Where this practice came from
One Second
Movement 7: Ten Seconds · Episode 1 · the first of eight stories
In 1912 an American named Donald Lippincott ran a hundred metres in 10.6 seconds, in a qualifying round at the Stockholm Olympics, and it became the first hundred metres world record the international federation ever ratified.
In 2009 Usain Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin.
That is the whole history in two numbers, and what sits between them is roughly one second.
One second, across nearly a century that included the professionalisation of athletics, the invention of modern coaching, synthetic tracks, purpose-built shoes, sports medicine, biomechanical analysis, nutrition science, global talent identification, enormous prize money, and a certain amount of pharmacology.
All of that bought about one second.
I want to be careful with this observation because it can be pushed in two wrong directions.
The first wrong direction is to treat it as evidence that none of it mattered. That would be silly. A tenth of a second is the difference between a gold medal and being forgotten, and the men who took those tenths off did something extraordinarily difficult. In a sport measured to hundredths, one second across a century is an enormous amount of change.
The second wrong direction is more interesting, and it is where this season is going.
You could look at that one second and conclude that humans are approaching a wall. That would also be too quick. But the shape of the curve is real: the improvements have got smaller and harder, and the reasons are not primarily about motivation or belief.
Which is why I want to draw a line, right at the start, between this season and something I have already written.
There is a famous story about a runner in 1954 and a barrier that turned out to be psychological, and I told it in another season because it is a genuinely good illustration of how a belief can sit in the way of a performance. This is not that story, and I do not want the two confused.
The four-minute mile was a round number that acquired meaning. It was arithmetic dressed up as a physical law, and once someone went through it the wall was revealed to be made of what everyone had believed about it.
The hundred metres is different. There is no round number here doing psychological work. What limits a sprinter is not a belief about what is possible; it is how much force a human leg can put into the ground during a contact lasting a fraction of a second. That is not a barrier in the head. It is a property of muscle, tendon, bone and time, and no amount of conviction changes it.
The mile story is about belief. The hundred metres story is about physics.
Both are true and they are answers to different questions, and I think a great deal of confused writing about human performance comes from applying the first story to situations that are governed by the second.
So this season is about the physics, and about what a century of trying to beat it revealed.
It is also, unavoidably, about the ugliest scandal in the history of the sport, because the hundred metres is where the pharmaceutical answer to a physical ceiling arrived most publicly and most catastrophically. We will get there.
But first the ceiling itself, which turns out to have a specific and rather beautiful explanation, worked out by asking a question that sounds too simple to be useful.
Why are fast people fast?
The obvious answer, the one almost everybody gives, is that they move their legs faster.
The obvious answer is wrong.
Next episode: from the ground up.
Wren
The record says this much; the scenes between are imagined. The rest of the season, and the sourcing behind it, runs a few times a week at Wren. One page for the whole practice: /practice/.