Watching Their Steps

In the morning Mike Pollock set about finding exactly how skinny—or "lean," as he graciously put it—the finest runners are. Tenderly, Pollock and his assistants, John Ayers and Ann Ward, measured our narrow, naked dimensions. Then, with chilly calipers, they determined the thickness of our skin and subcutaneous fat at assorted locations. After our lung volumes were measured on the spirometer we were weighed underwater, sitting in a bosun's chair hung from a scale into a murky green tank. We were requested to blow out all the air we could and slowly bend beneath the surface, waiting in warm suspension until we heard a tapping, the signal to arise. Manley came up dripping, to be told he weighed 25 pounds underwater. "That's as dense as we've ever seen a runner," said Ayers.

"That's what my wife has been telling me for years," said Manley.

In a while the word on our percentages of body fat began going around. Previous studies had predicted very fit male runners would be 6 to 10% fat. Yet Manley registered 2.5% and Gary Tuttle 1.3%. "The formulas that are generally used to determine body fat from skinfold measures turn out to overpredict for leaner people," Pollock said. Later he would come up with a new formula based on two simple measurements: thigh skinfold and shoulder width. "This can help the coach," he said. "He can use a fat caliper and assess the progress of his athletes toward the world-class kind of leanness, which we now know is between 2 and 6% fat."

Once measured and weighed, we were wrapped against the wind and chauffeured to Dallas Medical City Hospital, a shining new facility rising above leafless gray oaks, its corridors hung with Navajo rugs and posters from the Whitney Museum. In a room illuminated only by an oscilloscope's eerie orange glow, beneath a confusion of electrode wires and murmuring attendants, lay Jim Johnson, the 1974 AAU steeplechase champion, a pale, still, little form. Above him a massive white-coated technician pressed an instrument resembling an antique telephone receiver to Johnson's chest. This was part of the echocardiograph, a sort of miniature sonar that can plumb the internal workings of the body with sound and, by measuring the echoes, produce pictures of a beating heart, complete to the thickness of valves. The information appeared on the screen as cloudy orange patterns, like geologic strata, each blotch carrying a message for trained eyes. "A wonderful thing," whispered one of the attending doctors. "So much information. And it's absolutely noninvasive."

After a time Johnson was unhooked, sponged, dried and led, blinking, across the hall. I took my place on the bed and a couple of technicians began affixing electrodes—that strangely soothing process of daubing selected spots with a gel that enhances electrical contact, pressing on the little suction-cup electrodes, taping them over and carefully gathering the wires into a cable. For this examination they salved the inside of my calves and attached wires there as well. Lying in the gloom, still having had nothing to eat since the afternoon before, I found myself relaxing, giving myself over to the researchers in a kind of trusting peace. Allowing my head to fall to the left, I saw the scope's running orange ribbons changing in thickness in time with my pulse. I wondered, if I were left to watch these pictures of my heart's performance, whether I could somehow begin to consciously manipulate them, to will the function of my heart. I know one marathoner, John Farrington of Australia, who can depress his heartbeat to as low as 20 per minute. (The average marathoner's pulse at rest is in the 40s. The average person's is 60 to 80.)

Before I could see any change, however, I was unhooked and directed across the hall to another bed, another careful wiring, this time in a lighted room. It was explained by the doctor in charge that this was vectorelectrocardiography, plotting signals from different electrodes against one another on coordinates. The end product is a piece of graph paper with a loop on it. The experience was that of lying quietly while the doctor, dressed in a hospital gown, incanted over the little computer that did all the work. "I love this machine," he said, hugging himself. "I simply love it." He did a little dance.

Later we had still more electrocardiograms taken while running on a treadmill. When the results were in, it was found that 10 of the 20 runners showed abnormal or equivocal EKG findings either at rest or after stress. "I'm not sure what they mean," said Dr. Larry Gibbons of the Aerobics Center clinic. "Some of the resting abnormalities would be worthy of concern and a follow-up if one of you just walked into a doctor's office for a checkup without explaining that you're a world-class runner. Once you told him that, he'd probably realize that the voltage evidence of hypertrophy would be normal, not the unbalanced hypertrophy of a sick heart. But most intriguing are the five men who showed abnormalities while running hard. We really didn't expect to see that."

Said Dr. Kenneth Cooper of aerobics fame, "This will be a classic study because we can now say these irregularities are a normal world-class-athlete phenomenon."

(It would be nice if the word got around. All runners have heard of cases where fit athletes have been hospitalized or ordered to quit because of an anomaly on an EKG. Kerry O'Brien of Australia, a former world-record holder in the steeplechase, was told by Swedish cardiologists that he had an inverted T-wave and should discontinue running. Later he found he had had the same condition since 1968 and that it had not affected him in his races.)

Then it was time for our first real effort: the test for maximal oxygen consumption, conducted on Mike Pollock's treadmill. In this test one is fitted with a helmet, which holds a mouthpiece securely against teeth and gums. A flexible tube carries breath to a row of gas bags ranged along one side, below banks of instruments. The treadmill is situated on a platform, so high that the runner's head would strike the ceiling were it not for a small recess directly above. The unfamiliar weight of the helmet and the enclosed surroundings produce a claustrophobic sensation. Once accustomed to the machine, we did a submaximal run—seven minutes at 10 mph, then accelerating to 12 mph for another five minutes—while the instruments recorded our oxygen uptake, our heart rate and EKG.