If Tim Noakes "Central Governor" Model is Correct AND there is NO Lactate Threshold, HOW should this effect my train

Timothy Noakes wrote:

But what about the opposite example: What of the athlete who is informed that he has not finished a race when he thought he had and had already stopped running (as sometimes occurs in a 10 000m race when the laps are incorrectly counted)? Why is it so difficult to get going again? Perhaps because the regulator had thought that the exercise had already ended and that the body was now being switched into recovery mode?

Great thread!

In response to your question I have had the "pleasure" of experiencing just that: I completed 24 laps in a 10K track race, did my end-spurt and then I was told I had one more lap to go. I could barely walk after completing the last lap let alone run 400 meters. This was the only time in my (rather short) athletic career that I DNF a race.

I have to say that my own personal experience totally agrees with your findings Tim (Dr Noakes). Maybe I am prejudiced because I own a copy of The Lore of Running, but in my few years as a runner I have discovered a number of occasions that your CG theory fit my real-life experience. For example in my PR 10K race (road) a few months after the aforementioned DNF, I run as hard as I could without consulting my watch, and although I must say I had the benefit of knowing the course elevation profile well (5K uphill up to the turnaround point followed by 5K downhill) , I ran in an evenly paced effort which resulted in a negative split a little better than 2.5 minutes for the second half.

P.S. I am a slow runner, without years of experience, I coach myself, and I lack formal training in Exercise Physiology, Biology etc.

This is not fair...

Read HRE and there you have the answer. Lorraine, Dixon. Quax, Walker, Halberg, Magee...You can’t relate runners and performances from different periods.

Does Dixon he ever win the olympics ? Does Lorraine in the olympics or WR? Does Quax ever win the olympics and that despite he did the 5000m WR wasn´t he smashed by his opponents mots of the occasions ? Of course he did the 5000m WR record because he trains by good the Lydiard method, but all those that did the same 5000m WR before and after Dick they have inferior training methods than Dick. Does Dixon did a WR ever? Does Lorraine ?

The only think you are allow to compare is the poor Bannister with the later Snell.

For the rest, you can post hundreds of Lydiard performances and results that wouldn´t not change the inconsistency of your arguments.

As you wish. If you feel comfort with post offense then what i may reply ? Name you an idiot moron also indeed ? Remember i was the first one to be offended by this type of offenses by Nobbty the Idiot. But I still don´t care. Call me what you want. I will post on the name you prefer.

Dear Eh?

Thanks for your interest and support. The Kenyan study lacks only money, the usual limitation in the exercise sciences. Much is of course made of the fact that there are few other opportunities other than running for Kenyans to make a mark and that it does not take too many US dollars to sustain a comfortable life in rural Kenya.

As you say - success can never be reduced to one variable. In my view, this has been an important weakness of the modern exercise sciences - trying to reduce performance to one biological process or organ.

Here's a question that might help a layman like me better understand the central governor theory. Does the theory explain why running a certain distance in a race seems easier than in a time trial? Adrenaline is the explanation that people often use. But could there be more? Could it be that the brain (i.e., the central governor) reacts to the context the runner is in? In other words, does the central governor take formal competition more seriously than it would a time trial under workout conditions?

"Line of logic" might be a real stretch here.

You had asked on another post if I thought a process like "mind" can become a thing.

There was an anthropologist called Gregory Bateson who spent much of his career looking for the location of "mind."

He concluded that living systems process information in repeated patterns, feedback loops, and that no one part of the system exerts any more control over the system than any other part does. E.g., the fuel injection computer of a car might be seen as the car's "brain" and it makes "decisions about how much gasoline and oxygen to send to the cylinders. But it makes those "decisions" based upon information it receives from other parts of the engine and the environment (rpms, amount of oxygen, air temperature, etc.)

For Bateson, "mind" existed not in one part of the system, say the fuel injection computer, but in the exchange of information among the parts of the system, each contributing to part of the systems behavior but also with its range of behavior and commnication dependent upon the rest of the system.

