We’re all quitters
‘Mind is everything: muscles – pieces of rubber. All that I am, I am because of my mind.’
Paavo Nurmi, one of only four athletes ever to win nine Olympic gold medals
It is 3 July 1991 at the Olympic Stadium in Stockholm, and a new chapter in the history of athletics is being written. Five hundred metres into the 3,000-metre steeplechase, a black runner effortlessly pulls ahead of the rest of the field. Nobody can keep up with him. And the strange thing is that he doesn’t even have a number on his back. He is an entirely unknown quantity, and yet 400 metres before the finish it looks like he’s set to break the world record.
‘Who is this?’ asks an astounded announcer.
A few minutes after the runner has crossed the line as the winner, the Swedish organisers announce that his name is Moses Kiptanui.
The day before he had been on a plane from Nairobi to Stockholm with his agent, a British journalist by the name of Kim McDonald. Moses had actually joined the Kenyan army and was living on a military base in Nyahururu in western Kenya, but was suddenly given the opportunity to come to Europe and compete. On the plane Kim McDonald told Kiptanui that he couldn’t guarantee him a place in an event, but that he hoped to get into the 1,500 metres at the last moment. Out of eagerness to get into a race, Moses suggested to his agent that he could run in the 3,000-metre steeplechase if necessary. He had won a couple of races in the discipline back home at the military base and believed he could do the same in Europe.
When they arrived in Stockholm it turned out that there were indeed no places in the 1,500 metres, but Moses have the last vacant place in the steeplechase. Because of his last-minute arrival neither the media nor the result service was informed about the new Kenyan runner. That’s why the stadium was so shocked by his incredible performance.
He might have missed out on the world record by a couple of seconds, but Moses Kiptanui was now on the world stage to stay. One month later he won his first of three World Championships in Tokyo. The King of Steeplechase had arrived!
If he can do it, why can’t I?
Twenty years after Moses Kiptanui’s victory in Stockholm, I am standing outside the door of his office in the town of Eldoret, 30 minutes drive from Iten. His career long over, today he is a successful businessman running several companies.
He emerges to meet me – a tall, slim guy in a blue shirt with a red tie; immaculately well dressed.
‘Welcome,’ he says, flashing me the same broad smile that was transmitted around the globe as he stood atop the rostrum. ‘Impressive’ doesn’t really do justice to this man’s CV. Three times world champion in the steeplechase. The first person on the planet to break the eight-minute barrier in the steeplechase, and the thirteen-minute barrier in the 5,000 metres. Years on, he is still in good shape, he tells me as we sit in the leather chairs in his office. Unlike the vast majority of Kenyan athletes, he has kept on training since he abandoned his career. He can still run 10 km in under 30 minutes, if he wants to. On the wall hangs a picture from one of his three steeplechase World Championships.
I ask him if that first win in Stockholm surprised him.
‘Not at all. I had a strong conviction that I could win that race. Not winning was not an option,’ he says, determination still etched across his face.
In those days there were no sports newspapers or television programmes covering athletics in Kenya. Nobody was seriously interested in the sport. But Moses Kiptanui and the others in the military camp in Nyahururu had heard about one or two men from the region who had made good money running in Europe. Apart from this, Moses knew that his younger cousin, Richard Chelimo (who would later hold the 10,000 metres world record), had won several races in Europe. As Moses puts it: ‘I thought: what’s so special about my cousin Richard? He’s shorter than me and he wins. If he can do it, why can’t I?’
Everyone wants to set a world record
Moses Kiptanui illustrates the invincible self-belief with which the Kenyan runners attack their careers. As an American athletics coach told me a couple of weeks before I travelled to Kenya: ‘Virtually every running rookie in Kenya wants to set a world record or win a major city marathon, and believes this is a viable proposition. On the other hand, having spent years lecturing runners in New York for the New York Road Runners, I have found that by far the most common goal there is merely to complete a race.’
It is this almost naive belief people have in their own abilities that I meet time and time again in Kenya. I get the first hint of this on the bus on my way back from Moses Kiptanui’s office. The woman sitting next to me turns out to be Salina Kosgei, winner of numerous major marathons across the world. Then, having given birth to two children, she made a comeback and won the Boston Marathon in 2009. This is by no means rare in Iten. Female Kenyan runners are convinced that they can rejoin the world elite after they have given birth to their first child, and they actually do.
But where does this cast-iron certainty come from? What makes Salina and the other Kenyan women so convinced that they can win again after being out of training, often for several years? And why didn’t Moses Kiptanui doubt for a second that he could win at Stockholm when he did not know his competitors and had never previously run in Europe?
