Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

In terms of all-out speed, this guy -- decent in high school and a solid competitor on a regional level since college -- is neither especially fast nor especially slow compared to others in his range in his best events (10 miles and above). To be generous, his fastest all-out 100 meters in his peak distance-running condition of 2004 might have been 13.5 seconds, give or take a tenth or two. Using Gibbens' model, he should be able to run 5K at a pace of (13.5/0.71) = 19.0 seconds per 100 meters, or 15:50. This is slow by almost a minute. His predicted 10-mile, half-marathon, and marathon times of 54:52, 1:13:02, and 2:35:40 are off by 3:20, 4:33, and 11:23 respectively (and would be off by more were the longer events contested on a track, as are the sprints).

We can go the other way too. My 10-mile, half-marathon, and marathon bests predict 400-meter times in the 52-second range, which is absurd. Watching him sprint is like watching a duck with its ass set on fire, only less elegant and noisy.

Now let's look at some real runners. To cut to the chase, Gibbens' chart predicts that any male who can run the 100 in 10.5 seconds (a top-notch but not unusual high-school time) or faster could shatter all existing world worlds at the distance events. Perhaps Gibbens would pull out his "exceptions" card when looking at such athletes, but even if we move the upper bound to 11.0 seconds, we find that these guys should be able to break 27:00 for 10K, which no man on earth did until about 15 years ago.

On the other hand, Pete Pfitzinger, my own coach and a two-time Olympian with a personal marathon best of 2:10:43, never ran faster than 55.5 seconds for 400 meters, meaning that he's no faster all-out than the first runner in this series of examples. Alberto Salazar was reportedly no faster but once held American records in the 10K and the marathon. And given the number of sub-10.00 100-meter performances out there, someone should have brought the marathon world record (2:04:55, Paul Tergat) well under two hours by now.

I could go on all day, but the point is already clear -- the conclusion of Gibbens' entire second section, Other physiological systems influence how hard your muscles can work, is patently false. He states:

"The prediction table is telling us what our potential is in the marathon with proper training. Without the proper training our physiological systems and factors won't be fully conditioned and prepared to work at the level required to run a marathon in 3 hours, nor will our muscles be conditioned to perform optimally and, therefore, our performance will be less than predicted.

"The good news is that proper training can mostly remove these physiological limitations so that you are able to tap into the full potential of your muscles."

Inother words, he asserts that the best distance runners in the world are badly undertrained, given that their times don't conform to his chart.

Now, if you were to assess a sample of "average" runners, you probably would see a pretty close correlation between sprint times and long-distance times. But the fact of the matter is that most people who run, and run road races, just don't train very hard. It's a hobby for most, and understandably people aren't apt to start running 10 or 15 miles a day when they have full-time jobs, families, and little hope in any case of making it to even the top local level. But bearing in mind that Gibbens purports to maintain a site that's all about maximizing performance, we need to look strictly at physiological factors, not psychosocial ones.

There are training implications to be observed here. If I'm advising an aspiring marathoner known to be heavy in the fast-twitch area, he or she is unlikely to respond as well to an overabundance of "lactate-threshold" training (basically, 10K to half-marathon race-pace training) as would someone more naturally inclined to distance running. This is because the fast-twitch fibers are best prepared to participate in long-distance events by depleting them of glycogen at a modest pace and forcing them to adapt to oxidative metabolism as best they can. That way, late in a marathon, when their more modest complement of Type I fibers are more or less exhausted, their bread-and-butter Type I fibers can "kick in" and help out. They can handle a heavier burden of faster "interval"-style training than can true distance types; in a nutshell, it's a matter of training to personal strengths while accommodating genetic shortcomings in a way that suits the runner's chosen (longer) distance.

Before moving to the final part of Gibbens' wayward essay, understand that he's completely out to lunch in decreeing that performance limitations are intrinsic to muscle anyway. One can state that the muscles ultimately move the limbs and that their failure therefore spells performance failure, but this is akin to saying that it's the wheels and axle and not the engine that really determine the power and speed of an automobile. Unless the heart is trained to pump a maximal amount of blood (and hence oxygen) to the working muscles, it doesn't matter how powerful, by any measure, those muscles are. And this kind of adaptation is gained by doing exactly what Gibbens rails against at every opportunity: logging a lot of mileage, a surprising fraction of it at a very comfortable pace.

