STATE OF PLAY
Tim on the power of smiling
“With a beaming smile, Kipchoge declared his 59:19min half-marathon ‘a 60% effort’”
Eliud Kipchoge completed a half-marathon on the Monza race track in Italy in 59:19mins, and sporting a beaming smile declared it a “60% effort”. Who was he trying to kid? Everybody. But mainly himself, because cultivating a positive mindset was going to pay dividends in the greater test to come.
This trial run was in the build-up to last year’s attempt by Nike to find a human capable of dipping below the magical 2hr mark for a marathon. The Kenyan would eventually miss the mark by a mere 26secs.
The experiment is the oft-visited topic of scientist Alex Hutchinson’s excellent book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. The writer attributes endurance feats to a mix of genetics, training and mindset, and sets out to explore the role of each.
Remarkable tales of endurance limits being smashed by unfathomable will abound, but research does bear out that one exceptionally simple technique – that seems part of Kipchoge’s natural disposition – tends to boost human performance.
In one cited experiment, Stephen Cheung, a physiologist at Brock University in Canada, tested a group of 18 trained cyclists. Half the subjects received a fortnight of ‘self-talk’ motivation to suppress negativity and subsequently improved their ability to tolerate higher core body temps.
In another, Samuele Marcora, a research professor at the University of Kent, paid 13 volunteers to pedal to exhaustion on static bikes while a screen flashed images of happy or sad faces in imperceptible 16-millisecond bursts. Those shown happy faces rode, on average, 3mins longer. So, what if we swap the subliminal smiling faces in the lab with the looming sight of a competitor on the course?
“Passing people gave me positive reinforcement to keep pushing even when my body was starting to fail,” Scotland’s David McNamee says of the marathon in last year’s Ironman Worlds in Hawaii. “Towards the end of the race, you’re at your limits and any positive mental boost helps ease the pain slightly.
“Passing people also gives you a distraction. Instead of focusing on how tired you are and the distance left, your mind switches to only caring about overtaking.” McNamee had reached T2 in 14th place and ran himself up to third in the finestever performance by a male British Ironman in Hawaii.
Four-time Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington is synonymous with smiling, but surely a pre-race crash ahead of her final contest in 2011 would put paid to the renowned chipper demeanour? “There was a definite case of faking it that day,” she admits. “I was in pain but needed to mask it as it does give me a boost to smile and conveys the impression of not hurting to my competitors. I think it was a powerful weapon in my armoury.” Given Wellington was never beaten at Ironman, it would be hard to disagree.