U
Ukrainia
Guest
Hey guys. I'm planning on writing a book. The premise is that I started out as a lazy couch potato (true) and attempted to get as close as I could to a 4 minute mile. I want the style to be casual and humorous, yet informative. Filled with personal ancedotes, science, physiology and psychology. It would be nice to get some feedback about the style and if you would like to read a book based on the premise. I am not looking for feedback on structure or grammer right now. I know those are in drastic need of revisions - dozens of them. Also, I didn't do any research here, so I'm sure some of my "facts" might be off. Finally, if you don't agree with evolution, it's not my intent to get into that argument here - even though I mention it here. I just wrote this up in the last day or two to practice writing. Anyway, this is a super rough incomplete draft of the second chapter. Any thoughts about if this is a book you might want to read? I hope at least 1 person will read the whole thing 
Ch. 2
A great quest should be challenging, adventurous, and a little bit pain inducing. Its even better when it provokes a deal of doubt and soul searching. The best things in life come with struggle required. But such a quest should also be possible. To divine my chances of success, I would start out by watching Youtube videos and bouncing some ideas off my dad, but would conclude by interviewing everyone from the Wisconsins best runners, to Kenyan wunderkinds, to psychologists, physiologists and geneticists. The question I wanted answered is what does it take to become an elite miler? What sort of mixture of upbringing, training, mindset and genetics leads to accomplishing one of the most taxing challenges in all of sport?
When outsiders, especially Americans, look at elite mile runners, theyre seeing athletes that dont correspond to the ideal of pure athletic prowess. Looking at the grainy black and white videos of Roger Bannister running the first 4 minute mile in recorded history, almost makes you think that you could do it. Heres a lanky guy without much to differentiate him from the general public, running at what looks to the untrained eye like a strenuous jog. Hes a bit taller and skinner than the average joe, but to sport fans that are used to 330 pound linemen, and 7 foot centers, he stands out for being exceedingly normal. Some body types make your jaw drop, while some make you think that looks a lot like my friend Bob, who was teased for being skinny.
Likewise feats of athletic prowess are much more visually impressive than the 4 minute mile. Most of us have stood at a free throw line before, wondering how someone could possibly dunk from such a distance. Weve all watched the hundred meter dash finish in the blink of an eye. Or have seen a quarterback pinpoint a sprinting wide receiver over 50 yards down the field. These are feats of the Greek Gods of humanity, idolized for their feats of immense speed and strength.
Distance runners, if anything, are thought of as oddballs, or weaklings or cultish. Americans have a vague sense of who Steve Prefontaine was. He wasnt just a runner, he was a rebel who died too young and enthusiastically lived and breathed running. Runners are a bit wacky that way. Running itself isnt exciting or adrenaline producing the popular thinking goes, so it only makes sense, that runners make up for their drab, boring training routines by having a few screws loose upstairs. They cant rely on the popular culture for watching their races and idolizing there feats, so runners make their own culture and sacralize their own memorable moments and personalities.
Prefontaine though wasnt just known for a rebellious nature. He was known for intensity and passion. The Bible may be the most quoted book in the West, but in the running community the best quotes all come the guy they just call Pre, a man whose character is exemplified when he said "a lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more." Thats why the running community loved him, and always will. Sports often seem more about shoe deals and commercials. Hype surrounds the best athletes in the most popular sports from the time theyre a freshman in high school until theyre retired. Theyre in a cocoon of self love wrapped so tight, that sport stars have become just as Hollywood as the actors known more for self promotion and lavish materialism than any connection with the community that follows them. Prefontaine wasnt like that. In a sport that endeared itself not with the mainstream, but with those that were never the jocks and prom queens of the high school set, but the little guys, the ones not concerned with popularity contests. He ran because for him, this was the purest battle of wills. You win but running hard, by never giving up and by going far past what you had once thought were your limits.
Its clear then, when I first thought about running a 4 minute mile, why this was so appealing to me. I had always heard and believed, that whatever your chosen avenue in life was, that youre almost always going to fall short of your potential. Few can take a challenge, whether physical or mental, corporate or community oriented, tedious or adventurous and transform it into a way of life so consuming that you cannot go any further. If you can however, awards await. They may not be of the tangible type like money or property or fame, but they just might be even more valuable. To get all metaphysical on you, life is about realizing your frailties and your capabilities.
The former is often difficult. When you grow up, you dream big. Its not inconceivable you could reach all your goals. For me, I thought why couldnt I be a world famous archeologist (hey, I was growing up on Jurassic Park and Indian Jones) or a soccer phenomenon or president of the United States? Then reality hits. You grow up. And you start looking at things with a hyper critical eye. You realize that there are people smarter, better looking, funnier and more athletic. You realize your time on earth, along with your talents, is finite. Lifes box of chocolates is sometimes laced with cyanide. Recognizing those frailties is eye opening, and when youre not careful you start to think that the list of your frailties is eons longer than that of your capabilities. What setting an audacious goal allowed me to do is dream big again. It allowed me to rethink what was possible.
This brings me to the first trait that many of the best milers have; grit. Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania, thinks one of the key ingredients to unlocking talent is a tenacious, dogged perseverance. Its not only genius thats important, but realizing your own genius. Its not enough to be smart or strong or fast or sociable or any of the valued traits idolized in society or sport. Whats important is the cultivation of that innate talent.
One widely cited statistic is that it takes 10,000 hours of determined practice to master most fields (well look at some of the problems with this later). Looking at success from this metric, potential takes years to fulfill. However, its not enough to do something often. Just driving, or writing, or doing math, doesnt make you excellent in any of those things, nor does it necessarily make you much better. Grit means doing those things creatively, with focus and desire and a little bit of passion could only help as well. In academics that might be the difference between a Ph.D and finding the breakthrough in a field. In the mile run it might be the difference between a 4:05 and a 3:59. And for the elite, its the difference between a gold medal and none at all.
What sustained practice does, is make skills habitual. I remember when I first tried to drive a car. It took all my focus to stick to task. Whenever I didnt, I started to drift noticeably to the other side of the road. But quickly, over the next few weeks and months, driving became noticeably easier. I could drive and think about girls with the rock music blaring, while doing complex calculus and chewing on a hot dog (okay, the latter things are false). The same thing holds true in soccer. A move thats great for more advanced players to quickly make a change in direction, is called the Cruyff (made famous by the player of the same name) turn. It involves placing the inside on your foot on the ball and then quickly pulling the ball behind your plant leg. For anyone thats played for years, it becomes second nature. Instead of thinking about the move itself, the move comes easily leaving your mind free to think about who to pass to, or where to place a shot.
The same holds true for running. When I started running after weighing over 220 lbs, it was the first exercise I had gotten in a long time. I was doing 9 minute pace for two miles and it wasnt easy. Then, days went by of pushing myself to run fast, and 9 minute pace became easy. However, continuing to run at or near that pace isnt what grit is about. Grit is about challenging yourself. But after a while, even the idea of challenging oneself becomes habit in and of itself. You do, in fact, realize that your training plan isnt working if youre not gasping for breath and feeling some pain by the end of the workout. You also know youre running at the edge of your capacity, because not only are you gasping for breath unable to speak to anyone else, you cant even think about anything else except for placing one foot past the other, in the hope that your mind can win the battle of will over your body.
