Everest - The First Ascent: How a Champion of Science Helped to Conquer the Mountain (47 page)

Pugh set up treadmills in the wind tunnels at Farnborough and at the MRC and had the athletes run one in front of the other, while he measured the energy consumptions of those in front and those behind, also exploring which position gave the most effective protection. One of his findings was that at middle-distance speeds, running approximately 1 meter behind another runner reduced the energy consumed by 6.5 percent—an advantage of about 4 seconds per lap.
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Experience on the track showed that athletes couldn’t generally run so close behind each other, but by running behind and slightly to the side, they could still gain around 1 second per lap—as Hyman had already thought.
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Traditionally, it was common for British runners to choose to run out in front. Some years later, before the Munich Olympics of 1972, Hyman—with his knowledge of the proven benefits of slipstreaming—tried to persuade the great British runner David Bedford that if he ran out in front for all twenty-five laps of the 10,000-meter Olympic final, he would be handing a 25-second advantage to his competitors, who would surely avail themselves of slipstreaming.
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Just to tie with them, Bedford would have to run 25 seconds faster than them. Bedford assured Hyman that his margin of superiority was greater than that. He went on to lead the field for lap after lap, only to see five runners sweep past him in the closing stages.
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One of Pugh’s more important projects after getting his own laboratory was specifically with marathon runners. In the mid-1960s when heat exhaustion and dehydration in athletes were still not fully understood, Olympic and British rules did not allow runners to drink during the first 10 miles of a marathon. Only three drinking stations were permitted in the entire race. Heat exhaustion—when the body’s normal cooling system becomes overloaded and malfunctions—has potentially fatal results unless the victim is cooled rapidly. But when athletes collapse from heat exhaustion, they are typically shivering and have goose pimples. Instead of dousing them with cold water to cool them down, officials used to cover them in blankets to stop them shivering.

Having studied hypothermia among hill-walkers, Pugh was particularly interested in how runners coped with heat. There had been many studies of people exercising in severe heat on treadmills indoors, and in 1963 Roger Bannister had studied soldiers marching in Aden in temperatures of 90°F.
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But no one had yet investigated what happened to marathon runners in moderate conditions outside in the open air.

Seventy runners participating in a race organized by the Road Runners’ Club at Witney near Oxford in June 1967 let Pugh and a team of colleagues measure their skin and body-core temperatures. They weighed them, took urine and blood samples, and recorded their pulses, blood pressures, and temperatures before and after the race.
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Four athletes who collapsed were subjected to especially detailed studies. In addition to the standard rectal thermometers, Pugh used a new device for measuring temperatures continuously—a radio temperature pill which the athletes swallowed. It was designed by Heinz Wolff, one of Pugh’s colleagues at the MRC. The data they collected was the first such data ever published.

Athletes knew that getting too hot depressed their running performances. In 1960, athletes competing in the Rome Olympics had wanted to fly out early to acclimatize to the heat, but the BOA had insisted it was unnecessary. They were wrong. As a result most of the British runners felt they performed poorly.
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What Pugh showed for the first time was that, even in the relatively mild conditions of an English summer, the temperatures of long-distance runners could rise remarkably high, and being too hot and being dehydrated could slow them down. Five percent of his study group collapsed at the end of the race.

Mexico City was not expected to be significantly hotter than England, but Pugh estimated that the solar radiation would be seventeen times more intense. After two further studies at Font Romeu, Pugh predicted that heat might be almost as important as altitude in slowing marathon runners in Mexico.

A telephone call to Christopher Brasher at the
Observer
was enough to get the BOA and the Amateur Athletics Board to finance a second Mexico trip for Pugh. Two international athletes—Mike Turner and the long-distance runner Tim Johnston, who was ranked eighth in the world at 10,000 meters and tenth in the marathon—went with him and agreed to run until they collapsed from heat exhaustion.
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Turner ran for 18.5 miles before he collapsed, having lost 8.5 pounds—6 percent of his body weight. “You drain off all your fluid reserves and your skin dries up prickling and itching . . . I was forced to stop by sheer exhaustion,” Turner said. Johnston collapsed after 14.5 miles, losing 4 percent of his body weight. His temperature had climbed to a dangerously high 106.34°F.
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Pugh’s study was the first to measure the skin and body temperatures of athletes collapsing from heat stress, and the first to describe runners experiencing one of its symptoms—“the gooseflesh syndrome.”

“This heat factor is quite new,” an excited Dr. Pugh was quoted telling a reporter from the
Sunday Mirror
: “We have seen long-distance runners like Jim Peters collapsing in the marathon event in Canada [in 1954], and we have proved that an important factor in this is loss of fluid and too high a temperature.”
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After Pugh came home from Mexico, the International Athletes Club issued a leaflet to all “Olympic possibles,” in which Martin Hyman set out Pugh’s ideas on how to prepare for Mexico, and how to cope with the altitude, heat, and fatigue.
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In an era when New Zealand athletes were still wearing black running gear, Pugh suggested that British athletes should wear “white to reflect radiant heat and not dark to absorb it.” Their clothes should be made of “cotton which evaporates sweat (thus cooling the body) and not artificial fibre which does not.” They should “expose the maximum amount of skin”—their vests should have “very large deep arm holes and thin shoulder straps,” and their shorts “should be as brief as possible, with high vertical slits at the side.”

Since running shoes retained heat in the same way as hats, he suggested that the uppers should be constructed of meshed fabric to allow the air to penetrate. Also, since the rubberized Olympic track was expected to become very hot, giving the athletes blisters on the soles of their feet, the soles of their shoes should be made of rubberized spongy fabric. Before a race like the marathon, the athletes should try to find ways of “warming up” that did not increase their temperature, and they should attempt to acclimatize to heat before traveling to Mexico. “How is it possible to justify this heat scare?” Sandy Duncan retorted crossly, after seeing the leaflet: “White clothing throughout is entirely impracticable and so is cotton . . . and what pray of sunburn from these solar rays? Has Dr. Pugh ever studied a pair of athletic shorts? Anything smaller or split up higher would be indecent!”
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Pugh was now completely absorbed in finding ways to help marathon runners. In early 1968, Hyman recruited over fifty of the UK’s top marathon runners to take part in two endurance trials. The aim was to allow Pugh to test whether the runners might “improve their performances in hot conditions by drinking a lot of water in small amounts during the race” and by “eating a diet high in carbohydrates just prior to competition [i.e., the week before],” as had recently been recommended by Swedish scientists.
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Pugh also tested the impact of adding glucose to the drinking water.

British distance runners were used to training themselves not to drink during races—and often for several hours beforehand. It was widely believed that water made the athlete heavy, might make him want to urinate, and might give him a stitch. Machismo also played a part: Tim Johnston described himself as feeling “a bit hair shirt” about drinking while running. Athletes, like prewar British climbers, were unaware that dehydration might limit performance and cause physical damage.

The results of Pugh’s research convinced him, however, that marathon runners would perform better if they drank small amounts of water whenever they wanted during a race, and that the risks of heat collapse in hot conditions would also be greatly reduced.
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Therefore he campaigned to get marathon organizers to allow athletes to drink sufficient fluids. He even tried to get the time of the Mexico marathon changed from 3 p.m., when the sun would be at its fiercest, to a cooler part of the day. But when the British Amateur Athletics Board put this to the Olympic authorities, they were told that no one else had objected to the timing of the marathon, and in any case, Mexico City was not particularly hot.

Eventually, however, Pugh’s ideas passed into common currency. Skimpy clothes, ventilated fabric, lightweight running shoes with spongy soles, and caps with meshed crowns became de rigueur
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And today, marathon runners are given every opportunity to keep their bodies hydrated.

