Watching Their Steps

Finally, the researchers addressed themselves to long-distance runners' efficiency. Frank Shorter seemed to waste little energy, but others of high oxygen efficiency had biomechanical flaws. "In this we haven't been too successful," said Cavanagh. "It may be more appropriate to look to subcellular data for answers."

That brought the question back to Costill and, in effect, to where we began. "Frankly, I'm stumped," he said. "I just can't explain how the finest marathoners can be so incredibly efficient." Clearly the direction research will take is into the inner workings of the muscle cells where mitochondria and enzymes manage the production of energy from fuel and oxygen, but Costill held out no hope for a quick solution. He spoke of painstaking experiments requiring cell-by-cell analysis. "We've got it narrowed, but I don't know if we'll ever explain all the complexities of human muscle adaptation," he said. "It might not be such a wonderful thing if we did. It would certainly disappoint the 99% who would find that no matter how they tried, they could never become champions."

On the evening of our arrival, Bill Morgan, a psychologist from the University of Wisconsin, had circulated personality inventories—lists of questions related to one's levels of guilt, self-confidence and satisfaction. Three years before, through a combination of psychological and physiological data, Morgan and several others had predicted nine of the 10 wrestlers who would make the 1972 Olympic team, so he had our attention. In the hush before we began, steeplechaser Doug Brown whispered, "Who's going to read the questions to Geis?" Paul, giggling, clapped his hands and took on an expression of vacant delight. He had just made a perfect 4.0 for the quarter at Oregon.

The results of the tests actually went some way toward explaining such behavior. "World-class runners have a psychology similar to world-class wrestlers or oarsmen," said Morgan later. "They are all lower than the general population in neuroticism, depression, anxiety. This suggests that one prerequisite for success is a psychological profile characterized by stability, by desirable mental health. Runners are stable to the point of being aloof, even defiant."

In a private interview each runner had with the psychologist, Prefontaine gave Morgan a taste of defiance. Asked for short answers to three simple questions (how he began running, why he continued, what he thought about in races), Prefontaine grew impatient with the seeming shallowness of the interview. Before it concluded he had delivered a spontaneous lecture on what running was for him: "A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways as they're capable of understanding."

Later Morgan speculated that this allowed some insight into why Prefontaine sometimes did not satisfy himself even with a winning, record-breaking race. "He was trying for something that only the other participants might be able to understand." Because Prefontaine was never more articulate on the subject than he was with Morgan, his races must speak for themselves.

Yet there was method behind Morgan's exasperatingly simple questions. In asking what we thought about in a long race (the single question runners hear more than any other), he was looking for something he had noted before, a way of dealing with the prolonged pain of running hard. In Boston he had worked with distinctly nonworld-class marathoners—men slower than 2� hours (the U.S. best is Bill Rodgers' 2:09:55). "I found that these men all used a cognitive strategy to dissociate the pain," said Morgan. "For example, one man will imagine himself building a house—from drafting the plans, pouring the foundation, doing the plumbing, the framing, every shingle. As the race ends, he's admiring the landscaping. Another mentally puts on a stack of Beethoven records and runs the whole way to the changing symphonies. Another, whose father was an engineer, becomes a locomotive up Heartbreak Hill."

Morgan thus came to study the finest marathoners with great expectations. None were fulfilled. "Even when I probed, asking, 'Do you have ways of dealing with the discomfort?' they only said things like, 'If I'm feeling bad, I try to push a little harder because the other guy must be worse off.' Not one world-class runner used a strategy to dissociate or distract himself from the pain."

A related finding was that at 12 mph on the treadmill a control group of good college runners did not read their bodies well. They said they felt less stress than their oxygen consumption and heart rate indicated—until right before they collapsed. By contrast, world-class runners described levels of fatigue that accurately paralleled their physical states.

An explanation for all this, which appeals to runners, is that the imperatives of racing well call for a certain degree of attention to pace, form, tactics, level of fatigue and liquid intake. Anything, including self-deception, that distracts a runner from the task at hand will be a detriment to performance. In its nuances the pain may be saying something that can help win the race. Rather than distract themselves, the best runners learn to listen.