Not all new ideas are useful, however. About 20 years ago, one long jumper decided he could jump farther if, instead of leaping in the
conventional way, he did a somersault in midair. As soon as other broad jumpers saw him do it, they all tried it. But in the end, it didn`t improve the length of the jump, so everybody stopped doing it.
According to Frederick, new training techniques have made a substantial contribution to improved times and distances. ”The use of weight training, for example, in sprinting is a relatively new development since the late 1960s,” he says. ”Before then, people were pretty much raw talent, like Bob Hayes. Today, with people using weight training, their strength has gone up with a commensurate drop in the average winning time of about a half a second, which is, relatively speaking, precipitous, when you look at how slow the record in the 100 meters historically drops.”
For some sprinters, distance running has been the key. Florence Griffith- Joyner, the women`s world recordholder in the 100 and 200 meters, including a stunning showing at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, has run up to eight miles on an indoor treadmill in preparation for her races. Now, so enamored has she become of long-distance running that she has threatened to win a marathon, a 26-mile distance she has never attempted, by 1996.
Her techniques must work. Her best times in the 100 and 200 meters, 10.49 and 21.34 seconds respectively, were so much faster than the old world records, not to mention her previous bests, that they prompted accusations of steroid use. Griffith-Joyner, however, passed seven drug tests in 1988, setting rumors more or less to rest.
It is possibly Griffith-Joyner`s own fault for spurring rumors. Her own flashiness seems to invite criticism. On the other hand, her quieter, more conventional sister-in-law, hurdler and long jumper Jackie Joyner-Kersee, owner of two Olympic gold medals and a world record in the heptathlon, seems to attract far less attention.
Another believer in distance training is up and coming swimmer Janet Evans, 1990`s winner of the Sullivan Award for top United States amateur athlete. Evans, who has set three world records in the 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter freestyles, works out at distances exceeding a mile before settling in for speed work. Her success is attested to by German swimmer Heike Friedrich, who said after an Olympic race, ”Janet Evans is in a different dimension. A swimmer like Janet comes around once every 25 years.”
Edward Frederick believes the great master athletes of the past would outperform most of today`s athletes if they could travel forward in time and take advantage of today`s training techniques and improved equipment, such as shoes. They would also have today`s faster, higher and longer records to compete against.
”The champion runners of long ago, like Paavo Nurmi, would be as outstanding today as they were back then,” he says.
The question of whether there are outside limits on human performance draws considerable controversy among the experts. Frederick, for one, believes that in the distant future, athletic records will continue to improve to standards that today might be considered absurd.
The old carnival trick of a man trying to outrun a horse may not be so ridiculous, Frederick says.
”People have always argued that humans are two-legged and not four-legged and therefore cannot run that fast. But an ostrich has only two legs, and it can run 50 miles an hour. Yeah, there has to be a limit. People aren`t going to run at the speed of light. But I don`t think we know what the limit is yet.
”I believe in my heart of hearts that it`s possible for people to get down below a three-minute mile,” Frederick says. ”You have people running 400-meter laps in 40 seconds or so now, and if you apply that times four, you get 160 seconds, which is under three minutes.
”I don`t know if there`s anybody today who will do that. There is a theoretical limit of 500 or 600 meters at which human beings are capable of running at those levels of intensity. The main reason is that the byproducts of anaerobic metabolism-that is, metabolism without oxygen-build up to a point after 500 meters to where you cannot tolerate it anymore-the muscles start tiring, and you run out of gas.
Could a human actually run as fast as an ostrich? ”Well,” Frederick remarks, ”generally speaking, birds are slower than mammals. That`s why mammals eat birds. Ostrich speeds are a function of where they live-large spaces in Africa where they have to cover great distances-so it may not have to do with pure physiology. I don`t know if their muscles or lungs are different than ours. The point is, there`s no special advantage to having four feet. The pattern of gait is different, but there`s nothing about being four- footed that should make you run faster than a two-footed beast.”