If you apply Bateson's ideas to running performance you would never explain an athlete's performace solely in terms of that athlete's physique or even of his "mind." All would be interdependent, but that mind would be part of the athelete's interactions with his environment and others who are part of that environment. Somewhere in all of this there will be a function that defines for that athlete what's possible and what isn't, what's not hard enough, what's properly hard,and what's hard enough to be dangerous. There may be a part of the individual brain that is primarily involved with processing that sort of information but that brain part can only process the information available to it. That makes me a "yes and no" guy on the CG theory. I don't believe that finding the area of the individual brain where this might happen will allow us to manipulate the brain in a predictable way that will imporve performance because we would not be dealing with the external and interactional aspects of the mind and its influence on performance.

Does any of this ever become a thing? Well, a group is a thing. An environment is a thing. an area of the brain is a thing. But I think that we tend to limit our understanding in many cases by focusing too much on things and not enough on processes.

Living in the Past wrote:

As for Kardong, he was an outstanding runner at Stanford. Do you recall that photo of him and Arvid Kretz wearing war paint and finishing first and second in a two mile dual meet race against California? Kardong is leaping into the air with his arms spread eagled. I think he ran 8:47. So getting down to 13:00 for three miles wasn't a huge leap (no pun). He had the talent.

I do. I probably still have it somewhere. That was in the days when Stanford's nickname was The Indians. Wonder how those guys would dress up today now that they're The Cardinal?

The Kenyans believe that any Kalenjin can run (very well). But they also believe that ultimately it is their ability to train harder than any others that explains their success. Many of the coaches that I spoke to were suspicious of the "genetic" explanation. But then their opinion cannot be considered as totally objective.

The problem with the topic of genetics and sporting ability is that in many countries it is not possible to hold a dignified and objective discussion on this topic without being labelled "racist" as in: "If you are looking for racial differences, that means you believe that different races exist". It seems that the concept of distinct races, at least in the way this concept is simplistically understood - (Obama is black; Clinton is white) will be disproven by the next generation of genetic studies of different populations. So in this sense this criticism has very real merit.

The frosty reception given to Jon Entine's book "Taboo: Why black athletes dominate sport and why we're afraid to talk about it" is a measure of the depth of the emotion that this topic engenders.

The reality is that not all the ethnic groups in Kenya contribute equally to Kenya's running success and that the groups who are the most successful are located in a fairly localized area in the North West part of the country (as everyone knows). Thus it is best in my view to look for a localized geographical explanation (acting probably over centuries) for the particular success of the Kalenjin and not to try to explain it as "racial" characteristic shared by all "black" Kenyans.

The most remarkable observation I made when touring the Nandi Hills (the Nandi have been the most successful runners of all the Kenyan "tribes") is that everyone seems to have a similar body type - lean (ectomorphic) with long thin legs. I saw no one who was either more muscular or "fat" as one would see when touring Europe or North America. Since this body habitus is ideal for running it is perhaps understandable that there would be rather more runners amongst the Kalenjin than amongst other population groups.

A final point: The concept that only East Africans and not Europeans can run long distances, is false. The Ethiopians are Europeans who returned to Africa some time in the more recent past. Thus the great modern Ethiopian runners of today are European by origin, not African. This has been shown by the genetics research group at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

That's a very nicely put analogy HRE. It also fits with many other models in physiology that ultimately lead to the realization that the integrated system is only as strong as the weakest component. As I've stated several times, I don't think many will argue that there is homeostatic control, and pressure by the integrated system to attempt to maintain homeostasis during exercise. What that pressure is, is it the CGM, or something else? Open to debate. Your point about focusing on the "things" and not the process gets back to Noakes' point earlier in the thread where he jumped in and appeared to be chastizing those of who use physiological parameters (e.g. LT, VO2max) to put training in context. I will use your analogy to argue for my position.