Kenyans don’t tolerate losing to a foreigner
The first person I meet on my return to the training camp is one of the foreign runners there. He is a rangy white guy with long grey hair gathered in a ponytail. The other runners here call him Jesus, but his real name is Toby Tanser. A globetrotter and long-distance runner with Swedish roots, he usually lives in New York. He came to Kenya for the first time in 1995 to pitch himself against the world’s best runners. He became so infatuated with Kenyan running wisdom that he has written two books about it and comes every year to train in Iten. He laughs in agreement when I start talking about the Kenyans’ extreme self-confidence.
‘People come here looking for special genes,’ he says. ‘But what they find is people who simply do not believe they can lose. The Kenyans simply regard themselves as the world’s undisputed rulers of middle- and long-distance running.’
This unshakeable belief in their own abilities has been built up layer upon layer in Kenya, as they have watched one countryman after another winning a gold medal over the last twenty years. As Toby puts it: ‘You have to understand that many of them have never seen a white runner beat a Kenyan, and they won’t tolerate losing to a msungu [The Kenyan term for a person of foreign descent].’
When Tanser participated in the Kenyans’ local competitions in the 90s, onlookers threw stones at the Kenyan runners running behind him.
‘Although I’m a good runner who has won races in Scandinavia, in the mind of the Kenyan, a foreigner is not someone you lose to in running. They shouted “Shame on you, you are being beaten by a msungu, you are shaming Kenya!” at the runners trying to catch up with me.’
The power of the mind
The recipe for any top performance always contains a large dash of self-belief. In any field, from business and politics to sports and music, this ability to instil belief, both in yourself and in others, is crucial to success. Doubt, by contrast, can poison any performance. One of the main reasons for people failing to achieve what they otherwise could is that they doubt their own abilities. When we doubt we get tense, fear the worst and multiply the probability of failure.
The most famous evidence of the power of belief is to be found in medicine. You’ve probably heard of the phenomenon of the placebo effect. In his renowned report, ‘Psychological Variables in Human Cancer’ in 1957, the psychologist Bruno Klopfer describes a man to whom his doctors referred as ‘Mr Wright’. Mr Wright had far-advanced lymph sarcoma with tumours the size of oranges in his neck, groin, chest and armpits. He had already exhausted all known treatments and was expected to die in the not-too-distant future.
Nevertheless, Mr Wright was confident that a new anti-cancer drug called Krebiozen would cure him. He was already bedridden and fighting for every breath when he received his first injection of what he believed was Krebiozen – in fact it was water. Dr Klopfer expected him to be dead within a few days but instead was amazed to find him out of his bed happily chatting away, joking with the nurses. Mr Wright’s tumours had shrunk by half, and after ten more days of treatment he was discharged from the hospital. However, the other patients in the hospital who had received Krebiozen showed no improvement at all.
Within a few months negative reports began to appear in the media about the effectiveness of the drug. Mr Wright relapsed to his original state and returned to hospital, depressed and close to death once more. At this point Dr Klopfer assured Mr Wright that the bad press was due to early shipments of the drug deteriorating during transit, and promised to treat him with some fresh, extra-potent Krebiozen. Mr Wright regained his positive attitude and again he responded to the treatment with amazing results. He did not know that the injections he received were actually only water.
Mr Wright’s story is by no means exceptional. The power of belief making ill people well again has been documented again and again. It used to be generally thought that placebo effects were just a case of people’s perception of their own illness changing. However, research has shown several biological effects that placebos can exert. Brain chemicals, stress hormones and the immune system can all be influenced by the power of belief. People with Parkinson’s disease given placebo injections showed significantly higher dopamine levels in the brain. It’s a fiction that results in measurable, factual results – that’s the paradox of the placebo effect. It has basically nothing to do with the pharmacological properties of whatever ‘drug’ is used. The effect primarily derives from the ‘false’ belief that the ‘drug’ is effective.
Performance placebo
I lie on my modest wooden bed in my little room at the training camp, thinking. My meetings with Moses Kiptanui, Salina Kosgei and Toby Tanser have made me wonder whether the Kenyans have simply created their own collective performance placebo effect. Perhaps it is this more than anything else that separates them from other runners. Maybe their irrational belief in their own abilities enables them to achieve the apparently impossible. Take the former 5,000 metres world champion, Benjamin Limo, for example. He had no TV, only a radio, but through it he had heard how all the Kenyans won gold medals at the 1988 Olympics. Every time he turned on the radio, another Kenyan had won. So he thought that all he actually needed to do was to get to the Olympics – once he was there he would win for sure.
