The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (11 page)

On that January day at the Armory, with the weight of expectation lightened by his decision not to take the race seriously, Scott ultimately decided to finish, but I blew by him with 150 meters left to run 1:54 and beat him for the first time. It was thirty seconds faster than I had run as a high school junior.

Ultimately, Scott moved away from the 800, running it less and less as his career wore on, opting for and succeeding in other events. As for me, I continued to get faster. My substantial improvement landed me a dazzling wood and glass box known as the Gustave A. Jaeger Memorial Prize, given to a four-year Columbia varsity athlete who “achieved significant athletic success in the face of unusual challenge and difficulty.” Let’s see someone with a high baseline aerobic capacity try to win that one.

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Some people improve their endurance more rapidly than others. They are gifted with high trainability. Others are gifted with high
baseline aerobic fitness. But how high can that baseline be? Or, the crucial question for sports: does anyone have elite-level aerobic endurance before training? It is a question that Norman Gledhill, a professor of kinesiology at York University in Toronto—who has administered the National Hockey League’s predraft combine—began to consider in the 1970s. Gledhill’s curiosity was ignited by a few cases in which a modicum of endurance seemed to precede training. The story of Nancy Tinari, a high school student at nearby George S. Henry Secondary School, was one that lodged firmly in Gledhill’s mind.

In 1975, Tinari showed up to gym class in cutoff jean shorts and battered canvas Keds and proceeded, with no prior training, to cruise two miles in the twelve-minute run test. “I didn’t think of myself as a jock,” Tinari says. “I wasn’t into equipment, or following training. I had no real interest in it.” Fortunately for her, the man holding the stopwatch that fall day, George S. Gluppe, had a lot of interest in it, and “was just smart enough to realize I had someone special on my hands,” he says. Gluppe pestered and prodded Tinari to start training. “You know, Nancy, you could be an Olympic runner,” he told her. She laughed. Ultimately, though, Tinari gave in and made good on those words.

As soon as she started training, she started winning. After high school, Tinari ran at York and then as a professional. In 1988, despite mustering a measly thirty to thirty-five miles a week of training because of injuries, she competed in the 10K at the Olympics in Seoul. To this day, Tinari holds the Canadian national record in the 15K.

Norm Gledhill never forgot the tale of the girl who was discovered in gym class and became York University’s greatest runner. He was often reminded of it through the 1980s and ’90s as he and his colleague Veronica Jamnik endurance tested thousands of subjects, from elderly women to elite cyclists and rowers. Now and then, they would find someone with a VO
₂
max that defied their sedentary existence.

In the late nineties, Gledhill and Jamnik, along with York researcher Marco Martino, set out to see whether they could identify
and study such naturally fit folk. Part of their work was to administer fitness screenings to young men hoping to become Toronto firefighters. Over two years, the team gave VO
₂
max tests to 1,900 young men.

Among them were six men with absolutely no history of training whatsoever who nonetheless had aerobic capacities on par with collegiate runners. The “naturally fit six,” as Australian physiologists Damian Farrow and Justin Kemp call them in their sports science book
Why Dick Fosbury Flopped
, had VO
₂
max scores more than 50 percent higher than the average untrained young man, despite being inclined to couch-bound activities. When the York researchers examined their “hidden talents,” as they call them, they saw that the naturally fit men had a crucial gift, through no discipline or effort of their own: massive helpings of blood. They were endowed with blood volumes that could have been mistaken for those of endurance-trained athletes. “It’s the increased diastolic filling,” explains Gledhill, referring to the part of the heartbeat when the heart muscle relaxes to allow blood back in. “When you fill up the right side of the heart with more blood, then it pumps more blood into the left side, and the left side pumps it out into the body. The [return of blood to the heart] is enhanced because of the extra blood volume.”

An increase in blood volume is one of the telltale signs of a well-trained athlete. And, on occasion, a pro athlete has been caught doping with a blood volume loader in an effort to increase endurance. But not the naturally fit six; they just came out of the box that way, naturally doped.

Some of the world’s greatest endurance athletes, too, seem almost to come out of the box in better shape than their peers. Athletes like Chrissie Wellington.