Frederick notes that humans are not particularly well-adapted for running, in that they run flatfooted rather than up on their toes like most running animals. ”So, yes,” he says, ”there are some anatomical
limitations. But they don`t explain the difference between 12 to 15 miles for a marathoner and 50 miles per hour. There may be reasons why we don`t run that fast, but I don`t think they have to do with physiology. In the horse or the ostrich, the psychological factor is minimal. Ostriches are dumb. They don`t know they can`t run that fast. People are always building walls for themselves, but I can`t imagine ostriches spending their time wringing their hands wondering if they can do 48 m.p.h. or 50 m.p.h. They just do whatever it takes.”
Frederick cites other potential feats that sound unimaginable but that he believes are possible. As one example he mentions the 150 m.p.h. pitcher who was the subject of a hoax in Sports Illustrated several years ago. ”It`s certainly possible to throw that fast,” he says. ”You just have to have incredible mechanics and a long arm. You can serve a tennis ball at those speeds because you have the arm extension of the racket.”
Similarly, he says, jumps that are now considered fantastic may yet be attainable. ”People who study locomotion have found that when cats jump, they use only a small percentage of muscle fibers in their legs, around 50 percent. Yet they are fabulous jumpers, even with only half their fibers being recruited. What if you were able to call on 69 percent instead of 50 percent? The result would be phenomenal.”
Hay believes that there are definite limits to human performance but that those limits may be much more dramatic than anyone can imagine. ”In the long jump, where I`m doing quite a bit of research, there are a number of factors involved,” he says. ”A person has to run very fast down the runway, and there is a limit on how fast anyone has ever been able to run, so the limit will at very best be somewhere near that limit. At the takeoff pole position, a person has to jump as high as he or she can without losing velocity, and yet there is a limit on how high we can jump, and high jumpers are flirting with that limit. So someone`s long jump is constrained by running and jumping ability.
”On the other hand,” Hay says, ”if you take the fastest anyone has ever been able to run and the highest anyone has ever leaped, you get a jump that is colossal. It`s way out there, probably 40 to 60 feet. On the other hand, the realistic limit is clearly somewhere back because there are inevitable losses in horizontal velocity while gathering vertical velocity. So I think the limit would probably be around 40 feet by the time you took into account those losses.”
Ryan, on the other hand, believes the limits of performance are not very far off. ”For example,” he says, ”I don`t think anyone will ever run the mile faster than three minutes and 40 seconds. And there are limits on other performances based on physical factors that are not readily subject to change unless you change the rules. Men are pole-vaulting over 19 feet today, some are even working to 20, but they are not going to vault 29 feet. For one thing, there is a limit to what can be done without mechanical assistance. Moreover, how high one can vault on a pole depends on how far you can fall into a soft cushion without injuring yourself.”
But why does he believe no one can run faster than 3 minutes 40 seconds in the mile? ”There are a number of physical factors,” he explains. ”One is the ability of the heart to drive the body over that distance and period of time. Although you can increase your heart rate if you have been training regularly-and if you are under 30 years of age, you can get it all the way to 200 beats per minute-but that doesn`t mean every beat is producing the volume of blood and oxygen to the muscles necessary to keep up the level of performance. So there is a limit imposed by the ability of the body to respond to demands made on it.
”Strength has something to do with it, and strength goes with height. But one of the strongest athletes we ever had was Wilt Chamberlain. If you got him running a mile, in theory, because of his strength and length of stride, he should have been able to run under 4 minutes. But he couldn`t, and the reason was the mechanical advantage he had in length of stride was overweighed by the fact that he ran less efficiently than a runner only 6 feet tall. If you are making a watch, you can`t make it more efficient by making it bigger.”
You can make a tennis player better by making her bigger, however. For years, Martina Navratilova dominated her sport, in part because she is an amazing athlete but also because nature made her taller and longer-limbed than most women. This allowed her to get velocity on her serves and play a powerful serve-and-volley game that overwhelmed women who were more accustomed to a baseline game.
Thomas McMahon believes we will be able to tell when we are reaching the limits of human athletic achievement. ”Right now,” he says, ”we don`t see athletes breaking down in races. People don`t break bones spontaneously when running in a sprint. But horses do. What I`m getting at is that when people start breaking bones in races, then the mechanical limit will be in sight. But we haven`t gotten anywhere close apparently.”