Such is life in Iten. Living there, you are constantly bombarded with the message that you too can achieve something big. To Kenyans, the possibility of losing simply does not exist. As Toby Tanser told me:
‘A few years back I said to some of my Kenyan friends that I would show them a white person who could beat every Kenyan. They were all about to fall off their chairs laughing. “A white man cannot defeat the Kenyans!” they shouted. I asked if they were prepared to bet 50 shillings each. Although none of them had a penny to their name, they all took the bet, they were that convinced. “Nobody can beat Paul Bitok of the Nandi tribe,” they said. But I had a video tape from the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, in which Dieter Bauman sprints past the Kenyans to win the 5,000 metres. When I inserted the tape and they saw that I was right they were left in complete shock. This is a good example of the brainwashing that goes on here, which is a highly underestimated factor in Kenyan success.’
It is also interesting to note that the Kenyans’ belief in their own abilities is not really founded on logical, rational analysis of the way things are. If anything, the opposite is true. Just think of Moses Kiptanui. He did not even consider the possibility of defeat in Stockholm, yet in reality there was a strong chance that he could lose. Or Benjamin Limo. In actual fact, is it is simply not true that all the Kenyans returned home from the Olympics with a medal. Many of them got nowhere close. But because the radio was his only source of information, he developed an overwhelmingly positive impression of the performance of the Kenyan athletes.
Neither Moses Kiptanui nor Benjamin Limo based their beliefs on logical assessment of the facts. But even if they weren’t necessarily correct, their ‘truths’ gave them the faith and the courage to do the impossible. As Matthew Syed puts it in his book Bounce: ‘The paradoxical conclusion behind the performance placebo effect is that the thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true, but which are incredibly effective.’ In other words: it is not a question of being right, it is a question of winning.
The downside of knowledge
The Kenyan runners challenge the rational, analytical Western approach to developing top performance. Those who know the most (or think they do) are not necessarily those who win. In the West we have masses of knowledge and scientific ballast, yet in Kenya they have the results. Perhaps too much knowledge and information can actually limit potential, instead of helping to unlock it.
Colm O’Connell, the Godfather of Kenyan running, had this to say on the subject: ‘Americans and Europeans analyse everything. They break an athlete down into atoms. Here is your maximum oxygen uptake, here is your muscle fibre type distribution, over here you can see your pulse, and by the way, one of your legs is longer than the other. I think that kind of over-analysis destroys an athlete. I accept them as they are. If I start making my athletes too aware, I remove their instinctive drive and self-belief.’
All this is not to say that knowledge, information and a degree of realism are not useful qualities. Every top performer has to make rational choices, evaluate themselves critically and be able to stare reality in the face, but too much information can damage their chances by narrowing their perceptions of what is achievable.
In the words of Colm O’Connell: ‘Athletes don’t respond well to too much information. You must only give them a minimum. If one of my athletes has a problem I don’t necessarily tell them so. Instead I get them to train in a way I think will solve it, without making them aware of it. The last thing I want them to think ahead of an important competition is that they have a problem. There is a feel-good factor which you have to be aware of.’
The question is whether this simplicity and minimum of information is one of the Kenyan runners’ best-kept secrets? For example, nobody in Kenya tells you that you need slim calves or unusually high oxygen uptake to join the world elite. Nobody’s maximum oxygen uptake is even measured. Here everyone is like Moses Kiptanui; they look at the success stories and think, ‘If they can do it, why can’t I?’
See it before it happens
If you want to foster self-belief it is crucial to realise that the human mind doesn’t respond as well to information and facts as it does to stories and images. As Colm O’Connell expresses it: ‘Don’t start with knowledge! Start with desire and imagination, then knowledge will come.’
Albert Einstein seems to have been in agreement, once saying: ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ You have to first be able to imagine something before you will be able to turn that thing into reality. One of the best-known studies of the power of imagination – or visualisation as sport psychologists name it – was conducted by Dr Judd Blaslotto at the University of Chicago. He split a basketball team into three groups and tested each one to see how many points they could score with a limited number of free throws. After this, he had the first group practise free throws every day for an hour. The second group just visualised themselves making free throws. The third group did nothing. After 30 days, he tested them again. As expected the third group did not improve at all. The first group had improved by 24 per cent, and incredibly the second group had improved by 23 per cent without touching a basketball!
Bizarre as it may sound, in some disciplines it seems to be possible to achieve a similar effect from visualisation as from certain types of training. In another study, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a Harvard neuroscientist, divided volunteers into two groups. The first group was given a five-finger piano exercise to practise for two hours for five days a week. At the end of each session Pascual-Leone measured the neural activation of the group. He noticed that even after just five days of practice new neural circuits were being established.
