We are all time travelers, passengers on an unflagging moving present that carries us even further into the future.
—Michael Lockwood, The Labyrinth of Time, 2005
Hey, kids! What time is it?
—Buffalo Bob, The Howdy Doody Show, circa 1952
By now it was almost four o’clock, and I was not greatly surprised that he was late.
I was awaiting, with no little anticipation, the visit of an old boyhood friend whom I hadn’t seen in decades. It was so long ago, in fact, that it struck me that instead of coming from Michigan, it was more like he would be arriving from a different time dimension altogether. John had been a fairly straight-and-narrow fellow in high school, but after graduation, his life had taken a rather bizarre and certainly unexpected turn. Maybe it was his participation in the 1968 Chicago riots that led John to suddenly drop out of society, moving into a barn in the Lower Peninsula and abandoning a promising future in law, family, and all the usual social conventions. And there he had been ever since.
I had heard enough of his story to expect some rather eccentric behavior. He would, for example, insist on sleeping outdoors (so as, in his words, “not to lose the magic”). But what I did not anticipate was that immediately on his arrival, this bearded, altogether cheerful soul would rapidly stride from room to room, covering up all the clocks with a towel or cloth. We were, it seemed, about to spend the weekend unaware of time. (His idea was not original. The 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a gesture of disdain for the constraints of time, is said to have tossed away his watch, predating Peter Fonda in the opening scene of Easy Rider by a couple of centuries. In Rousseau’s case, it is tempting to suggest that this act might have been associated with his subsequent bizarre social behavior, progressive paranoia, and ultimate death with insanity.)
My mind recoiled. How would we know when to eat dinner? To go to bed? When would we know when the coffee shop was opening for my morning latte? We wouldn’t know how long to cook the lasagna. Or when to meet our friends at the cinema. And—now seemingly of critical importance—when would John know it was time to leave?
For three days, I was off kilter, disoriented, confused. No question about it, this weekend had a lesson. Those of us who have stuck to the narrow path of a conventional life are slaves to time. Without its anchor, our daily lives are set adrift. (Adventuresome readers are invited to try this experiment for themselves. See what it’s like to miss your daughter’s piano recital, to burn a steak or two.)
Time is, quite literally, of the essence. Indeed, it creates the very boundaries of our lives on this planet. From the moment of our birth, the sand begins to flow without ceasing through the hourglass to mark the point of our exit. In between times, we mark time in all that we do—our sleeping, eating, working, vacations. Clearly, no other single factor so defines our existence.
No wonder, then, that the great thinkers—philosophers, mathematicians, poets, theologians, physicists—have struggled throughout history to understand the nature of time. Time is something we all know about. But what is it?
Aristotle was among the first to consider time as a fundamental feature of the universe. From this viewpoint, it proceeds linearly and continuously, without interruption or influence by outside events. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing—time marches on. It is like a geometric straight line. Here, likening time to a mathematical construct would reveal its absolute, or physical, nature.
This was a popular idea, since it obviously reflected what people saw before them—the regularity of the tides, seasons, migration of birds, and, most particularly, the progression of the sun, moon, and stars across the sky. This concept of time as an imperturbable progression was further embodied by the invention of the clock, which defined time in respect to astronomical events. This modern measurement of time has, of course, become extraordinarily precise, extending from highly exact astronomical observations to the frequency of vibration of the cesium atom, a clock with an accuracy of 5 parts per 10 million million. That’s a margin of error of .0000001 seconds per day.
Others have been inclined to view the passage of time from the standpoint of human experience (psychological or subjective time). Human beings, among all the animals, are uniquely gifted with the ability to sense time. This is nowhere less apparent than when you are awaiting a flight delayed for three hours (we might call this O’Hare time). Subjective time can, of course, move much more rapidly, like when you are enjoying a party with good friends or winning at tennis (label this as 40-love time). You’d have difficulty convincing yourself that the agonizing creep of time at the airport is identical to that on the tennis court. But viewed from the U.S. Naval observatory in Washington, D.C., the keeper of astronomical time, no objective difference exists between O’Hare and 40-love time.