That hummingbird I mentioned earlier? Its maximum heart rate is around 1,260 beats a minute, over six times that of a normal human being.

Finally, Gibbens goes on to discuss a favorite concept of his, the "Central Governor" model of exercise limitation originally introduced by Tim Noakes. Noakes is a South African physician whose tome The Lore of Running is a fantastic resource. He is also regarded with more than a shade of skepticism by other learned runners, which doesn't categorically make his farther-reaching ideas wrong, but explains Gibbens' affinity for his yen for his more unworkable notions.

The central governor idea implies that when people get really tired but continue to push, their muscles or other organs don't max out, their subconscious mind puts a clamp on the whole circus in order to prevent tissue damage. In other words, he says, the brain doesn't merely survey the wreckage but attempts to forestall it.

Here we see why Gibbens introduced this outburst by dismissing the significance of "research study dissections" and "in-depth discussion of intricate physiological factors" and elected instead to "explain how it works in simple, straightforward language": He doesn't have any data for his central governor. Noakes has published a few papers dealing with the model (here's one), but not only has it not been applied to runners in the real world, it's hard to envision how this would even be possible in the first place or what the utility would be. This, for now, like the endurance world's less baroque, less dizzying version of string theory.

I shouldn't need to reproduce Gibbens' words here to convince anyone of this: The central governor, whatever its real or imagined role on race day, is a meaningless concept in the context of training to maximally improve individual performance. Even if it were true that a "central governor" is responsible for anticipating incipient fatigue and, at critical workloads, putting the brakes on the muscles, heart and lungs, it wouldn't matter, because with improvements gained in training, this governor would simply recalibrate itself to a higher level. It's an anti-Occam's razor construct to the extreme.

Not only that, but the governor premise is, in key and fundamental ways, not borne out by laboratory and real-life experience. The central governor would posit a fall in heart rate, decreased glucose release, decreased ventilation, and other physiological parameters in extremis -- otherwise there would be no way to detect such a governor. Even if these things happened, it would have to be determined that cortical rather than local mediating factors were responsible. Also, there are numerous instances of top athletes running themselves more or less into the ground. The central governor appears to be a rather slipshod job of protecting us, given the relatively small number of "false alarms" in the form of race DNFs ("did not finish") and the notable number of people who wind up on the side of the road in medical tents owing to dehydration, hyperthermia, glycogen depletion, and other derangements. When you don't have any fuel left to burn or sufficient blood to pump throughout your vascular tree, it doesn't matter what is allegedly going on upstairs; your performance goes friggo-bazoo.

If Gibbens were merely saying that the brain plays a role in recognizing "red-lining" and helping set a proper pace given the race length, weather conditions, course difficulty, and so on, it would be different (and not at all new). Of course the brain (including the conscious mind) determines a runner's behavior; we're not just creatures who run pell-mell as hard as we can until we drop, unless we're running from something deadly, like a tiger or a Power Running article. But this, of course, isn't what Gibbens is saying at all.

All a central governor posits, then, is that the human body cannot exceed its limits, which gloriously trivial. One might propose any number of other mechanisms responsible for shutting down in extremis: the length of one's fingernails on race morning, the number of Harry Potter books read in the past three months, the whims of a baleful three-headed god, or the central governor's subversive lieutenant governor and his peripheral mistress, shacking up in the hyoid bone. The fact remains that reaching that breaking point is strictly a function of the physical capacity of the runner in question, a capacity determined not by a governor but merely observed by it at all meaningful points.

Finally, if a central governor limits performance, what are the implications? Find a way to override it to make endurance events dangerous by playing Tim Allen and, in effect, putting a jet engine in a dishwasher?

What can be said about this model for certain is that whatever its representation, its polar opposite exists in the head of Richard Gibbens when it comes to writing about distance running. The man takes the outer limits of sensible speculation and discourse and takes care not to remain within in them, but to forever contemplate beyond their boundaries.