The second group was asked to simply imagine playing the same piano piece each day. When he measured this group’s neural activation he found that mere mental rehearsal of playing the piano had altered the same physical structures and established neural circuits in the same way that actual practice had with the first group. Even more thought-provoking was the fact that the performances of the two groups were almost identical when they were tested after a two-week period.
These studies demonstrate the power of visualisation and mental practice, and they show us in concrete terms that the limits of possibility can be, and indeed are, altered by your mind.
Walt Disney clearly understood the importance of visualisation – he once said that if he had not seen Disneyland in his mind, the rest of the world would not have seen it on Earth. The clarity of the mental picture he had helped him to bounce back from all the setbacks he met along the way.
Swimmer Michael Phelps, eight times gold winner at the Beijing Olympics, has described the part played by visualisation in his success, too: ‘There are times in my sleep when I literally dream my race from start to finish. Other nights … I visualise to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish.’
In sports this is often referred to as the Bannister Effect after the British doctor Roger Bannister. In 1965 he became the first man to break the four-minute mile, with a time of 3 minutes 59.4 seconds. Until then, it was widely believed that it was physically impossible for a man to run a mile in less than four minutes. People claimed the human body would burst from such a trial of speed and endurance.
The most incredible part of this story is not Bannister’s achievement, but the effect it had on other runners. Forty-six days after the record-breaking event, the Australian John Landy bettered Bannister’s time, managing 3 minutes 57.9 seconds. Within two years, 37 runners had broken the four-minute mile. The reason was certainly not physical conditioning, better tracks or improved shoes. The real barrier to break wasn’t physical, but mental. Bannister’s success removed a mental block from thousands of other runners, allowing them to believe that they could match and even better his achievement.
Meet four world record holders in 30 minutes
This is exactly what goes on every single day in the Kenyan running Gold Mine in Iten. You constantly hear people’s stories of neighbours, cousins, uncles and friends who made it. I still remember my first early morning training session there. Although I felt in good shape, I was overtaken by one group of runners after another. My surprise was not so much due to being overtaken as to the personalities who ran past me. First came Olympic gold medallist Asbel Kiprop, and after him three world record holders – first Linet Masai, then Mary Keitany and Florence Kiplagat.
It wasn’t until later in my stay that I realised that was just a perfectly ordinary morning in Iten. If you go jogging for 30 minutes as the sun rises, meeting four world champions on the way is not an exceptional event. In Iten the superstars train side-by-side with the young hopefuls. Imagine what that means. Every morning, the novices get to see how the world’s best do their training. They see that elite runners also suffer when the going gets tough; that they are not always at their best either – they see that they are humans too. But they also see what price they are willing to pay and how hard they push themselves. They witness what it takes to success at close quarters.
This is precisely what gave Moses Kiptanui the conviction that he could win in Stockholm. It’s also the mechanism that instilled self-belief in Wilson Kipketer, the treble world champion and former world record holder for the 800 metres. As he told me: ‘I was a student at St Patrick’s High School in Iten, and realising that Peter Rono [Olympic gold medallist in the 1,500 metres] went to the same school made a big difference to me. He slept in the same building as me, we ate the same food and we had same coach. That made me think: if he could do it, I can do it too.’
It’s easy to see how this applies in contexts outside of athletics. Since Apple released the iPad the market has been inundated with similar tablets from other companies. Those companies all had what they needed to release the first tablet, but didn’t until Apple showed them the way with the iPad.
When you’re pursuing a goal, there is something reassuring in knowing there is someone who has done it before, whatever it might be. Knowing that it’s possible and studying how it was done will almost certainly increase the chances of you remaining committed.
Shoals of stars
There are a lot of things we believe to be impossible only because we haven’t seen anyone do them. When we’re struggling with a project or a problem, the likeliest reason for giving up is the belief that it can’t be done. What’s the point of persevering and investing time if it’s actually impossible to succeed? If you are presented with convincing evidence that it can be done, it’s not an impossible task any longer. For most people, just knowing that something really is possible makes the idea of doing it themselves seem achievable. It removes the mental block that prevents them from succeeding. Understand this mechanism and you’ve understood a key ingredient of any Gold Mine.
When Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon in 1997, there were no other Russian players in the world top ten. Two years after Kournikova’s breakthrough, there were five.
