R*****s
发帖数: 41236 | 1 5月期的RT看到这么篇有趣的文章，机器流 VS 野兽流， 俺应该算机器流 ：）
Of Machines and Beasts
http://www.runnersworld.com/race-training/of-machines-and-beast
THE RUNNER AS MACHINE
THE RUNNER AS BEAST
or Hybrid? :D
Two weeks before the 2012 New York City marathon, I decided to test my
fitness at a small 5K in Queens. I was in my late 30s, and my training had
been solid. Based on the previous year's times, I thought I might be able to
win. Or not.
As I warmed up near the course, I saw two guys doing strides with the form
of college track stars. They must have been 15 to 20 years younger than me,
and they looked serious.
I decided to let them go and hope they'd blow up, then attack.
At the gun, they took off at a sub-5:00 pace, even faster than I'd expected.
I locked in at 5:20, my 5K sweet spot when the machine is in working order.
The strategy worked. Within minutes they were losing steam, and I was
gaining ground. About a mile into the race, I passed the slower of the two
and fixed my sights on the one up front. I gradually reeled him in, and when
I passed him at the halfway point, he let out the slightest groan: a split-
second sound of defeat.
That's your cue, I thought. Just keep your foot on the gas.
Suddenly I was no longer the pursuer; I was the prey. For the next 8 minutes
, I ran scared, as if he were right behind me, a mountain lion preparing to
pounce. In the end, I won by more than 30 seconds.
Later that day, a friend sent me a one-word text message: "BEAST!"
It's one of the most common metaphors in running and among the sport's
highest words of praise–second only to "machine." Both connote immense
power and strength, an ability to run harder, faster and with more
determination than we might have thought possible.
But they couldn't be more different. A machine is tire-less and precise,
able to crank out a specific result consistently; a beast represents
formidable, brute force, the incarnation of pure will. And we know we are
neither. We are weak and unpredictable, prone to injury and self-doubt.
And yet, those metaphors serve a purpose no less important than our
stopwatches and racing flats. Thinking of ourselves as machines helps us to
tick off the miles during the long, lonely stretches of a race, while
imagining that we're beasts enables us to dig deep and, on a good day, to
devour our competition.
Together, the machine and the beast comprise the two sides of a competitive
runner's psyche–scientific reason and primal instinct–and negotiating
between those two is essential to being the best runners we can be.
THE RUNNER AS MACHINE
The machine is our foundation, our ability to run the same pace for hours at
a time and to log 70-, 80-, 90-plus miles per week. The beast emerges later
, in the grueling throes of competition, after the machine has done all it
can. And our language reflects this: We reserve the beast metaphor for post-
race congratulations, but machine metaphors permeate the discourse of
running.
We don't just get faster, we "develop new gears." We don't just have legs,
we have "wheels." We go on "cruise control" on flat roads and "power up"
difficult hills. My father, who ran in the '80s, once told a fast woman he
knew that she was "like a steel spring wrapped in skin."
Even when things go badly, the metaphors persist: We "run out of gas," "lose
steam," "fall apart" and "blow up." Deep down, we realize that while we
aspire to machine-like precision, machines too can fail–the admission is
built into our vocabulary. But in theory, the best machines, those tended to
and cared for the most, fail the least.
In this sense, I've come to see us more like mechanics than machines. And
though we're not likely to hear "You're a mechanic!" being shouted from the
sidelines of a race anytime soon, it's a far more compelling metaphor. It en
-compasses not just the race, but everything we do to get there–the tempo
runs, ice baths, speed intervals and massages. After all, a machine is only
as good as its upkeep.
In his 2009 book about the moral value of manual trades, Shop Class as
Soulcraft, the philosopher-mechanic Matthew Crawford writes that his job is
to keep a motorcycle functioning at optimum efficiency no matter how old it
might be, to be conscientious and invested enough in his work to intuit
mechanical problems not immediately apparent, and to develop the kind of
knowledge that comes only with years of experience.
Crawford's book resonated with me as a runner. Training our bodies to run,
and to keep running, is like working on old bikes: We care for them, mend
them when they're broken and test them constantly. And we listen to them,
ever vigilant against signs of disrepair. A runner's twinge is a motorcycle'
s loose nut–get to it early and make sure the machine can keep doing its
job.
What motivates this endless devotion to our own maintenance?
A common view is control. What we lack in life, we seek in sport–mastery
over the entire enterprise. We constantly revise our training to improve our
PRs, alter our diets to achieve maximum strength at minimal weight, create
schedules, log every mile and generally plan our lives around running. We
tinker, tweak, adjust and reset. And come race day, if everything goes
according to plan, we get to perform like machines–tireless, precise and
consistent.