Making an action habitual applies to running, but it applies to the rest of life just as easily. This means that, while running is great, but its only beneficial within the context of what you do with the rest of your time. You may habitually run, but if you also eat multiple doughnuts and drink numerous sodas daily, running wont magically make you healthy, just a bit healthier than you would otherwise be. Unfortunately bad habits stick with people. Think of how many people agonize over the amount they drink, or their weight, or the amount of time they procrastinate and youll have a handle on how much peoples actions go against their ideals. Neuroscience is comparatively new, but its emergence has begun to show how little of what we do is affected by conscious choices. Some have termed our affinity for unconscious thoughts and actions the zombie brain. Others have described our penchant for basing our action and even moral choices off of innate emotional preferences, only using logical thought as post hoc rationalization. There is obviously as much of a downside to this, as there is a positive contribution to our lives. The benefit is that our brain is able to efficiently use energy. We are not thrown into an intense energy expenditure every time we cross the road, socialize, or throw a baseball. Even the most cognitively demanding activities can become routine.
The downside is that we fall into habits we know we dont want to dont need. Drink alcohol once, its no big deal. Drink a few times and youre living large. But for the college student who is in tri-weekly beer pong leagues (you know, there probably are such things) drinking becomes normal, and even worse it activates the dopamine neurotransmitters so not only has drinking become normal, its become doubly addictive.
Therefore, its interesting that running itself may produce an addictive experience. Evolutionary theory suggests that traits that improve the ability of a species to live to mating age and to attract a mate will be passed down and become prevalent within a population. Running fast was vital to hunt down animals and possibly even to run those animals to death. The better endurance you have, the more likely you were to survive to be able to reproduce, and in genetic terms thats what real success entails. Our genes have created bodies therefore that need a level of exercise for optimal health. Our local Wal-Mart may mean that our food doesnt require us to be fast, but those genes are still in human populations that did face environmental pressures to be able to run for miles on end. Evolution, in other words, doesnt created perfect specimens for the current environment. The most prevalent genes have been passed down by the fittest people, but the catch is that whats been true for most of human recorded history the human need to run fast for long periods of time isnt true any longer. So for now, and for the next few dozen generations at least, were stuck with need to exercise to stay healthy. The good thing is weve also evolved to like it. Embracing exercise doesnt just produce physical health, its also a boon to psychological well being.
If psychological excellence is a prerequisite for mile success, what differentiates the physical outliers from the norm? First, its actually pretty easy to find out how many people have run under a 4 minute mile. Only 347 Americans have ever done it. Considering the population of the USA is over 300 million, that equates to roughly 1 American 4 minute miler for every 1 million Americans alive today. My initial optimism, you might say, wasnt warranted. If youre less generous, you might say my quest was insane.
　
　
　
　
　
Ch. 2
A great quest should be challenging, adventurous, and a little bit pain inducing. Its even better when it provokes a deal of doubt and soul searching. The best things in life come with struggle required. But such a quest should also be possible. To divine my chances of success, I would start out by watching Youtube videos and bouncing some ideas off my dad, but would conclude by interviewing everyone from the Wisconsins best runners, to Kenyan wunderkinds, to psychologists, physiologists and geneticists. The question I wanted answered is what does it take to become an elite miler? What sort of mixture of upbringing, training, mindset and genetics leads to accomplishing one of the most taxing challenges in all of sport?
When outsiders, especially Americans, look at elite mile runners, theyre seeing athletes that dont correspond to the ideal of pure athletic prowess. Looking at the grainy black and white videos of Roger Bannister running the first 4 minute mile in recorded history, almost makes you think that you could do it. Heres a lanky guy without much to differentiate him from the general public, running at what looks to the untrained eye like a strenuous jog. Hes a bit taller and skinner than the average joe, but to sport fans that are used to 330 pound linemen, and 7 foot centers, he stands out for being exceedingly normal. Some body types make your jaw drop, while some make you think that looks a lot like my friend Bob, who was teased for being skinny.
Likewise feats of athletic prowess are much more visually impressive than the 4 minute mile. Most of us have stood at a free throw line before, wondering how someone could possibly dunk from such a distance. Weve all watched the hundred meter dash finish in the blink of an eye. Or have seen a quarterback pinpoint a sprinting wide receiver over 50 yards down the field. These are feats of the Greek Gods of humanity, idolized for their feats of immense speed and strength.
Distance runners, if anything, are thought of as oddballs, or weaklings or cultish. Americans have a vague sense of who Steve Prefontaine was. He wasnt just a runner, he was a rebel who died too young and enthusiastically lived and breathed running. Runners are a bit wacky that way. Running itself isnt exciting or adrenaline producing the popular thinking goes, so it only makes sense, that runners make up for their drab, boring training routines by having a few screws loose upstairs. They cant rely on the popular culture for watching their races and idolizing there feats, so runners make their own culture and sacralize their own memorable moments and personalities.
Prefontaine though wasnt just known for a rebellious nature. He was known for intensity and passion. The Bible may be the most quoted book in the West, but in the running community the best quotes all come the guy they just call Pre, a man whose character is exemplified when he said "a lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more." Thats why the running community loved him, and always will. Sports often seem more about shoe deals and commercials. Hype surrounds the best athletes in the most popular sports from the time theyre a freshman in high school until theyre retired. Theyre in a cocoon of self love wrapped so tight, that sport stars have become just as Hollywood as the actors known more for self promotion and lavish materialism than any connection with the community that follows them. Prefontaine wasnt like that. In a sport that endeared itself not with the mainstream, but with those that were never the jocks and prom queens of the high school set, but the little guys, the ones not concerned with popularity contests. He ran because for him, this was the purest battle of wills. You win but running hard, by never giving up and by going far past what you had once thought were your limits.
Its clear then, when I first thought about running a 4 minute mile, why this was so appealing to me. I had always heard and believed, that whatever your chosen avenue in life was, that youre almost always going to fall short of your potential. Few can take a challenge, whether physical or mental, corporate or community oriented, tedious or adventurous and transform it into a way of life so consuming that you cannot go any further. If you can however, awards await. They may not be of the tangible type like money or property or fame, but they just might be even more valuable. To get all metaphysical on you, life is about realizing your frailties and your capabilities.
The former is often difficult. When you grow up, you dream big. Its not inconceivable you could reach all your goals. For me, I thought why couldnt I be a world famous archeologist (hey, I was growing up on Jurassic Park and Indian Jones) or a soccer phenomenon or president of the United States? Then reality hits. You grow up. And you start looking at things with a hyper critical eye. You realize that there are people smarter, better looking, funnier and more athletic. You realize your time on earth, along with your talents, is finite. Lifes box of chocolates is sometimes laced with cyanide. Recognizing those frailties is eye opening, and when youre not careful you start to think that the list of your frailties is eons longer than that of your capabilities. What setting an audacious goal allowed me to do is dream big again. It allowed me to rethink what was possible.
This brings me to the first trait that many of the best milers have; grit. Angela Duckworth, professor of psychology at Pennsylvania, thinks one of the key ingredients to unlocking talent is a tenacious, dogged perseverance. Its not only genius thats important, but realizing your own genius. Its not enough to be smart or strong or fast or sociable or any of the valued traits idolized in society or sport. Whats important is the cultivation of that innate talent.
One widely cited statistic is that it takes 10,000 hours of determined practice to master most fields (well look at some of the problems with this later). Looking at success from this metric, potential takes years to fulfill. However, its not enough to do something often. Just driving, or writing, or doing math, doesnt make you excellent in any of those things, nor does it necessarily make you much better. Grit means doing those things creatively, with focus and desire and a little bit of passion could only help as well. In academics that might be the difference between a Ph.D and finding the breakthrough in a field. In the mile run it might be the difference between a 4:05 and a 3:59. And for the elite, its the difference between a gold medal and none at all.