Similarly, when the South Korean golfer Se Ri Pak became Rookie of the Year on the LPGA Tour in 1998 she was the only South Korean golfer in the world top 100. Today, just over ten years later, 35 per cent of the world’s 100 best golfers are South Koreans.
In the late 1980s Korea had fewer than 200 golfers between the ages of fifteen and eighteen able to do a round under par. Today, the country has more than 3,000 young golfers with a handicap of zero or less, and the National Korean PGA Tour pumps out superstars. It is unlikely that Se Ri Pak expected to ignite such a fire when she won her Rookie of the Year prize, but the nation’s driving ranges were quickly flooded with young girls who wanted to be the best in the world and were convinced they could make it. The first lady of South Korean golf had paved the way for her sisters, and the rest is history. Since 1998, seven out of the eleven rookie prizes have been won by a South Korean woman.
It is perhaps difficult for us to understand this kind of sudden blossoming of talent. After all, in a sense nothing had changed in these places. In Russia the rackets were the same, the courts looked no different and the training regimen was the same. In South Korea the clubs and courses remained the same, as did the players’ genes. The transformation was in the attitudes of the athletes. Having seen what could be achieved, they set out to emulate that success themselves. The raw ability to play tennis and golf was already there, but their self-belief exploded.
As the elite South Korean player Mi-Hyun Kim told me: ‘Before Se Ri made it on to the LPGA Tour, we all thought that was something huge; something we couldn’t achieve. But after she won two majors in her first year, some of us started to think that maybe we could do the same.’
Each of the Gold Mines seems to have its own Se Ri Pak. In Ethiopia it was Abebe Bikila, the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal. In Brazil it was the football legend Pelé. And in Kenya it was Kipchoge Keino, who won gold in the 1,500 metres at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Once a single person has pushed the limits of what is possible, ten more will follow in their slipstream.
This, more than anything else, is the secret behind the winning culture in the Gold Mines. Each successive star paves the road on which the stars of the future will tread. They make others see and believe that the impossible is possible, fostering their ability to visualise success. When you are only a few strides away from a training partner who has run a 2.04 marathon, or set a new world record, there is every reason to believe you are equally capable.
There was a similar phenomenon in the 1990s where Santa Monica Track club achieved total domination in the sprints, with Carl Lewis at the fore. In those days there would be a world champion or an Olympic medallist in practically every one of the eight lanes. It was a fact that if you ‘won’ the Tuesday night starting practice then you were the world’s fastest athlete off the blocks. When you find yourself in that kind of environment your preconceptions about your own abilities and limits are completely rewritten. You can give a person the most sophisticated education and conditioning but nothing beats planting them in an environment with people who do what they want to do, but who are better at it than they are.
Sessions of suffering
On my second day in Iten I get another demonstration of the Kenyans’ irrational, instinctive relationship to what is possible and how it puts them in a different league to everybody else. My alarm goes off at 5.30 a.m. I have agreed to meet a group of Kenyan runners outside the camp. I wipe the sleep out of my eyes and groggily get out of bed, trying to motivate my tired body by focusing on what Moses Kiptanui told me on my first day in Kenya: ‘There will be training sessions out on the red paths that you will never forget. You’ll find the going tough, but the scenery is incredible and you will be in the company of record holders and Olympic gold winners.’
Twenty minutes later I’m standing outside the metal gate at the entrance to the camp waiting for my training group to arrive. All around I see runners trickling over the undulating landscape like tiny ants. Iten is a running farm, created by the athletes themselves. Young hopefuls flock here to become part of the training environment. Even though everybody competes against everybody else, there is a special sense of cohesion here. Even the poorest runners will find somewhere to sleep here and some ugali to eat.
The East African runners push their limits mentally as well as physically
My training group suddenly appears in the early morning light. ‘Come on!’ shouts the runner at the front of the pack, and I join in at the back.
All the runners in this area follow more or less the same regimen. Most of them train three times a day: an early session at 6 a.m., the next at 10 a.m. and the last late in the afternoon. Every Tuesday, several hundred runners of all ages gather at the only track in Iten, which is more a 400-metre potholed dirt road than a proper athletics track. This is where the Kenyans run their famous, much feared interval races. It is not unusual to see people run until they retch, only to get up and run on. As Toby Tanser puts it: ‘Here I see runners suffer to a degree that I cannot in my wildest dreams imagine anybody in the West subjecting themselves to. This is a fast moving journey which wrenches the body beyond its mortal limitations; it starts with the recognition that pain is the validation of accomplishment.’