But as Robert Pirsig writes in his 1974 classic, Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance, "You are never dedicated to something you have
complete confidence in." Like the mechanic, we ply our trade on something we
neither designed nor built, and troubleshooting is the name of the game. We
routinely subject ourselves to chance, to the whims of flesh and bone and
to training methods that revolve not around foolproof absolutes, but
variables and probabilities.
Aristotle would say that we are practitioners of a stochas-tic art: The word
translates as "to guess at" or "to aim"–if you do this, then you should be
able to achieve that. But you might not. In any stochastic art, Crawford
notes, mastery is compatible with failure.
"Fixing things, whether cars or human bodies, is very different from
building things from scratch," he writes. "The mechanic and the doctor deal
with failure every day, even if they are expert. . . . This is because they
fix things that are not of their making, and are therefore never known in a
comprehensive or absolute way."
For runners, such uncertainty manifests itself as a buzzing, full-body kind
of excitement every time we toe the line. Why else would we keep doing it?
If we got what we wanted every time we tried, we'd lose interest. Our
blowups are just as motivating as our PRs, and we never know which one is
going to happen. You can have a flawless cycle, and the wheels can always
come off.
I've run more than 100 races, including 21 marathons, and if I've learned
one thing, it's that preparing for a race–being a mechanic–takes you only
so far. You still have to run the race. And, while training is rational–
meticulous, deliberate and logical–racing is insane. As the body begins to
exhaust its glycogen reserves, the brain greedily tries to sap up whatever
is left, depriving our muscles of the fuel they need to keep going–hence
the defeatist self-talk in the latter stages of a race, those seemingly
sensible decisions you find yourself making to just stop and walk or settle
for a slower time. "Hey, this is stupid," your mind whispers. "Give yourself
a break."
It's often said that overcoming that self-talk–especially during the final
miles of a marathon–is entirely mental. But that implies higher-order
cognition, an ability to reason your way through a race as if it were a game
of chess–a battle of wits with your opposition and your own failing body.
It implies rational thought, and as any competitive runner knows, your
thoughts at the end of a race are anything but rational.
On the contrary, racing taps into something far more instinctual and
automatic–our lizard brain, if you will. It's a carryover from when we
crawled out of the primordial swamp, caring about just one thing: survival.
We may have evolved into intelligent beings, but the lizard brain is still
there, at the back of our skull just above our spine, telling us when to
attack and when to run.
THE RUNNER AS BEAST
Last spring I met a group of friends to watch the Kentucky Derby at a bar in
Brooklyn. The room was full of men wearing seersucker suits and women in
summer dresses and floppy, wide-brimmed hats. As my friends talked about the
trainers and jockeys, I was enthralled with the horses.
Halfway into the race, a horse named Orb began moving up the pack, from 15th
place to first by the final stretch, where he broke into an all-out sprint.
His jockey stopped spurring him on and just let him fly. It was as if Orb
knew the finish line was straight ahead and was determined to be the first
one to get there. As he shot across that line, the crowd cheered, toasted
their mint juleps and resumed their conversations. But I couldn't stop
thinking about the horse.
Surrounded by the pretenses of civilization, I felt a profound sense of
kinship with a soaking-wet colt galloping through the mud. I saw myself in
his pained, determined face; his powerful, resolute stride; and his final
burst of speed that seemed to communicate one simple thought: To hell with
this–let's go.
Kenneth McKeever, a professor of equine exercise physiology at Rutgers
University, says the kinship is real–from the cellular level to competitive
psychology. "Horses are just like humans," he says. They sweat profusely,
their plasma expands when they run, and they're natural athletes.
If we're looking for a model of the ultimate beast, however, mechanically
speaking, horses are not the greatest distance runners in the animal kingdom
. That distinction, says Bernd Heinrich, biologist and 2:25 marathoner, goes
to the pronghorn antelope, which has roamed the Great Plains of North
America for more than 4 million years, staying alive by outrunning predators
like lions, saber-toothed tigers and even cheetahs. Pronghorns can run up
to 61 miles per hour, have been known to cover 7 miles in just 10 minutes,
and have a VO2 max of 300 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight.
For comparison, a thoroughbred racehorse has a VO2 max of about 180, and
Kilian Jornet registers 89.5–several points higher than most elite
marathoners.
But pronghorns aren't domesticated; they run only for survival. Horses,
meanwhile, submit to training methods like ours: They do speed intervals,
hill repeats and tempo runs. "Horses readily exercise, they love it, and
they give it their all," McKeever says.