Say you buy a car and you would like to improve the cars performance so you buy a bigger engine and drop it in. Well, the bigger engine is now limited by the fuel injector, so, until you put in the new fuel injector the car won't go any faster. Once you put in a new fuel injector you realize the handling is poor and you can go fast in a straight line but need better suspension... etc etc etc... By knowing the "things" that contribute to the integrated system (e.g. engine, fuel injector, suspension) one can more effectively build a faster car. Of course the "things" here are analogous to the "things" in performance such as LT/MLSS, VO2max, economy etc. Maybe more importantly though is this. Pretty much anyone can build that faster car from a slower one if the original car wasn't very fast. By that I mean, in running, training in general will make anyone faster, but how do you fine tune it to optimize performance? Or how do you diagnose a problem when the car isn't going very fast? Why looking at the individual "things" to see if one of them is broken or not at the level of the other "things".

So, my point is, as I've stated before, the science of performance can serve as a tool to help guide the building of the faster car, or diagnosing the problem, but there's no discounting the fact that the driver needs to practice driving the car fast as well. In this analogy, the driver is the ultimate "mind" as he cannot go fast without a fast car, but if the driver is not fast, the best car in the world will not win any races either. Integration, integration, integration,... but understand the "things".

Steve

Thanks Pete. I appreciate your advice. Recall that I come from a culture where it is rude to be rude. Of course this has its drawbacks.

It is more the way you are behaving i guess. Moron is as moron does and all that.

Tim,

You still haven't addressed my questions from Page 45. I think it was a very clear point so I will paste it again below. Did you miss it and my reminder or is there a reason you have not addressed it? Thanks.

Going back to your post regarding what it would take to prove the CGM and move it beyond theory, I think that is a decent list.

A few other questions. You earlier stated that you do not believe it is important whether it is conscious or unconscious that controls exercise limits. Yet you now focus on the CGM mainly as subconscious, it appears. Which is it? The fact that consciousness can impact how hard we work is blindingly obvious and I want to believe you're better than to think even Hill really thought that our consciousness did not regulate how hard we run; we don't sprint at top speed until we fall over regardless of the distance to be run, which is the logical extension of that model.

Second, as you stated with the quote from Hawking, a theory that it inconsistent with observation should be abandoned. Correct me if I am interpreting wrong, but I recall that the theory says that the unconscious Governor limits us to keep us from over-exerting and exceeding our limits, leading to heart damage. If this is true, how do you incorporate training? There are two possibilities: 1) you train your body to ignore or "reset" the Governor, thereby allowing you to work harder. The logical extension of this is that you exceed your limits and we'd see elite athletes dying during races at increasingly high numbers the faster we look. 2) Training alters the body and it's ability to produce energy in such a way that we can work harder without hitting the point where the CG slows us down.

I don't see how #1 can be the case, a CG that can be reset to dangerous levels seems maladaptive to me, and we'd see evidence that we are over-exerting and people would be injuring/killing themselves during races.

#2 can be discussed. It does not exclude the fact that there could be a subconscious controller. However, it does indicate that, for all practical purposes, knowing whether there is one is useless and the CG would NOT be the determiner of athletic performance. It would simply be the last link in the process. The actual bottleneck would be earlier in the process, somewhere buried in all of the factors including aerobic capacity etc etc that are classically considered to be the limiters of performance. The CG would sit there unchanged and untrainable.

While I still do not believe there is any real evidence for the CG as you describe it, as I said #2 above does not exclude it from existing but only indicates that from a training perspective it is completely useless. However, it is important to note that most of your "evidence" for the existence of the CG relies on trying to say that all the other classical performance limitors we talk about are incorrect or unimportant.

In summary, the Hill model is fatally flawed if it makes no allowance for conscious thought to influence performance. Likewise, the CG model is fatally flawed if A) you try to say that training resets it, or B) supporting it relies on saying all the classical limiters are wrong or not important (without them, training only affects the CG and we are back to case #1 above)

Please discuss.

Just a bit off topic and totally irrelevant, but is it possible to drive from South Africa to Kenya and/or Ethipoia or do you have to fly? And if it's possible to drive do many people do it?

A little closer to the topic and into the touchy area of race, I've noticed that in the US whites tend to move a way froma sport when blacks take to it seemingly because of a belief that they (whites) are "fast" enough to be competitive. This seems to spill over into the rest of the world as well.