Knowing too much
We have now been running for 45 minutes through the countryside and the sun is beating down on us from a cloud-free sky. The group has drastically increased its pace. The most recent gear change has taken me right into the red zone. My heart is galloping and I am gasping for breath in the thin air. Even though the group has been very considerate of the new white boy in the class, I am forced to throw the towel in five minutes later. I jog back towards the camp completely shattered, while the group briskly disappears out of view. When Kenya’s former marathon record holder Paul Tergat was asked about the secret of the Kenyans’ success he replied simply: ‘If you train with us you will see why we win.’ He was right.
Another thing I notice is that nobody runs with a heart rate monitor in Iten. In fact, the only heart rate monitor I see during my stay has been taken apart by its owner so he can use it as a line to dry his wet clothes. Colm O’Connell smiles broadly when I confess that I am amazed at the absence of a piece of equipment that would be considered standard in the West. ‘Fifteen years ago I was given a heart rate monitor by some Swedish scientists,’ he says. ‘I’ve still got it; it’s still in the box in my room. Here, nobody needs a heart rate monitor to tell them that there is no more petrol in the tank.’
The use of computers is now becoming commonplace in the Western world. Runners return from their workouts to feed all kinds of data into a training log, often downloading it from their watches. The Kenyans, however, keep their training much simpler. There nobody allows a heart rate monitor to tell them how hard they can train or what their physical limitations are. As Toby Tanser explains: ‘Scientists will always maintain that if the Kenyans ran according to the scientifically “correct” method, they would run even faster. If Martin Lel had been born in the United States, they would have thrown him straight into the weight training room, but the fact is that he has never been to a gym and yet he has won the London Marathon three times and the New York City Marathon twice. Kenyans are not scientific. They are instinctive, organic runners who know a hell of a lot about running and the body’s potential with no knowledge of expressions like VO2 max, lactic acid or anatomy.’
The moment of truth
Paradoxically enough, some of the most powerful evidence as to why the Kenyans’ somewhat irrational attitude allows them to win is to be found in rational science. South African professor of exercise and sports science Tim Noakes has done some fascinating work in this area.
In his late twenties Noakes started to become interested in running. Today he has run more than 70 marathon and ultra-marathon races, is author of the book Lore of Running and has been recognised the world over for his Central Governor Model, which maintains that the brain – and not the body, as was previously believed – is the primary organ that dictates how fast, how long and how hard humans can exercise.
If you run 1,000 metres as fast as you can you will begin at some point to feel discomfort and fatigue. However, according to Noakes that feeling of tiredness does not come from the muscles, but from the brain. Basically, the brain tries to protect itself and avoid you pushing yourself so hard that you reach the finish line in an exhausted or damaged state. It therefore makes you feel tired, and it is because of this control mechanism that we don’t generally run to the point of complete breakdown. In other words: when you’re so tired that it feels like you’re about to collapse any second, you’re actually not even remotely close to your limit. Tim Noakes says: ‘I don’t see fatigue as a physical phenomenon; I see it purely as an emotion. You have to understand that however bad you feel, it’s actually just your brain playing a trick on you to make sure you don’t damage yourself. You always have a little in reserve, or as some would interpret this, you can always push yourself a bit harder.’
According to Noakes, succumbing to fatigue is nothing more or less than quitting. What we call exhaustion is not the inability to continue; it’s basically giving up. ‘I can show you a lot of videos where the distance at the finish line between the first and the second runner is inches. In these cases the second runner chooses to lose, he chooses to come second. It’s not that the athlete didn’t have reserves. He just didn’t manage to activate those reserves. His brain said no because he wasn’t able to convince himself that it was important to go even deeper. He accepted coming second.’
The rise of a scientific revolution
Tim Noakes’s idea that it is your mind that limits your performance rather than the actual capability of your muscles is supported by more recent findings. In a study published in 2011 in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, Samuele Marcora, an exercise physiologist at Bangor University in Wales, brought ten elite rugby players into her lab and had them perform a simple exercise protocol in three steps. First they pedalled on a stationary bike as hard as they could for five seconds while their power output was recorded (a test of maximal voluntary cycling power, or MVCP).
After a period of rest they were then required to pedal the same bikes for as long as possible at a fixed intensity that corresponded to 90 per cent of their individual VO2 maximum values. Marcora offered cash prizes to the top performers and circulated the results publicly to stimulate competition and make sure the subjects went all-out and rode to exhaustion. The players were also asked to rate their exhaustion on a scale of 6 to 20 (20 being complete exhaustion). On average, they rated themselves at 19.6 on that scale.