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Wellington, a thirty-six-year-old British triathlete, made her name in Ironman races: a 2.4-mile swim, followed by a 112-mile bike ride, all before a full 26.2-mile marathon run.

She is the greatest female Ironman triathlete ever, and not by a little. In thirteen iron-distance races, including four Ironman world championships, she never lost. In July 2011, Wellington turned in one of the more outlandish performances in endurance sports history: she finished a race in Germany in 8 hours, 18 minutes, and 13 seconds; more than half an hour faster than the world record prior to Wellington’s appearance in the sport in 2007. Her time would have placed her ahead of all but four men in that particular race.

By her own admission, Wellington was not interested in devoting herself to fierce sports practice when she was a child in the tiny village of Feltwell in eastern England. Her childhood passion was environmentalism. “I was the kid organizing neighborhood recycling,” she says. Wellington did play sports, but “my aim in school was to get the best grades that I possibly could, and I used sports more just for fun.” So she tried a bit of everything: running, field hockey, netball, and she swam for the local Thetford Dolphins.

When Wellington was fifteen, her parents realized they had an aquatic talent in their living room. Here’s how Wellington recalls the conversation: “My parents said to me, ‘Look, you’ve got potential in swimming, do you want to join the big swimming club that’s an hour away and we’ll drive you every morning? Or, it’s your major exams coming up when you’re sixteen, do you want to focus on that?’ And I said, ‘Look, I’d rather stay with my local swimming club, not take it so seriously, and focus on my exams.’ And that’s the choice I made when I was younger.”

Wellington’s academic focus served her well. She went on to graduate with honors from the University of Birmingham in 1998 before traveling the world and then starting on her master’s degree in international development at Manchester University. In 2002, Wellington took a job at the British government’s Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, or DEFRA. For two years, Wellington worked to implement development projects in impoverished countries, and she helped draft the official UK policy for the postconflict reconstruction of Iraq.
In the meantime, she had started recreational running. When she entered her first marathon, she shocked herself by finishing in three hours when her expectation had been 3:45. She was intensely passionate about her job as a civil servant, but by 2004 Wellington had tired of the bureaucratic tango it took to push incremental policy changes. She burned to have a tangible impact. So she moved to Nepal to work on a sewage sanitation project in an area ravaged by civil war. There, in the Himalayan mountains, was born the inspiration for her professional triathlon career.

Wellington had no road biking experience—she was twenty-seven the first time she sat atop a road bike—but in May 2004, just before she left for Nepal, a friend goaded Wellington to try an amateur super-sprint-length triathlon. That’s a quarter-mile swim, a six-and-a-quarter-mile bike, and a one-and-a-half-mile run. Wellington borrowed a shabby road bike that she says was “black and yellow and looked like a bumblebee.” Unlike the serious competitors, Wellington did not have clip-in shoes for the bike, and midway through the race she got her shoelace tangled in the gears and nearly fell. Nonetheless, she finished third and had a blast. So Wellington did two more super sprint triathlons, and won both times. When she landed in Nepal, she bought a bike.

In Nepal, Wellington would cycle with friends some mornings. Right away, she noticed, “I could just go and go and go all day.” During a two-week holiday from work, Wellington and a group of friends traveled to the Tibetan capital of Lhasa and then biked eight hundred miles through the Himalayas back to Kathmandu.

Wellington had been living at an altitude of around five thousand feet in Kathmandu for eight months, so she had a degree of altitude acclimation, but much of the holiday ride was done above fifteen thousand feet—it topped out at Everest Base Camp, near eighteen thousand feet—where the air is so thin that unacclimatized folk have trouble walking, much less riding. That wasn’t a problem for some of the men who rode alongside Wellington. Not only were they experienced
cyclists, they were Sherpas, native Nepali people who make their living shepherding climbers up Mount Everest. “Their technical skills were far superior to mine,” Wellington says, “but I could hold my own climbing up the hills and the mountains.”

“When I returned to Britain from Nepal [in late 2005],” she says, “I was determined to give triathlon a good shot. I still had no idea of being professional, though.”