What's happened in distance running in the last twenty five years, i.e., white athletes drifting away or settling for less than championships, happened in sprinting during the 60s and 70s. You have three white Olympic 100 meter champions between 1960 and 1972 (ok, Borzov might have gotten a tad lucky but he was also very fast.) Now they're gone.

It may be that they're gone because black sprinters are too fast for them. But there were many black sprinters in the sport prior to 1960 and white sprinters were able to be competitive. I know of cases where talented young white kids have been directed away from playing basketball by parents who believe their kid has no long term future in the game because whites can't play the game as well as blacks.

The point has been made many times that the US, with a much larger population than Kenya's, must have more athletes with "genetic" abilities for running comparable to the Kenyans but obviously those people haven't been getting into the sport recently or haven't pursued it in the same way.

Should say "they (whites0 AREN'T fast enough"

Should say "they (whites) AREN'T fast enough"

I don't know whether Lydiard has the 'best' system for running training or not. He does have an excellent resume though. What he has also given me are a number of basic concepts that appear to be golden rules so to speak. Some come directly from his words like no anaerobic training whilst the base building is occurring to examples from his life like taking a small number of kids from the local area in a small country to such success. It is this final point that i believe strongly as i go around coaching. It seems that there is talent everywhere just crying out for the right sort of advice. Genetics or not there are strong distance running cultures present in New Zealand and Australia and a lot of talent seems to appear every year.

Back to Arthur himself, it seems pretty clear the influence this man had through his life as a running coach. One thing he achieved was to highlight a number of the fundamental principles that underlie the coaching process. Others have also identified one or the other of these principles over time to their own success and help to support the presence of this or that principle. Whether one wants to follow Lydiard as is or not, we can't afford to ignore these fundamentals in our own training process.

I was coached by a Ukrainian for almost my whole time as a senior athlete. It was Soviet periodisation all the way. The macro, micro and meso cycles are in my blood and i know how to utilise them with some subtlty. For me to agree with what Lydiard was saying took some time. I was resistant because i knew another way too well. It was probably the naturalism in what he did that kept me intrigued enough to finally start to have some ideas on where he was coming from. Funnily enough now that i have some ideas about his way i can see how the basic concept of periodisation (breaking a time frame up into periods) is threaded throughout his entire program. He has 4 phases (mesocycles) for starters. He has a mircocycle that beings or ends with the long run on Sunday. I'm not sure he has a macrocycle but i was surprised to find in Jim Ryun's training schedule leading up to his WR's in the 880y and mile that there is almost definitely a 3 week macro cycle occurring. Also the Ryun hill schedule is eerily Lydiard like. Conincidence or information transfer? I also see quite a bit of Lydiard in Peter Coe's approach but that would be far too contentious surely.

cheers

Sim

Thanks Spaniel. I will do my best.

My focus has been to get the brain into the discussion. I am not a neurophysiologist and know desperately little about the brain and how it works. In the laboratory I believe we study subconscious controls when we have subjects do activities with which they are unaccustomed (exercising at a fixed rating of perceived exertion) and we expose them to changes in the oxygen content of the inspired air which they have usually not ever experienced before. I would not understand how under these conditions, the changes that occur in their exercise performance are due to conscious controls. But again I may be wrong. Similarly when they exercise in the heat or the cold, we are able to explain (ie predict) why they change their exercise performance on the basis of biological signals that I don't think are being perceived at a conscious level by the subjects. I do not know that we consciously know how quickly our bodies are heating up - this is the biological signal to which the brain is responding under these conditions.

The point is that we study pacing strategies in response to some environmental pertubation; we don't study pacing strategies in athletes in competition in which there is no pertubation. So anything we say about how athletes pace themselves in competition is purely a theory based on the model of subconscious control we believe we have identified in laboratory studies. But it has to be fairly obvious that conscious controls also exist. We can clearly override the CG - I did it many times in my running career - but I also learned, especially in the 56mile Comrades marathon, that if you went too fast early on in the race, sooner or later the "bear" would jump on my back and I would "hit the wall" and whatever I might consciously wish to happen would simply not happen, however hard I willed it to happen, or prayed for assistance, or whatever. At the time I believed that this "fatigue" was due to changes in my muscles - "peripheral fatigue". Now on the basis of what we have found - in particular the finding that under these conditions we are activating less than perhaps 40% of the fibers in our active muscles - it seemed more likely that our effort was being regulated centrally in the brain. Because if it were not, the brain would logically recruit progressively more muscle fibers until all were active at which time and only then would we be exhausted.

