The mind’s the limit, says Noakes

Heretics rarely enjoy the satisfaction of seeing their critics convinced, and maverick sports scientist Professor Tim Noakes is visibly pleased at the overdue attention given his findings on the dangers of over-hydration in long-distance athletic events.

‘Science is such a peculiar clique,” he says, indulging in a brief moment of introspection. ‘First they say your idea is wrong. Then they say it’s correct but irrelevant. And then they say they taught it all along.”

But the University of Cape Town academic who literally wrote the book on long-distance running (his Lore of Running continues to be South Africa’s top-selling sports book) is not resting on his laurels; and the scientific establishment, including the British Medical Journal that finally gave Noakes’s hydration research an icy nod, is about to be confronted with one of the most radical challenges to accepted dogma to emerge in almost a century.

Along with colleagues Professors Vicki Lambert and Zig Gibson, he has developed what he calls the Central Governor Model, a representation of athletic exertion that, in a few broad strokes, endorses the gut feel of anyone who has ever cursed a personal trainer through gritted teeth.

In 1907, Noakes explains, a pair of Cambridge scientists first made a link, in retrospect a tenuous one, between concentrations of lactic acid in the body and muscle fatigue.  Then in 1923 Nobel laureate AV Hill proposed that it was oxygen that drove athletic performance.

No more dignified than his Cambridge predecessors who had tormented frogs’ legs, Hill ran about at various speeds with a bag on his back in which he collected his exhalations. Nevertheless his research was hailed as decisive, and today has become lore: when you run out of oxygen, lactic acid builds up, your muscles are in effect poisoned, and you stop. End of story. Until now.

A review of Hill’s data in 1987 and a suspicion that he had been getting all the oxygen he needed triggered alarms with Noakes, but there was still something missing, and too many questions that couldn’t be answered by Hill’s model.

‘People with heart disease exercise, but most don’t get ill,” says Noakes. ‘Likewise many people climb mountains and, while some die, the reality is that the great majority survive. The body seems to be very well-regulated on the whole, and it was this that led me to believe that there was something else controlling the entire system, something that prevents us from getting into trouble.”

The answer, says Noakes, had been lying buried in Hill’s writing all along.

‘The general idea was right, just the model was wrong.”

Hill had referred to a ‘governor”, in his opinion the heart, which regulated exertion by the muscles to suit its own capacity.

‘But the way to regulate the work of the heart is to regulate the work of the muscles. If you cut down the work the muscles are doing, you’ll spare the heart. And you do that from the brain.”

Noakes describes the central governor as a subconscious safety-catch, a regulator that prevents us from wrecking our bodies.

‘The best performance-enhancing drugs in the world are amphetamines because they reduce or remove your sensations of fatigue,” he explains. ‘According to our new model, fatigue is merely a sensation designed to slow you down, to keep you safe. Without that sensation, you can die during exercise.”

He is quick to point out that he is no psychologist, but his model seems to span what has been the traditional gap between physiology and the human mind. In enlisting the subconscious mind to regulate the body, he enters waters not regularly charted by conventional Western science.

‘This subconscious regulator allows you to perform only to the level you believe is possible. Once the physical discomfort becomes too great, you stop believing that it’s worthwhile to continue. I can’t speculate on how you influence a subconscious belief, but I suspect that is where training will play a vital role.”

Which raises intriguing ethical questions about sports training: if changing beliefs is pivotal, surely one must start young, and in that case, how young is too young to be focusing on that Olympic medal? Is a future of Soviet-style sports academies for 10-year-old automatons possible?

But a good scientist will not be sidetracked by bad science fiction.

‘The implications of this research are varied, but we can only deal with observations,” says Noakes, and clearly his model has meshed snugly with a host of observation from marathon runners pacing themselves (as he explains, they know they still have to walk to the podium and go to work the next day!) to anecdotal cases of distressed mothers lifting cars off toddlers.

How the scientific establishment reacts to the debunking of Hill and the central governor model remains to be seen. But Noakes is an experienced campaigner, and knows better than most how to pace a long race.