Immediately after completing this ride to exhaustion, each of the players then repeated the five-second maximum power test. Not surprisingly, Marcora found that, on average, the rugby players cycled with 30 per cent less power in the final five-second MVCP-test (performed in a state of exhaustion) than they did in the first MVCP (performed in a fresh state). On the other hand, it also transpired that they pedalled with three times as much power in the final five-second MVCP-test (performed in a state of exhaustion) than they managed in their fixed-intensity ride to complete exhaustion. But how were the rugby players able to triple their power output when they were already in a state of near total exhaustion? If they had stopped their ride to exhaustion because they were no longer physically able to sustain their performance, how could they then drastically improve on that performance immediately afterwards, without any opportunity to rest?
You’re a quitter
Marcora’s findings stand in sharp contrast to the traditional way of explaining tiredness. Explanations are usually based on the conviction that a decrease in performance is the result of physical fatigue – pointing to the fact that less oxygen reaches the muscles, that lactic acid builds up and that our legs tire.
It is upon this traditional view that all product development in the running industry is based. It has led to the development of countless methods to augment training, such as heart rate monitors, eating carbohydrates to replenish glycogen in tired muscles and even blood doping to allow more oxygen to be carried to active muscles. But if it were a physical barrier which limited performance it would not be possible for the rugby players to triple their power after having rated themselves as being almost completely exhausted, with nothing left to give. If their muscles were truly able to do no more, that last push would be impossible.
Marcora’s studies have paved the way for a revolution in the way we view fatigue, convincingly arguing that its true cause is the perception of effort. People give up way before they have reached their absolute physiological limit. The rugby players certainly didn’t feel as if they quit voluntarily. When they struggled in the exhaustion ride and couldn’t sustain the intensity any longer despite their best efforts, it felt as though it was their bodies that had reached a limit, but in reality it was their minds giving up – something of a paradox. The next time you feel as though you have reached your absolute limit in some activity, stop and ask yourself – have you really?
Intensity is king
The idea that the brain to a large extent sets limits for the body makes self-confidence and mental toughness seem even more crucial for the development of world-class performance than it was previously thought. It also explains why exercise physiologists have had trouble explaining the fact that high-level endurance athletes aren’t very different from each other when they undergo different physiological tests – there are no discernable differences between the winners and the losers. They all have a very high VO2 max, demonstrate good running economy and so on. It is impossible to explain the difference between their performances purely on the basis of physiological parameters. The difference between the best and the next best is more likely to be psychological.
Samuele Marcora also carried out a number of tests to gauge athletes’ perceptions of their own abilities, or what psychologists refer to as self-efficacy. The tests showed that beliefs about personal limits tend to be self-fulfilling. People who think they are able to push harder and do more, usually can.
This, of course, takes us right back to the Kenyans and their apparently irrational approach to training. Tim Noakes explains it like this: ‘If you look at Kenyan runners, they have a different attitude to pain and they push behind intensity of training to a whole new level. When they start feeling discomfort, I don’t think that they see it as pain in the same way than others do. They see it as a challenge. ‘
The marathon triple world champion Paul Tergat says more or less the same thing: ‘Hard training is all about asking yourself: can I give more? The answer is usually yes.’
How to delay being tired
Every time I asked European athletes who train or have trained in Iten about their experience of the Kenyan method, I was met with resigned looks and shakes of the head: ‘They just push, push, push and then keep pushing,’ they said.
You can see fear in the eyes of Western athletes who go to Iten to train when the subject of the Kenyans’ merciless interval running training comes up. When European and American athletes come to train, they often ask the coach: ‘How many intervals are we going to have today?’ No Kenyans ever ask that question. Nobody knows how many intervals they will have to run and nobody asks how many are left. They run right to the edge of collapse, perhaps lying in a ditch retching afterwards, only to get up to run once more.
Another good example of the Kenyan refusal to discount anything as impossible is the game ‘Catch the Impala’, one of their ‘alternative’ training methods, particularly popular among the Nandi people.
The impala is a type of antelope and a supremely fast animal, but it doesn’t have much staying power. If you run after it, it will stop at some stage to rest. Then, before you get too close it will start running again. Assuming the impala manages to have these rests, this stop-and-start chase can go on for about 40 km. After that point the impala is very tired and if you have the speed and endurance you may be able to get close enough to pat it on the backside. To the Kenyans, ‘Catch the Impala’ is the ultimate test of manhood – as the former Olympic 800 metres bronze winner Mark Coty once said: ‘When I returned home to Kenya, they actually respected me more for my ability to catch an impala than for having brought home an Olympic medal.’