After I had learned how to train for that race, I also had to learn how to run the race. I learned that the key was to study the final 25km of the course and then for the last month or so before the race, to imagine myself running over the course, memorizing each hill and its exact distance. Only when I did that was I able to speed up at the end and run the last 2 miles faster than any other section of the race. This endspurt taught me that the cause of my fatigue could not have been "peripheral fatigue" since it was reversible at least for a short time. And if exercise was regulated only by "peripheral fatigue" why was it necessary also to prepare my brain for the last month (at least)?

During those runs I also learned that it requires all your conscious effort just to MAINTAIN your pace; it was quite impossible to will yourself to speed up, except in the last mile or so.

Hill never discussed the role of the brain in determining exercise performance. I have personal copies of all his books and I can find no such reference. But he did write that in skilled activities the brain co-ordinates and determines the response. Why he did not discuss conscious controls during exercise I have no idea. Perhaps he did not think the brain was important since in his view exercise was regulated in the periphery. But if he had included an opinion that the brain played a role, exercise physiology would have been different in the past 90 years and this blog would probably never have happened.

With regard to your 2 propositions, proposition 2 seems more probable. You train your body to be able to maintain homeostasis at a higher rate of energy expenditure (oxygen consumption). This allows you to run faster without endangering homeostasis. But there has to be more to it than that since it seems that the governor is conservative and it does insure that there is quite a large reserve. I conclude this on the basis that athletes can change their performance quite suddenly (i) without dramatically increasing or altering their training if they believe what their coach tells them - the performance of John Landy discussed earlier is a case in point. Or (ii) by adding a few sessions of speed training to their normal aerobic, base training. So you might be able suddenly to teach the governor to be less conservative (at least for a period although this too will be reversible). I also think that in disease states, the governor suddenly becomes even more conservative.

I have additional evidence for these statement that I will share in due course if we are able to get it published.

Thank you for agreeing that the Hill model is fatally flawed since it absolutely does not allow for the brain to influence the exercise performance.

In contrast we have provided irrefutable evidence that exercise performance is regulated by a complex intelligent system and we have published that work in a number of peer-reviewed journals. The CG does not exist purely on the basis that the Hill model is "fatally flawed" and needs to be replaced. We have real data that presently support the predictions of the model.

The key difference in your runs was that your perception of effort was so much less in the training run in which you felt so good. I will discuss the issue of the perception of effort in due course and how we believe it regulates the exercise performance.

Steve, my experience was totally relevant to this discussion. The fact is, I did an awesome training run which was not planned, where I had no preset plan it just happened. I was totally "in the zone" as they say, absoulutely flying along, yet hardly breathing. Yes, this doesn't completely relate to the oxygen cost but my ease of breathing at an incrdible pace was amazing to me.

THIS IS SUPER CONTRACTILITY.

My muscles found an extra gear, I had no fear and no significant fatigue. I was in an extraordinary state of concsiousness in which I was totally confident about my true running talent, do you know what I mean by that Steve? I'm talking about the awesome runner within us all that was released from his inhibtions for two glorious miles of freedom. What I must now strive to do is to re-create that feeling in races, because I know it is not a delusion it is real. Please don't try to belittle my efforts or my enthusiasm to encourage this debate Steve, you don't know me so please don't judge me.

Dear Steve,

First I cant make it to the ACSM so I will not be able to listen to your presentations. I would really appreciate meeting you in the flesh.

Second, I have invested much in the CG model and yes we are thinking along the lines you have suggested. I just wanted someone to say - "Yes if you do this and if you find this, yes then we will begin to give the theory more credence".

So let us see what is the outcome of those studies.