience that anyone who argues that oxygen delivery alone can explain all forms of exercise performance will have great difficulty justifying how self-belief works.
After I had returned from Ireland, I suggested to John that I repeat this lecture for the team. So on a wet and cold Sunday morning in a cramped room at a youth hostel in Stellenbosch, where the team was on a training weekend – the team’s budget did not allow the use of more luxurious facilities – I repeated the talk to a room full of young, enthusiastic and impressionable rugby players. After I had ended the talk, one of the senior players stood up and said, ‘Where are the Maties [Stellenbosch University rugby team]? Can’t we play them right now, because we are going to beat them.’
Subsequently, in the nine games of the 2008 Varsity Cup competition, the team had only two moments of disappointment. They lost the first game when they ran out of time against the team from the University of the North West (Potchefstroom). The game finished with the Potchefstroom team five points ahead but with the Ikey Tigers camped on their try line. It was from that moment that the team began to believe that they could become the equals of all the other teams in the competition.
Then, after winning their next seven games, in the eighty-first minute of their ninth game, the final against the Maties, after the hooter had sounded and the game was technically over, the team managed to lose control of the ball, allowing Stellenbosch to score a game-winning try and snatch victory. Afterwards, the team gave me a signed jersey with the words, ‘Professor Noakes, you made us believe. You made us.’
This, of course, is only a small part of the truth, since without the expert coaching that they received, all the self-belief in the world would not have produced these victories. The point is that without self-belief, the best-coached team will not beat the less-skilled team that has self-belief.
It would require another three years of work before the team finally lifted the Varsity Cup for the first time after a dramatic 26-16 victory in the final against the University of Pretoria, played in Pretoria on Monday 11 April 2011. To win the 2011 Varsity Cup trophy, the Ikey Tigers did not have to play the team that has been UCT’s nemesis for the past eighty years, the Maties. They had beaten the Ikeys in both the 2008 and 2010 finals, but after winning all three previous Varsity Cup competitions, the Maties failed to make the 2011 play-offs.
So when the two teams met later in the same year at the annual Cape intervarsity match at Stellenbosch, the question that had to be answered was: Had the Ikey Tigers developed the self-belief to beat the Maties and to prove that their victory in the Varsity Cup was fully deserved? Fortunately, the answer was a resounding yes, as the Tigers were comfortable 28-19 winners after trailing 6-19 early in the second half.
There is still much to be done, but by adding the proper mental approach to all the usual aspects of proper preparation, we have been able to add a dimension that has perhaps been missing from the club in the past.
One of the premier examples of self-belief that we used to influence the thinking of our Ikey players was the story of how, on 6 May 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first human to run the mile in less than four minutes.
Roger Bannister was a great athlete who really understood the power of the mind. In my quest to understand why Bannister, and not other, possibly more gifted athletes at the time, was the first to run the mile in less than four minutes, I came to the conclusion that he understood better than anyone that this battle was fought in the mind, not in the body.
Gunder Haegg, the man who in 1945 came within 1.3 seconds of breaking the four-minute barrier for the mile, wrote before Bannister’s attempt that he thought Bannister was the man to do it. His reason? ‘He uses his brains as much as his legs. I’ve always thought the four-minute mile was more of a psychological problem than a test of physical endurance.’ As Bannister himself observed, ‘Racing has always been more of a mental than a physical problem to me … The mental approach is all important, because the strength and power of the mind are without limit. All this energy can be harnessed by the correct attitude of the mind.’
When Bannister finally achieved his objective at Oxford’s Iffley Road track on 6 May 1954, he wrote one of the most significant paragraphs in running literature: ‘Though physiology may indicate respiratory and circulatory limits to muscular effort, psychological and other factors beyond the ken of physiology set the razor’s edge of defeat or victory and determine how closely an athlete approaches the absolute limits of performance.’