Time can also be viewed from the perspective of sequence. Gottfried Leibniz (who lived from 1646 to 1716) thought of time that way. (He also invented calculus, the binary system on which today’s computers are based, and—to his lasting credit—optimism in life.) According to this idea, termed the relational theory of time, events do not take place in time; instead, it’s the other way around. Time is defined by the order in which events occur. By this concept, events in life become the cornerstone of existence rather than time itself. This argument runs counter to that of time as a physical, immutable, independent reality.
You could easily fill an entire library with what’s been written about the nature of time. (Those who wish a concise, easily readable source can try the 1972 book What is Time? by the British author G.J. Whitrow from Oxford Press.) Among these discourses are many intriguing themes. For instance, Einstein’s ideas on relativity spoke against time as an absolute, stating that the passage of time depends on the location and speed of the person looking at the clock. In effect, a clock traveling at extraordinary speeds will appear to slow down when compared to another clock at rest relative to the observer. Such arguments are inconsistent with a physical, independent characterization of time. They state that rather than being absolute and invariable, time is related to speed. Thus, they are more supportive of Leibniz’s concept of relative time. (Until your Volvo can approach the speed of light, however, these can be considered theoretical, rather than pragmatic, arguments.)
And then there is the question of the arrow of time. Can time go backwards? Or is it unidirectional? In light of our daily experiences, this would seem a bit silly. Of course, billiard balls do not come flying out of their corner pockets, your mother-in-law’s precious china dish that you dropped cannot suddenly reassemble itself, the faux pas you uttered at the boss’ dinner party last night cannot be retrieved.
Others have not been so sure. Physical laws of motion, for example, work just as well in reverse as they do in forward motion. That is, if you filmed a system corresponding to the laws of Newtonian mechanics, you would never be able to tell whether the film was later being projected backward or forward. It is possible to calculate not only the future positions of the planets around the solar system, but also their locations in the past. In the laws of physics, there is no preferred direction of physical processes in respect to time.
Indeed, this question of the direction of time has been considered with a great deal of thoughtful deliberation, and a number of books have been devoted entirely to this subject alone.1 In the end, it seems that common expectation holds true. Students of the subject have generally come to the conclusion that the passage of time, notwithstanding events in certain popular novels and films, cannot be put in reverse. It proceeds only forward. The most powerful argument for one direction of time comes from the second law of thermodynamics, which holds that the degree of disorder, or entropy, in a system increases as a function of time. Left to themselves, systems become more disorganized, not the reverse. Predictably, things run down. Other evidence of the one-way arrow of time has been witnessed in the course of biological evolution, the chronological order of geological events, and the extended trends of astronomical events (like the life spans of stars or the expansion of the universe itself).
Another interesting perspective of time is that in its linear progressive flow, there exists no such thing as now. Like its counterpart in mathematics, the point representing the present is dimensionless. It, in fact, does not exist. As soon as you consider the point of now as the present, it has become part of the past. Contrary to all you learned about Zen theory, not to mention carpe diem, by this account, you cannot live for the present because the present does not exist. There is only future and past. As Kai Krause has concluded, “Everything is about the anticipation of the moment and the memory of the moment, but not the moment.”
The only way to make time stand still, as it were, is to think about it in terms of duration between two points in immediate time. That is, “I am now a student at the University of New Mexico.” In this way, now becomes a state, a condition. And you could, I guess, remain a perpetual college student, thereby freezing time indefinitely.