In February 2006, shortly after her return, Wellington was at a wedding in New Zealand and “got roped” by friends into entering a 151-mile running, cycling, and kayaking adventure race through the Southern Alps. Wellington’s lifetime of kayak training consisted of a crash-course tutorial the previous month. Despite capsizing several times in the kayak leg of the race, she placed second. In September, juggling training and a full-time job, Wellington won an amateur triathlon world championship title. Five months later, in February 2007, she turned pro.

In October that year, despite having trained exclusively for shorter triathlon races, Wellington entered the Ironman World Championship as a virtual unknown to her competitors. Her anonymity lasted through the early afternoon of October 13, 2007, when she arrived at the running portion of the world championship race two minutes ahead of the closest woman. “I kept expecting the other athletes to be stronger and come up and pass me,” Wellington says, “but the gap was just growing.” By the finish line, the gap had grown to five minutes.

The British Triathlon Federation hailed the win as “a remarkable feat, deemed to be a near impossible task for any athlete racing as a rookie at their first Ironman World Championships.” Wellington bested athletes like second-place finisher Samantha McGlone. In each of the five previous years, while Wellington was helping bring drinking water to third-world countries, McGlone had been a member of the professional Canadian National Elite Triathlon Team. She had already competed in triathlon at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and, unlike Wellington, was actually deliberately practicing to race the Ironman distance. “We
all have talents,” Wellington says. “And sometimes those talents are hidden and you have to dare to try something new or you might not know what you’re good at.”

By the time Wellington retired in December 2012—ending a career that was five years from start to finish—triathlon-as-after-work-hobby was a receding memory. As a professional, Wellington trained zealously. Six sessions each of swimming, biking, and running per week and six-hour training days were not uncommon, not to mention the massage afterward and meticulously planned meals and sleep. She never stopped improving throughout her career and her best work may still have been ahead. But it was her rapid rise that was most startling.

When asked what her weak spot was relative to her competitors, Wellington is quick to point to her swimming, the discipline in which, interestingly, she has the deepest experience.

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In the York University study, 6 out of 1,900 men were in the naturally fit fraternity. That sounds rare at first blush, but 6 out of 1,900 suggests that most large high schools have a few naturally fit boys, and, if the results can be extrapolated to women, there are more than 100,000 naturally fit people in the United States between the ages of twenty and sixty-five. Looking at it this way, it’s reasonable to wonder whether every professional endurance athlete in history might not have started as a member of the naturally fit fraternity.

The school fitness test—like the one that set Nancy Tinari on an Olympic path—is not a terribly uncommon venue for the identification of future world-beaters. Meb Keflezighi, the Eritrean-American who in 2009 became the first American man to win the New York City Marathon in twenty-seven years, initially got a sense of his endurance prowess during the mile run in seventh-grade gym class in San Diego. “I just ran hard because I wanted that A; I had no idea of strategy or pace,” Keflezighi writes in his autobiography,
Run to Overcome,
of the 5:10 mile he clocked on no training. The gym teacher phoned the San
Diego High School cross-country coach and told him, “We’ve got an Olympian here.” Indeed. Keflezighi went on to win the silver medal in the marathon at the 2004 Olympics in Athens. “A PE class had turned my life around,” he writes, “though I didn’t know it at the time.”

Andrew Wheating, a twenty-five-year-old American and one of the nation’s top milers, did not run his first track race until his senior year at tiny Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, New Hampshire. His running career was kick-started when he ran a five-minute mile as part of a conditioning drill before his junior-year soccer season. Apparently sensing that his athletic future lay on the track and not the pitch, Wheating’s soccer coach suggested he switch to cross-country. Wheating did so and earned a track scholarship to the University of Oregon, a powerhouse running program. The summer after his sophomore year at Oregon—his third track season ever—Wheating made the U.S. Olympic team in the 800-meters. Two years later, at the end of the 2010 track season, Wheating ranked fourth in the world in the 1,500-meters with a time of 3:30:90, equivalent to a mile time under three minutes and fifty seconds.