Bannister also understood the power of inspiration. In John Bryant’s book 3:59.4: The Quest to Break the 4 Minute Mile, he writes of the relationship between the athlete and his coach, Franz Stampfl. ‘Stampfl, like Bannister,’ he says, ‘refused to acknowledge any limits to human performance.’ Bryant also quotes Bannister’s training partner, Chris Chataway, on Stampfl: ‘He didn’t know a hell of a lot about running, but he had this fantastic ability to inspire … what I know is that he could touch what we were doing with magic. By the time you’d listened to Franz, you would be in no doubt that breaking the world record would be as good as painting the Mona Lisa … He made you certain that you could do it, and that it would be a disgrace if you didn’t. If you missed the chance to break a record, how could you ever forgive yourself? All this made a huge impression on me, and it must, I think, have made an impression on Roger too.’
In 1989, when I performed one of the great academic rituals – the inaugural address by a newly appointed professor at the University of Cape Town – I dedicated the lecture to Sir Roger Bannister, so important did I believe his contribution to have been.
Bannister’s genius was his ability to condition his mind so that it would ‘release in four short minutes the energy I usually spend in half an hour’s training’. But without the input of his coach at the critical moment on that fateful day, even Bannister’s mental fortitude might not have been enough. Arriving at Oxford’s Iffley Road track some hours before the race, Bannister became disheartened, for it was cold and rainy, the track was wet and the wind was blowing – all conditions that, in his mind, made it impossible for him to break the four-minute mile on that day. But in an interview fifty years later, Bannister explained what had happened to change his mind: ‘The crucial thing that he [Stampfl] said was: “Well, I think you can run a 3:56 mile.” If he believed that – I hope he did – it certainly was a helpful comment. And he said if you have the chance and you don’t take it, you may regret it for the rest of your life.’
Chris Chataway, who paced both Bannister and Landy a few weeks later to sub-four-minute miles, also explained how discussions with Stampfl helped his own mental approach to racing: ‘It was a sort of pre-race mental calisthenics. I would say I was tired, and he would explain why he was absolutely convinced that my finishing burst would be strong. In a way, I knew he didn’t know any better than I did whether or not I would win, because it was a totally unknown quantity, but just hearing someone say the things … was useful.’ Always Stampfl taught that the ‘great hurdle was the mental barrier’.
So Bannister went out and ran the 3:59 mile that his coach had said he could do under those conditions. While his performance in breaking the four-minute mile showed immense mental fortitude, I believe it was Bannister’s race against the Australian John Landy – the ‘mile of the century’ – that showed most impressively the extent to which Bannister had mastered the mental aspect of racing.
When Landy had built up a commanding lead towards the end of the second lap and showed no signs of tiring, Bannister made the important mental shift that he described in his book:
I won back the first yard, then each succeeding yard, until his lead was halved by the time we reached the back straight of the third lap … I now connected myself to Landy again, though he was still five yards ahead. I was almost hypnotised by his easy shuffling stride … I tried to imagine myself attached to him by some invisible cord.
With each stride, I drew the cord tighter and reduced his lead … As we entered the last bend, I tried to convince myself that he was tiring. With each stride now I attempted to husband a little strength for the moment at the end of the bend when I decided to pounce … When the moment came, my mind would galvanize my body to the greatest effort it had ever known.
With seventy yards to go, Bannister passed Landy and went on to win.
That Bannister was ahead of his time in the mental approach to sport is therefore not in doubt. Yet there was precious little material on this topic at the time.
We used the experiences of Bannister, as well as two other runners, to teach the Ikey rugby players how important it is to believe in the outcome of the event, even though it makes no logical sense to believe that it is possible to predict the outcome.
The first example is that of Jim Ryun, the first schoolboy to run the mile in less than four minutes. In his book, Ryun explains how, at the age of fifteen, when he had been running for only two years, his coach had called him in to talk about his running goals. Ryun relates what happened next:
‘Let’s talk about goals,’ he [his coach] began. ‘What do you think you can do a mile in?’
‘This year?’ I said. ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe—’
‘Not this year,’ interrupted the coach. ‘I mean by the time you’re a senior … ultimately.’