And, finally, being linked so intimately with the essence of human existence, it comes as no surprise that poets and philosophers have waxed nostalgic on just how precious time is. Consider this quote from Fernando Pessoa:
I sorely grieve over time’s passage. It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be. The miserable rented room where I lived for a few months, the dinner table at the provincial hotel where I stayed for six days, even the sad waiting room at the station where I spent two hours waiting for a train—yes, their loss grieves me. But the special things in life—when I leave them behind and realize with all my nerves’ sensibility that I’ll never see or have them again, at least not in that exact same moment—grieve me metaphysically. A chasm opens up in my soul and a cold breeze of the hour of God blows across my pallid face.2
In 1884, a group of international astronomers gathered in Washington, DC, to create worldwide time zones. Their goal: to eliminate the chaos and confusion that had previously existed as each locality in the world sought to create its own particular time measure. In the United States, for instance, each railroad company set train arrivals and departures by its own time standard. The year before this historic meeting, almost 100 different railroad times were in force.
The world was divided into 24 longitudinal time zones to put us all in synch. They chose Greenwich, England, on the outskirts of London, as the starting point, or the prime meridian. (Today on visiting this site, one expects to see something extraordinary, maybe a bright yellow line running north and south through the grounds, but, no.) What was formalized in the capital city of the United States was the original idea of the ancient Babylonians a couple of thousand centuries earlier. This was to divide the day into 24 hours, with 60 minutes to an hour, and 60 seconds to a minute. This is all related, of course, to astronomical events, which define the chronological time that governs our lives.
Biological activities all vary rhythmically, in a manner that roughly approximates chronological time as well. Body temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure all wax and wane over specific time periods. Some of these circadian rhythms have direct bearing on sports performance. Chapter 4 deals with this phenomenon in more depth.
Another way that biological functions relate to the passage of time is the rate over time at which physiological processes take place. Scientists, in their attempts to define the real world as we see it, are accustomed to examining biological structure and function in concrete, three-dimensional terms, measuring things in grams, meters, or liters. However, recognition is growing that time, that impalpable factor of the fourth dimension, plays a critical role in how biological systems function. Most specifically, it is clear that such function must be couched in terms of its duration, or how long it takes to occur.
Functional activities of the body, such as sweating, cellular metabolism, or the rate of blood filtered by the kidney in the production of urine, all occur at a certain level of intensity related to time. Using these same examples, then, we can talk about the number of milliliters of sweat produced in a minute, or metabolic rate in terms of the oxygen used by cells as liters per minute, or urine production in milliliters per hour. In the same way, we can also talk about time defining broader biological processes, such as life span or generation time (time between conception and the age of ability to procreate). We can define the limits of such functions, compare them between different people, and define abnormal functions (as in diseased conditions), all by describing their activities in respect to the time it takes for them to occur.
No surprises yet. But here’s the interesting thing. The rates of these functions are not associated with chronological time at all. Somehow they missed the memo from Greenwich. Instead, intriguingly, they relate to body weight, or mass. The bigger you are, the slower these processes go in respect to chronological, or clock time, and the longer it takes them (on your watch) to occur. The heart rate per minute of a shrew, which weighs about 2.5 grams, is about 1,000 times in a minute. During the same time period, the heart of an elephant beats only 30 times, and a human being’s beats 70 times.
The same thing is true of rate of energy turnover within a mammal’s cells when metabolism is expressed relative to the animal’s size. That is, the smaller an animal, the more intensely its metabolic fires burn. The daily energy metabolism of a 30-gram mouse approximates 170 kilocalories for each kilogram of its body mass. A 300-kilogram cow uses about one-tenth as much, or 17 kilocalories per kilogram. Everything small animals do happens faster than the actions of big ones. It is not the chronological clock that dictates the speed of physiological function, but rather, body size.3
We can express this link between physiological functional time and body mass by a kind of mathematical equation called an allometric formula:
Y = aMb
Here, Y is a biological process (liters of blood per minute, or times between breaths), M is body mass, a is a proportionality constant, and b (the most important item) is the scaling factor that indicates the extent and direction of the relationship between changes in the variable Y and body mass. A value of 1.0 for b indicates that the rate of the biological function increases in direct proportion to body mass. That would be true for respiratory rate, for example, if an animal weighing 10 kilograms breathed 20 times per minute, while a 40-kilogram animal breathed 80 times per minute. If b = 0, body mass would have no relationship to the process Y. Values between zero and 1.0 tell us that the biological process Y is associated with body mass, but Y increases at a faster rate than mass does as an animal’s size increases.
What is striking is that when one considers various physiological functions in different groups of animals, there is a rather remarkable frequency of values for the mass scaling exponent b that approximate 0.25. In fact, William Calder was able to find 40 allometric equations in the research literature that related the time duration of different physiological processes in animals with body mass, all of which had a value of b between 0.25 and 0.39. The sidebar illustrates a few examples.
On examining this list, there is another intriguing observation. One cannot help being struck, not only by the consistency of quarter-power scaling exponents (that is, b is about 0.25) on this list, but also by the wide diversity of the biological functions included. Indeed, at least at first blush, they seem to have no obvious mechanistic connection at all. By what link could one assume, for example, that the rate of urine filtration in the kidney has any commonality with the twitch contraction of the soleus muscle? How about time to reproductive maturity in respect to the relationship to how much one weighs? What do these functions have in common that would give them nearly identical associations with body mass?
Life span, in captivity (years) 11.6 M0.20
Reproductive maturity (years) 0.75 M0.29
Gestation period (days) 65 M0.25
Erythrocyte life span (days) 23 M0.18
Plasma albumin half life (days) 5 M0.32
Glomerular filtration rate (min.) 6.5 M0.21
Blood circulation time (sec.) 21 M0.21
Respiratory cycle (sec.) 1.1 M0.26
Cardiac cycle (sec.) 0.25 M0.25
Metabolic rate per kg (min.) 70 M-0.25
Even the duration of life itself fits into this scheme, with a mass exponent of 0.20. From this observation, Calder remarked that “using maximum life span, rather than absolute time, it appears that each life comprises about the same number of physiologic events or actions; in other words, each animal lives its life faster or slower governed by size, but accomplishes just as much biologically, whether large or small.”3
It’s almost as if we were born with a certain bank account of physiological function. The faster we use them up (in this analogy, make withdrawals from the account), the shorter our life expectancy. The average mouse has a 3-year life span, with a heart rate of 600 beats per minute (bpm), while the elephant lives 40 years, with a heart rate of 30 bpm. Yet their total number of heartbeats in a life time is similar. (Fortunately for you and me, human beings are outliers in this relationship. If we were to fit the pattern of other mammals, we would use up our allocated total of heartbeats by the time we reached age 25.)
A consideration of the obvious question of just why body mass is linked to the duration of physiological processes and events begs more time and space than is available here. The bottom line is that no one knows for sure. Attempts have been made to explain the mass scaling exponents for individual functions. But the ubiquitousness of quarter-power values for b, even in processes as seemingly far removed as breathing rate, kidney glomerular filtration rate, and generation time, seem to indicate there is a universal underlying principle involved.
Even if you’re thrown by the math, the message should be clear. We can’t rely on physiological processes to follow chronological time—they march to a different drummer. And that can be important when studying those functions that influence physical fitness and sport performance.
Before leaving this issue of physiological time, another aspect of biological timekeeping relative to sport performance deserves mentioning. The many factors that combine to determine athletic prowess are extraordinarily complex, but they share one feature in common—during the course of childhood development, they progressively evolve, or mature, toward the adult state. These advances in physical, physiological, and psychosocial features are predictably translated into steady improvements in motor performance (whether the child is engaged in sports or not). But, once again, the tempo of biological development is not closely attuned to chronological time. Here, the biological clock is set largely by genetic factors. The rate of this process during the course of the childhood years can vary dramatically among children. Thus, at any given chronological age, you may witness wide differences in body size, composition, physiological function, motor skill, personality, and motivation. As Bob Malina, anthropologist and sport scientist who has written extensively on this subject, has emphasized, “biologic processes have their own timetables and do not celebrate birthdays.”4 It is not difficult to appreciate the potential effect of this issue on early selection of talent, or the matching of competitors in contact sports like football. But this is a big subject. Chapter 6 presents a discussion with Professor Malina in more detail.
Athletes, it hardly deserves stating, are no strangers to the importance of time. Sometimes, in fact, time is the very point of the sport. How much time elapses while you run 100 meters as fast as you can? In other sports, time regulates the duration of the competition. How many times can a group of five unusually tall players throw a ball through a round hoop in 40 minutes? Indeed, without a clock, most competitive sports would become quite meaningless. Yet, in other events, such as tennis or baseball, the timing of muscular action largely defines athletic skill.
Athletes are also keenly interested in their repeated performances over time. They become fixated on batting averages, fighting records, or field goal percentages. When repeated performances are unexpectedly poor, we talk about athletes being in a slump. When Michael Jordan sinks six three-pointers in a row in the NBA finals against Portland, he’s on a hot streak. What explains these runs? Since the athletes have typically experienced no physical changes at the time, we say they are more (or less) mentally focused. We hear them described as trying too hard or, when on a roll, just letting it flow. Getting hot is something all athletes strive for (and would be willing, no doubt, to give a lot to know the secret of why it was happening).
It comes as a bit of surprise, then, that people who know a lot about the statistics of randomness are quick to pooh-pooh such explanations. Being hot or in a slump, they say, is just a matter of chance.
Thomas Gilovich from Cornell University teamed up with Stanford colleagues Robert Vallone and Amos Tversky to analyze the success of streak shooting of the Philadelphia 76ers professional basketball team during seasons from 1980 to 1982. Their findings? “Variations in shooting percentages across games do not deviate from their overall shooting percentages enough to produce significantly more hot (or cold) nights than expected by chance alone.”5
What they’re saying is that if you flip a coin many, many times, you will eventually witness 10 heads in a row. Not often, but by chance, it will occur. And if you shoot a ball at a basket a large number of times, at some point, you will sink 10 in a row. Neither of you is more mentally focused. You’re both in a groove, but only by statistical chance.5 (What bothers me about this analysis is that it seems that the people who have hot streaks always have names like DiMaggio and Jordan!)
Sometimes, too, athletes take great efforts to slow down time. Witness the interminable bouncing of the ball or tugging at the pants of my favorite pro tennis players (who will remain unnamed here) before they finally serve. Or the Yankees and the Red Sox, berated by umpires for taking their sweet time. Not to mention golfers on the PGA tour who dawdle on the back nine. The most obvious, though, are the basketball teams in the era before the shot clock who tried to protect their lead by stalling out the final minutes of play (see chapter 3).
These pages would be incomplete without checking in to hear what Yogi Berra, baseball’s resident philosopher, had to say about time. In fact, the keen malapropisms made by the former catcher for the New York Yankees contain useful insights about how we should think about this valuable commodity. Here are a few examples:
(When asked the time) “You mean, now?”
“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
“It gets late early out there.”
“It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
“I usually take a two-hour nap, from one o’clock to four.”
And everybody’s favorite, “It ain’t over until it’s over.”
(Just to keep things straight, I shouldn’t put on airs like I know a lot about Yogi and the Yankees. I once possessed, I think, a Yogi Berra baseball card. I got a view of Yankee Stadium during a Circle Line boat tour around Manhattan when I was nine. And I have a friend who lives in Memphis, Bruce Alpert, who attends Yankees fantasy baseball camps. But that’s about it.)
Athletes, too, are very conscious of how time is best proportioned as they construct their training schedules. This periodization, or pattern of training, appears to influence gains in performance and permits peaking for big events. Athletes need to decide just how many weeks they should use high- and low-intensity training, how many days a week to devote to speed work, how many days of rest they should take, and how many days they should taper before a big competition.
All that training gets funneled down into those small particles of time we call competition. That’s what it’s all about. Athletes have taken their genetic gifts, done everything in their power to enhance them, and now—in just a few clicks of the clock—they must realize them.
This phenomenon is seen through moments in time that, often in dramatic fashion, serve to define the essence of sports itself. Carlton Fisk willing his drive to left field into fair territory during the sixth game of the 1975 World Series. John Landy glancing over his left shoulder as Roger Bannister passed by him on the outside in the final lap to win the mile of the century in Vancouver. Michael Jordan in full flight above the rim. Here, time is stilled—at least in memories and photographs—and moments are imbued with powerful meaning for the world of competitive sports.
Some have attributed spiritual qualities to such moments. In his 1999 book The Tao of the Jump Shot (Seastone Publishers), John Mahoney writes, “Although the jump shot is a dynamic movement of energy, there is one unique point, a nearly measureless instant, during which the athlete remains frozen in space. The point of release, born in a moment of stillness. . .”
Sometimes, rarely, remarkably, athletes seem to transcend the tyranny of time altogether. Like Roger Bannister on the final straightaway: “There was no pain, only a great unity of movement and aim.” In the throes of supreme physical effort, they’ve been transported somewhere else, someplace where even the clock doesn’t matter. Victor Price, in his short story “The Other Kingdom,” wrote about this:
As they entered the straight they moved into a purely physical kingdom. Nothing mattered now but to keep going. . . . It was a wave of feral aggression, a lust for power and at the same time a sacred terror, as though he were pursued by some fierce and inescapable beast. Life existed now only as far as the finishing tape. The element of time expanded and contracted simultaneously; a seriousness on the threshold of physical agony, where the actions of this one man were determining the fate of all men, and none of the rules of life applied anymore. There was no good, no evil, no success, no failure. There was only the man eternally running. . . .6
(Alas, for most of us mere mortals, crossing the finishing line of a race is more likely to be accompanied by waves of nausea, hunger for air, cramps, and the longing for a warm shower.)
These pages explore ways that considerations of time and its relationship to work effort might optimize sport performance. This is our central theme. From many perspectives, this book shows that the influences of time on sport success are seemingly fixed, outside the athlete’s control. Our muscles weaken as we age, we swing a bat in milliseconds at an oncoming fastball, our leg muscles contract in a beautifully synchronized harmony during a 10K road race. All these lie in different levels of time, in which we have little say over the matter.
But this book also poses some interesting and challenging questions about just how much athletes can or should try to manipulate time to their advantage. If physiological responses to training vary rhythmically during the course of a day, would it be rewarding to select these times to head to the track? If a coach thinks that a high stroke count leads to a better time in a particular swimming event, should the athlete go with it? Or is it better to stick to a cadence that feels intuitively more normal—one directed by a subconscious controller of stroke tempo in the brain? Be forewarned that the answers to such questions are not obvious. Perhaps that is part of what makes sports so glorious. The wisdom of the body’s motor controllers that tick to an intrinsic clock. The athlete’s experience and decision making. All of this coming together in a fascinating mélange that dictates athletic success.
These chapters present a recurring question: Is the control of physical effort over time—sport performance—under the conscious dictates of the athlete? That is, can runners in a 10K race willfully strategize their pace to produce the best result? Or, are they under the control of unconscious processes within their central nervous systems that decide, without their knowledge, how fast to go and how to regulate stride frequency and stride length? Do human beings control athletic performance or do forces of nature rule, such as rhythmic biological variations over time or inexorable deterioration with age over time?
If I could contact Charles Darwin on the bridge of the Beagle, I think I know how he would weigh in on this question. He’d say that the process of human locomotion has evolved over thousands of centuries, and the factors that define both the best way to move and the limits of physical exertion are the products of all that natural experimentation. These factors are geared toward survival—limits are placed to protect us from catastrophic outcomes (fatal dysrhythmias, bone fractures, shredded muscles), and we exercise in a way that best preserves energy stores.
And athletes? Even without a formal poll, we could predict that most would be skeptical of that argument. That athletes can’t willfully strategize during a distance competition seems contrary to their experiences. Of course, this issue lies far beyond that simply of athletic success. It is quickly encountered by the end of the third week of any introductory philosophy course. Human determinism. Who (or what) is really in control here? The conscious or the subconscious? Are the forces of destiny—or the finish time in a 10K road race—under our conscious control?
Unlike the philosophical arguments, the question in the realm of athletic performance is at least potentially amenable to an experimental approach. The latter pages of this book examine some of these investigations. Even when nature is clearly a basic driving force—as in the effects of aging on performance—can athletes use cognitive strategies to subdue or overcome limits placed by biological factors that are out of their direct control? Is it safe to do so? I now count eight questions in the last three paragraphs without any obvious answers. Alas, insights to these dilemmas are not altogether at hand. But, such issues are intriguing. In many cases, they also have direct bearing on how athletes should best face competitive challenges.
But why write a book on this subject? In doing so, I have two particular goals in mind. The first is to examine some aspects of time that carry very real importance for performing athletes. How is muscular work best adjusted relative to time to provide optimal pacing during aerobic endurance competitions like distance running or cycling? How are such approaches changed when, instead of pacing, an all-out effort (such as in short-distance sprinting) is called for? Do particular times of day or season make sport training more effective or maximize performance? Can athletes alter their perception of time to improve neuromotor responses to high-speed events like, for instance, hitting a pitched baseball? Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 5 focus on these questions. Clearly, we are only beginning to understand these issues. But, it would seem that this information underscores the idea that understanding how time influences motor performance may offer valuable guidance to athletes. I hope this book will provide sport competitors with concrete strategies for optimizing athletic performance.
Do athletes perceive time differently than nonathletes? Consider the quarterback engineering an offensive drive in the final two minutes who is trailing by a touchdown. The returner of the serve at Wimbledon who is down a break in the fifth set. Do they feel time in a unique way? The answer is not entirely clear, but these pages may reveal some clues.
Beyond such issues, too, this book presents some fascinating questions regarding the basic mechanisms by which time influences physiological function, which then can be translated into pushing the limits of motor performance. The first three chapters examine how subconscious directors of motor activity within the central nervous system dictate how fast we run, and how the complex sequence of muscle activation and its tempo are best regulated for optimal performance. Chapter 4 addresses the intriguing biological clock that alters function in a temporal fashion. These circadian rhythms, first recognized for whole animals, are witnessed even at a molecular level in individual cells themselves. The final chapter reviews how, over the life span, time alters motor function, particularly as it decays in the waning years of life. It shows that the dictates of time are inexorably linked to the limits of human existence.
This book takes you on a journey through the effects of time on motor performance. It does so from the standpoint of how such an understanding might be utilized by athletes to improve performance. It also appreciates the incredible complexity and beauty—dare we call it spirituality?—that underlies such mechanisms. These, in effect, serve in many ways to define our existence on this planet. In doing so, then, John, I attempt to keep the magic.
1. A thorough discussion of the direction of time can be found in the following sources: Convency, R., and R. Highfred. 1990. The arrow of time. London: W.H. Allen. Leggett, A.J. 1982. “The ‘arrow of time’ and quantum mechanics.” In The enigma of time, ed. P.T. Landsberg, 149-156. Bristol: Adam Hilger.
2. Philosophical (and sentimental) considerations of the nature of the passage of time can be found in this work: Pessoa, Fernando. 2002. The book of disquiet. London: Penguin Books.
3. There are a number of excellent and very readable reviews of the influence of body size on physiological function, including the following: Bonner, J.T. 2006. Why size matters. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Calder, W.A. 1984. Size, function, and life history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 141. Schmidt-Nielsen, K. 1984. Scaling. Why is animal size so important? Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
4. Further reading on biological maturation of physical fitness during growth: Malina, R.M., C. Bouchard, and O. Bar-Or. 2004. Growth, maturation, and physical activity. 2nd ed. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics.
5. More on the randomness of streaks in athletic performance can be found in the following sources: Gilovich, T., R. Vallone, and A. Tversky. 1985. “The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences.” Cognitive Psychology 17: 295-314. Mlodinow, L. 2008. The drunkard’s walk. How randomness rules our lives. New York: Vintage Books.
6. Price, V. 1994. “The other kingdom.” In The runner’s literary companion, ed. G. Battista, p. 66. New York: Penguin Books.