Still, no amount of training can account for that elusive quality that gives
an athlete like Orb his edge. "With some horses, you can just see it's in
their heads–they're going to win," McKeever says.
Many of the best human runners have the same edge. "I'm going to work so
that it's a pure-guts race at the end," Pre once said. "And if it is, I'm
the only one who can win it."
But what does it mean to run a pure-guts race? David Epstein, whose book The
Sports Gene explores myriad factors that contribute to athletic excellence,
says that even the greatest endurance runners are never close to running
all-out. "Even at the end of a marathon, there is a massive proportion of
muscle fibers left unrecruited by the brain," he says. Recruiting those
fibers requires overriding the brain's fatigue signals. Animals in the wild
do this frequently, because their lives depend on it. We do it under dire
circumstances, or, in the case of sports, contrived ones.
Seeing a finish line, for example, provides "a situational context" that "
engages some of that hardware that evolved for survival," Epstein says, thus
enabling us to push harder than we thought we could midrace. "When the end
is near, the brain-rationing is lifted to a degree."
No race in recent memory has exemplified this more than the 2005 New York
City Marathon, where defending champion Hendrick Ramaala and Paul Tergat
sprinted neck and neck for the final 385 yards of that race. As Tergat
ground his teeth and hurtled himself forward with his long, relentless
strides, Ramaala fought back hard, his eyes wide, his mouth agape. In the
final seconds of the race, Tergat surged and Ramaala fell back by a single
step. Ramaala would later say that he felt nothing but resistance in his
legs and that he simply "ran out of gears." He collapsed the moment he
crossed the finish line.
"We can't really know whether Tergat was slightly more fit or economical
than Ramaala, or whether he was slightly tougher," Epstein says. But, "When
[two runners] are battling it out to the finish, whichever one can better
override their brain's fatigue signals and recruit just a bit more muscle
for the job is going to win."
We'll never know if Orb was better conditioned than his competition that day
or if he was able to dig just a little deeper. But as those 15 horses
circled that 1-mile track, each of them morphed, one by one, from the
machines they'd been trained to be into the beasts they are.
THE RUNNER AS HUMAN
After that race in Queens, the guy who finished second told me he had indeed
just graduated from college, where he ran 1:51 in the 800m–a speed I'll
never reach no matter how hard I train. He had the gears, but he didn't yet
know how to use them in a longer race. I was 37, I had tuned the cruise
control over countless miles, and I knew exactly how to pace myself for a 5K
. But my internal GPS only took me so far. In the final minutes of that race
, I became nothing but heat, breath, a pounding heartbeat and two
increasingly heavy legs churning the earth beneath my feet.
And though I raced like Orb that day, I'm usually one of the horses trailing
behind–giving it everything but, like Ramaala, running out of gears. At
the same race a year later, I pushed just as hard and finished eighth, more
than 1 minute behind the guy I'd beaten in 2012. Because no matter how much
we might want something–an overall win, a negative split, a PR–our
mechanical limitations cannot always be overcome by will alone. Orb isn't
undefeated and neither was Pre.
But that's beside the point–or rather, it's the whole point. "The
experience of failure tempers the conceit of mastery," Crawford writes, and
it motivates us to keep at it. In the negotiation between our internal
machines and beasts, placement, time and prizes are irrelevant. And the
ultimate goal is not machine-like perfection, but something far more
attainable: the knowledge that we invested ourselves completely in the
project, developed the best machines we could and, when the time came, let
the beasts in us take charge and carry us along with determination and force
we didn't know we had.
After all, we may be weak and unpredictable, prone to injury and self-doubt,
but that's not all we are. In running, we find a rare opportunity to be
driven as much by reason and the desire for excellence as by basic, animal
instinct. That is, human.
TUNE THE MACHINE
Runners earn the title "machine" by being reliable and efficient. To hone
your machine-like qualities:
Keep your training consistent all year long; train smart as well as hard.
Perfect your pacing in training and racing. Treadmills can be great
conditioning tools.
Smooth your form to become more efficient and to reduce chances of injury.
Listen to your engine and take action at every signal, be it dehydration or
a hamstring niggle.
Race regularly to become familiar with all race-day variables and expert at
handling them with poise.
Maintain your upkeep with proper fuel, strength training and massages.
FEED THE BEAST
Some runners are more naturally beasts than others, but all of us can
embrace our animal instinct. Here's how:
Do explosive workouts, like all-out hill sprints or 400m repeats, which
force you to let go and recruit all of your muscle fibers and neural
pathways.
Reframe effort as something to embrace and relish, not a burden to endure.
Do fartleks. Remove the usual pacing and steady-effort governors and react
instinctively to the terrain and to how you feel at the moment.