What sustained practice does, is make skills habitual. I remember when I first tried to drive a car. It took all my focus to stick to task. Whenever I didnt, I started to drift noticeably to the other side of the road. But quickly, over the next few weeks and months, driving became noticeably easier. I could drive and think about girls with the rock music blaring, while doing complex calculus and chewing on a hot dog (okay, the latter things are false). The same thing holds true in soccer. A move thats great for more advanced players to quickly make a change in direction, is called the Cruyff (made famous by the player of the same name) turn. It involves placing the inside on your foot on the ball and then quickly pulling the ball behind your plant leg. For anyone thats played for years, it becomes second nature. Instead of thinking about the move itself, the move comes easily leaving your mind free to think about who to pass to, or where to place a shot.
The same holds true for running. When I started running after weighing over 220 lbs, it was the first exercise I had gotten in a long time. I was doing 9 minute pace for two miles and it wasnt easy. Then, days went by of pushing myself to run fast, and 9 minute pace became easy. However, continuing to run at or near that pace isnt what grit is about. Grit is about challenging yourself. But after a while, even the idea of challenging oneself becomes habit in and of itself. You do, in fact, realize that your training plan isnt working if youre not gasping for breath and feeling some pain by the end of the workout. You also know youre running at the edge of your capacity, because not only are you gasping for breath unable to speak to anyone else, you cant even think about anything else except for placing one foot past the other, in the hope that your mind can win the battle of will over your body.
Making an action habitual applies to running, but it applies to the rest of life just as easily. This means that, while running is great, but its only beneficial within the context of what you do with the rest of your time. You may habitually run, but if you also eat multiple doughnuts and drink numerous sodas daily, running wont magically make you healthy, just a bit healthier than you would otherwise be. Unfortunately bad habits stick with people. Think of how many people agonize over the amount they drink, or their weight, or the amount of time they procrastinate and youll have a handle on how much peoples actions go against their ideals. Neuroscience is comparatively new, but its emergence has begun to show how little of what we do is affected by conscious choices. Some have termed our affinity for unconscious thoughts and actions the zombie brain. Others have described our penchant for basing our action and even moral choices off of innate emotional preferences, only using logical thought as post hoc rationalization. There is obviously as much of a downside to this, as there is a positive contribution to our lives. The benefit is that our brain is able to efficiently use energy. We are not thrown into an intense energy expenditure every time we cross the road, socialize, or throw a baseball. Even the most cognitively demanding activities can become routine.
The downside is that we fall into habits we know we dont want to dont need. Drink alcohol once, its no big deal. Drink a few times and youre living large. But for the college student who is in tri-weekly beer pong leagues (you know, there probably are such things) drinking becomes normal, and even worse it activates the dopamine neurotransmitters so not only has drinking become normal, its become doubly addictive.
Therefore, its interesting that running itself may produce an addictive experience. Evolutionary theory suggests that traits that improve the ability of a species to live to mating age and to attract a mate will be passed down and become prevalent within a population. Running fast was vital to hunt down animals and possibly even to run those animals to death. The better endurance you have, the more likely you were to survive to be able to reproduce, and in genetic terms thats what real success entails. Our genes have created bodies therefore that need a level of exercise for optimal health. Our local Wal-Mart may mean that our food doesnt require us to be fast, but those genes are still in human populations that did face environmental pressures to be able to run for miles on end. Evolution, in other words, doesnt created perfect specimens for the current environment. The most prevalent genes have been passed down by the fittest people, but the catch is that whats been true for most of human recorded history the human need to run fast for long periods of time isnt true any longer. So for now, and for the next few dozen generations at least, were stuck with need to exercise to stay healthy. The good thing is weve also evolved to like it. Embracing exercise doesnt just produce physical health, its also a boon to psychological well being.
If psychological excellence is a prerequisite for mile success, what differentiates the physical outliers from the norm? First, its actually pretty easy to find out how many people have run under a 4 minute mile. Only 347 Americans have ever done it. Considering the population of the USA is over 300 million, that equates to roughly 1 American 4 minute miler for every 1 million Americans alive today. My initial optimism, you might say, wasnt warranted. If youre less generous, you might say my quest was insane.
　
　
　
　
　