I’d never really given it any thought. ‘Maybe 4:10,’ I said …
‘I’m talking about the four-minute mile, Jim. No high school boy has ever run one. I think you can be the first … I’m convinced you can do it.’
‘Coach, I think you’re crazy!’
At the time, I had no idea what a four-minute mile signified … I was only fifteen years old, basically still a child … He was certain of my ability, even if I wasn’t myself. He had already tutored several very successful milers and believed in his coaching system … As difficult as it was to make the adjustment to consider myself a champion, a front runner, as a ‘good’ athlete, I did my best to trust in the coach’s judgment and to believe his words.
Though I was initially dumbfounded by his prediction, it did in fact prove not only to be accurate but to set me on target for what would be the essence of my life for some time to come.
Two years after this discussion, Ryun duly became the first schoolboy in history to run the mile in less than four minutes. Without the belief of his coach, Ryun would never have achieved this remarkable performance.
The most successful South African distance runner of the recent past, Hendrick Ramaala, winner of the 2008 New York City Marathon, writes:
What I realise is that once the mind accepts anything, the body will respond … If you don’t convince yourself that you are going to win, then you aren’t going to win it. For New York, I have to tell myself thousands of times that I am going to win this thing. I have done it before and I must do it again – before the start, at the start, during the race and at the finish. I have to tell myself that I am going to win it and that I am better than the other guys. You have to talk to yourself otherwise you are not going to win … You have to say: ‘Whatever happens I am going to win.’ In my opinion, the person who wins the race has already won it inside his head before the start of the race.
With these words, Ramaala demonstrates the remarkable power of the mind.
A final story that I’d like to tell is that of Canadian Terry Fox, an athlete who used his mind to overcome a tragic disability to achieve immortality. I use this story to make the point that however bad any athlete might feel during sporting competition, according to the central governor theory, that discomfort is generated by the athlete’s brain and not by his muscles. As a result, it can be overcome by mental processes – just as Terry Fox must have done when he ran across Canada on his one remaining leg.
In 1977, Fox’s right knee became so unbearably painful that he was forced to seek medical attention. His physician would no doubt have hoped that the problem was simply a stress fracture and that, after six weeks of rest, Fox could return to his calling as one of the brightest lights of the Simon Fraser University basketball team.
But as his physician searched the X-rays, he saw everything he had dreaded. It was a death sentence. Codman’s triangle, the sunray sign and the moth-eaten edge indicated the presence of disorganised malignant bone-cancer cells.
On that day, this highly talented eighteen-year-old student discovered he had the most disabling form of cancer. Ironically, Fox was a student of kinesiology – the science of motion. Within three days of the diagnosis, he was told that his right leg would need to be amputated through the hip joint – this for the man who a year earlier had graduated from his high school as athlete of the year.
For Terry Fox, there would be no more sport. Yet Fox went on to achieve many awards. On the eve of his operation, his mind was already made up – he had decided that whatever he opened his eyes to and whatever the surgeons left him with he would use to run across Canada.
For the first sixteen months after surgery, Fox endured the most rigorous chemotherapy. After twenty-four months, he began training for his goal. Within eight months of starting, he was running thirteen-and-a-half miles a day, and on 12 April 1980 he began his Marathon of Hope.
For five months and 3 100 miles, a one-legged cancer patient shook Canada, providing the country with a daily example of rare inspiration and supreme courage. Fox was able to raise $1 million for cancer research before more tragedy struck him – a persistent cough and inordinate fatigue.
On 2 September 1980, Fox said, ‘Take me to a hospital.’ When he arrived, he had only one question: ‘Is it cancer?’ It was.
The X-ray revealed that the cancer had spread to both of his lungs. Fox vowed to fight on. Even when his fight ended in July 1982, he was still not ready to give up. He was named Canadian of the Year and Canadian Sportsman of the Year.
As cricket legend Peter Pollock once observed, ‘You have not lived in the world of competitive sport until you have fought a battle that is not against an opponent, but against yourself.’ The key, of course, is that we now know that ‘yourself’ is, in fact, your mind.