Run trails or go completely off-trail and blaze over hills, into canyons and
through forests.
Leave the gadgets (Garmin, iPod) at home, and if you run with a partner,
commit to doing some runs in total silence.
LESSONS FROM THE METAPHORS
Approach running as a project, and accept uncertainties and failure as
necessary parts of the process.
Know that a well-tuned body is only part of the equation; train the beast as
well as the machine.
Remember that your mind will play tricks on you; you can override its
fatigue signals by tapping into your survival instincts.
At the end of a race, forget pacing and let yourself go. | d**********0
发帖数: 13081 | 2 没听说过。。。
以前就只读到过 “美女和野兽”。
【在 R*****s 的大作中提到】
: 5月期的RT看到这么篇有趣的文章，机器流 VS 野兽流， 俺应该算机器流 ：）
: Of Machines and Beasts
: http://www.runnersworld.com/race-training/of-machines-and-beast
: THE RUNNER AS MACHINE
: THE RUNNER AS BEAST
: or Hybrid? :D
: Two weeks before the 2012 New York City marathon, I decided to test my
: fitness at a small 5K in Queens. I was in my late 30s, and my training had
: been solid. Based on the previous year's times, I thought I might be able to
: win. Or not.
| d****r
发帖数: 2912 | 3 太太太长了。。。求摘要。
【在 R*****s 的大作中提到】
: 5月期的RT看到这么篇有趣的文章，机器流 VS 野兽流， 俺应该算机器流 ：）
: Of Machines and Beasts
: http://www.runnersworld.com/race-training/of-machines-and-beast
: THE RUNNER AS MACHINE
: THE RUNNER AS BEAST
: or Hybrid? :D
: Two weeks before the 2012 New York City marathon, I decided to test my
: fitness at a small 5K in Queens. I was in my late 30s, and my training had
: been solid. Based on the previous year's times, I thought I might be able to
: win. Or not.
| R*****s
发帖数: 41236 | 4 猜下就知道啦啊，机器，训练比赛都用理性思考，野兽，随心所欲胡搞...
基本上，我觉得训练像机器，比赛再爆发兽性，比较好 ：）
【在 d****r 的大作中提到】
: 太太太长了。。。求摘要。
| N******o
发帖数: 3053 | 5 老了，没资格谈什么野兽了，只能做机器。发扬光大MAF派！！ | R*****s
发帖数: 41236 | 6 男人多少还是有点兽性的，不管多老 lol
【在 N******o 的大作中提到】
: 老了，没资格谈什么野兽了，只能做机器。发扬光大MAF派！！
| h****w
发帖数: 1363 | 7 研究下年龄和兽性长短的关系吧
【在 R*****s 的大作中提到】
: 男人多少还是有点兽性的，不管多老 lol
| R*****s
发帖数: 41236 | 8 总体感觉，的确年轻野兽多，老年机器多...
【在 h****w 的大作中提到】
: 研究下年龄和兽性长短的关系吧
| z******o
发帖数: 3285 | 9 写的不错，满趣的，给我的主要信息是mental的重要性。刚看了一个狼的纪录片，每天
trot 50迈的生活方式。有一只13岁的狼，为了养家活口，打猎野兔。解说的在他追野
兔的时候说：他已经过了prime time了……然后他抓的野兔都被老婆拿去喂孩子了，自
己都不能吃，饥饿感迫使他再去打猎。
文明的生活方式已经很难激发这样的兽性了，虽然兽性还是存在。比如，昨天天热，跑
到家附近的时候，我家狗看起来没精打采，口渴的要死，突然闻到兔子，就变了个狗似
的。我就让他牵着我追兔子，啥也不想，只管脚下使劲倒腾，感觉可爽了，不过很累。 | R*****s
发帖数: 41236 | 10 我觉得人类已经停止进化了，基因越差的越能生.....
【在 z******o 的大作中提到】
: 写的不错，满趣的，给我的主要信息是mental的重要性。刚看了一个狼的纪录片，每天
: trot 50迈的生活方式。有一只13岁的狼，为了养家活口，打猎野兔。解说的在他追野
: 兔的时候说：他已经过了prime time了……然后他抓的野兔都被老婆拿去喂孩子了，自
: 己都不能吃，饥饿感迫使他再去打猎。
: 文明的生活方式已经很难激发这样的兽性了，虽然兽性还是存在。比如，昨天天热，跑
: 到家附近的时候，我家狗看起来没精打采，口渴的要死，突然闻到兔子，就变了个狗似
: 的。我就让他牵着我追兔子，啥也不想，只管脚下使劲倒腾，感觉可爽了，不过很累。
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