The idea that a person running on foot would be able to catch a wild animal as fast as the impala seems incredible; so incredible that most of us would dismiss it as impossible. By not accepting what we would consider to be obvious human limitations, the Kenya runners make the impossible possible.
A world without limits
The power of positive thinking which allows the Kenyans to push beyond apparent boundaries has implications far beyond the sporting world. The main reason that people – or organisations for that matter – do not achieve the success they desire is usually the story they tell themselves about why it cannot be done. They don’t have the right training or education, the state of the market is not on their side, they don’t have enough money or resources, they don’t live in the right place, the last time they tried they didn’t succeed – an endless list of reasons to fail. All these explanations serve no purpose other than to excuse people for not trying, or rather not committing themselves completely. Explanations like these make us quitters!
In reality, this starts early on. From the day we are born we pick up ideas, attitudes and convictions from the world around us. Our parents, friends, teachers, the media and many other sources all try to sell us their version of the truth. The truth we consciously or unconsciously choose to accept forms our convictions as to what is possible and what is not. The problem is that many people end up accepting a ‘truth’ that limits them rather than opening up possibilities for them.
This is difficult to avoid. From the moment we get up to the time we go to bed, we are bombarded with information that makes us feel limited. The media, for example, serve up one depressing piece of news after another about the global financial crisis and the hovering threat of recession. If we are programmed to feel that we are in an environment in which it is impossible to succeed then of course we are likely to resign ourselves to failure. Just take a look at Greece, struggling for survival and on the brink of state bankruptcy. Without doubt, the country is in a state of deep financial crisis, but it is in just as deep a psychological crisis. The Greeks are subjected to a deluge of bad news every day, even though there are also positive cases of Greeks defying the crisis and building successful companies. This atmosphere strangles any form of initiative, it pacifies people – bad news rapidly develops into self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyone who wants to develop high performance should be aware of this danger. We are all at risk of becoming psychological quitters. Subconscious programming and an overload of limiting information can paralyse people’s imagination and drive. The result is that we end up performing in a box created for us by others, a box that is far too small.
It happens in all spheres of life, and particularly in the education system. As the world-renowned creativity expert Ken Robinson once said: ‘We are educating people out of their creativity.’
We are being trained to dream small dreams, but small dreams represent an attitude of fear. They sabotage our imagination and keep us from setting new standards and acquiring new skills. Just think of all the art we haven’t seen yet, the jobs that haven’t been created yet and the records that haven’t been broken yet.
My point is that if a culture becomes too regulated, information-heavy and realistic there is a risk that it will lose the irrational optimism needed to break records. As we gain more experience and knowledge we lose our naivety, and that is not necessarily a good thing. This kind of naivety characterises the entrepreneurs, leaders, architects, artists and athletes who genuinely push the limits of what is possible. The challenge therefore is to maintain our naivety while continuing to harvest more experience and knowledge. Colm O’Connell puts it beautifully: ‘When you are young, you are running with your heart. When you grow older, you start running with your brain. You start calculating and worrying if the pace is too fast, or if you might sustain an injury. As a youngster you just go out and do it. My job is to keep the youthful aggressive instinct alive in my athletes when they grow older.’
Any organisation or culture that wants to attain new heights and set new standards must foster and stimulate naivety and the ability to think without limitations. To achieve the extraordinary, people need the ability to believe despite the facts and not because of them. Dean Keith Simonton, a professor of psychology at University of California at Davis, has identified this as an extremely common characteristic among high achievers. As he puts it: ‘They really believe that in the end that they’re going to win, and until they do, they will keep on pushing, keep on making the phone calls, writing the letters, whatever it takes.’
You will always be able to find 100 reasons that something isn’t possible, but there will also always be at least one good reason that it is. For this reason I am convinced that we can learn far more from running in Kenya than from laboratories in the West. Iten is a world where you will never hear why something is not possible. There is room for big dreams.
Just remember that dreamers don’t have special genes. They are simply determined and relentless in chasing those those dreams. If my cousin Richard can do it, why can’t I?
What you should never forget about
BELIEF
1. Imagination is more important than knowledge. If you can’t visualise it happening, it will not happen. Anyone wanting to break records and push boundaries must build a clear picture in their mind of what they want to achieve.
2. Too much information and knowledge can limit potential, paralyse action and kill belief. A top performer must distinguish between what they really need to know and what is just nice to know.
3. Belief is not about being right. It’s about winning. What often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are logically not true, but which are powerfully motivating.
4. Be realistic, but be unrealistic at the same time. Any organisation wishing to deliver high performance must nurture its ability to think on an unrealistically large scale and stimulate its naivety about what’s possible.