Hyman’s and Turner’s cooperation in the run-up to the Mexico Olympics helped make possible one of the most stimulating research periods in Pugh’s life. He felt great respect for them both, and they, like the Silver Hut scientists, came to know a completely different person from the man who stormed around Hampstead in a fury, upsetting his colleagues and his managers, or who lost his temper with his daughter at home. Hyman described him as helpful, cooperative, unusually interesting, idiosyncratic, a bit helpless about day-to-day life—but never rude or inconsiderate.

After three years of athletics research, Pugh had become so enthused that he wanted to take a team of young scientists to Mexico for the Games, hoping to pounce on some collapsing marathon athletes and study them. He also wanted to investigate whether the oxygen-transport systems of successful athletes were similar to those of high-altitude natives like the Sherpas. Peter Medawar was delighted. “This is just the kind of work Pugh ought to be doing and is indeed paid to do,” he told the head office, and set about obtaining Pugh an annual research budget that would prevent him from having to seek formal approval for every project.
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Shortly before the team was due to leave for Mexico, the Mexican Olympic authorities decided to ban all research at the Games, and the project had to be canceled.

In the end, no amount of acclimatization and training could compensate fully for the impact of Mexico’s altitude. Just as Pugh had predicted, some athletes achieved unprecedented success, but endurance athletes from sea level were unable to perform at their best. In many of the shorter, explosive events, records tumbled.
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One of the memorable achievements was Bob Beaman’s fantastic long jump. Assisted by the thin air—which helped the run-up and the jump itself—he jumped 29 feet, 2.5 inches, creating a record that lasted for twenty-three years.
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Athletics Weekly
described Mexico as “the schizophrenic games.” “Altitude made such an impact that many competitors were helped to undreamt-of achievements, while lowlanders were deprived of any sporting chance of success in the long-distance races.”
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The men’s 5,000-meter race was won in the slowest time in sixteen years. The 10,000-meter race was the slowest in twenty years—almost 2 minutes slower than the world record held by Australian Ron Clarke.
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Clarke finished sixth, collapsed after the race, and remained unconscious for 10 minutes. The five runners who finished ahead of him were all from high-altitude countries or had lived
and
trained at altitude.
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The Mexico Games were instrumental in highlighting the potential of high-altitude runners. Today, runners from countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, and parts of China dominate competitive endurance running.

30

The Restless Sharpshooter

In 1969, at the age of only fifty-four, Sir Peter Medawar suffered a catastrophic stroke while reading the Sunday lesson in Exeter Cathedral. He made a partial recovery, but in 1971 he was replaced as director of the National Institute for Medical Research by the molecular scientist, Sir Arnold Burgen.

Since establishing Pugh in his own unit, Medawar had been going out of his way to promote his work; for instance, he invited Pugh to give a colloquium on “athletic or high-performance physiology” to the 240 scientists at the NIMR’s headquarters at Mill Hill.
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The aim, he said, was to show off the “wealth of extraordinarily interesting information” Pugh’s research was producing.

With the stimulus of the Mexico Olympics, sport and exercise science had become a rapidly growing international research field in which Pugh had gained a valuable foothold. He lost his great champion at the MRC just at the moment when he wanted to expand his tiny department by taking on a few bright young researchers. But, even before Medawar’s departure, cold winds of change had already begun to blow on the future of applied human physiology at the NIMR.

Pugh had joined the institute at a time when the MRC was run on the “the Haldane Principle”—devised by the brilliant politician and public administrator R. B. Haldane, elder brother of the physiologist J. S. Haldane. The essence of the Haldane Principle was that research should be independent of the day-to-day concerns of politicians, and that to get the best out of scientists they must be given “the greatest degree of freedom” in the choice of the work they did.
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Not everyone agreed with this “genius-orientated,” “curiosity-led” approach, though it did produce some impressive results. MRC scientists won three Nobel Prizes in the 1950s, three in the 1960s, and two in the 1970s.
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Crick and Watson, who discovered the molecular structure of DNA, worked at the MRC’s Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge.