![]() It’s very useful because it lets us see the patterns that aren’t always intuitive in your day-to-day life. Neither is necessarily better than the other.īook knowledge is the study of how something either should work, or has historically worked, when viewed in a lab or observed within a big, average group. What I love about this is acknowledging that book and real-world knowledge have both upsides and downsides. The old-timers will tell you that while the apprentice system didn’t turn out particularly good book lawyers, it produced trial lawyers far superior to those you have today. The customary way to become a lawyer was to apprentice yourself to a practicing lawyer, read law on your own, and learn about trial work by carrying the old man’s bag into court. Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber, once described his attempt to become a lawyer in the 1920s: Keynes called it “animal spirits.” Both can be summarized as, “People in the wild are different from people on paper. And in the real world, souls drive performance in ways you’d never imagine in the classroom. Keynes had discovered for economics the same thing Hill discovered for physiology: It’s difficult to measure today how something will perform tomorrow, because both people and economies are not pure machines. In an interesting coincidence, Archibald Hill was married to John Maynard Keynes’ sister. You never know how an athlete can perform until you put them in the heat of moment, with the pressures, risks, humiliations, and incentives of real-world conditions that can’t be emulated in the laboratory. “There is more in athletics than sheer chemistry,” Hill wrote. Capabilities are a function of in-the-moment circumstances. This helps explain crazy stories about people lifting up cars when someone’s life is in jeopardy. ![]() Physical running limits on a test track may be different than physical limits during an Olympic final, which may be different than physical limits when being chased by a murderer. It will shut you down at a lower physical “limit” if the risk of exertion isn’t worth the reward. So like a speed governor on a car, it won’t let you exert true maximum performance – the kind of thing that could leave you exhausted to the point of being vulnerable – unless the stakes are high enough. Your brain’s first job is to make sure you don’t die. It’s what you’re capable of within the context of what your brain is willing to endure at a given moment’s risk and reward. There are limits to human performance, and Hill discovered them before anyone else.īut he uncovered, by accident, something else: Athletic performance isn’t just what you’re physically capable of. Once asked what use his calculations had, he responded: “To tell you the truth, we don’t do it because it is useful, but because it’s amusing.” Athletes who, in theory, could deliver a certain performance – a long distance run at a certain pace – gave up well before predicted. ![]() Subpar “machines” could beat the top athletes in ways that didn’t make sense. But in races – especially long, stressful, high-profile races – the predictions broke down. You could take a group of athletes, measure their oxygen intake and lactic acid buildup, and in theory determine who had the best “machine.” Sometimes, in a controlled setting, results matched predictions. As accurate as his calculations were in the lab, they were of little use in predicting athletic competitions. Hill’s discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine.īut there was a kicker. “Our bodies are machines, whose energy expenditures may be closely measured,” he wrote in 1926. His calculations were accurate at predicting his best run times around the track. Hill wanted to know his ceiling – the point at which consuming more oxygen did nothing for his ability to run. He and his colleagues spent months sprinting around a track, measuring their oxygen consumption and muscle fatigue and its connection to endurance. It eventually made him one of the top biophysicists in the world. Hill began studying his own capacity for exercise. On others his “stiffness and exhaustion” made him question how his body worked. He ran every morning, on a track before breakfast. Archibald Hill just wanted to know how fast he could run.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |