Year of the Dunk (15 page)

I still remember Einhorn, who had the demeanor of the nice Jewish doctor he is, standing by a window and holding up the films to the thin Indiana light. He turned to us. “Your cancer is one-hundred-percent curable,” he said. And once he rid my body of it, he continued, “the odds that it will return are about the same as my crossing the street outside and getting hit by a car.” Rebecca and my mother, who had flown in from New York City, embraced in relief; it was the first good news we had gotten in weeks, and it had come down from this Moses-like figure. But the treatment, he warned, was a brutal one. “If you're ready, let's get started,” he said. “Of course,” I said. “Let's do it.” We went up a floor, from the medical offices to the cancer ward, and the task ahead of me seemed much more real. I stripped down, put on a medical smock, and settled into a grayish-green dental-style chair, surrounded by IV stands and beeping equipment. A nurse prepared a needle, and as she stuck it in my left forearm, I promptly fainted.

57 days left:
107 degrees today in Austin. A wet, nasty late-June heat. Two sets of 10 by 100 sprints, with 45 seconds and six push-ups between each sprint. And five minutes between the two sets. High arcs of sweat went flying from my fingertips each time I pumped my hands. My shirt was soaked through by the sixth sprint. Weight is still at 175 pounds. My chest has grown a couple of inches, my posture has straightened up, my calves and thighs are thicker. But I can't wait for this year to end—my knee aches any time I drive for more than 20 minutes
.

H
is butt glued to an office chair, Edward Coyle wheeled himself toward me, hitched up the left trouser leg of his khakis, pulled down his black dress sock, and thrust out his shapely calf.

“
See those little white marks?” he asked, and I found myself bending over, nose inches from his handsome gam. Between the lines of black hair I could indeed spot dozens of thin scars. “Those are from the biopsies, thirty years of them.”

We were sitting in his lab, the same one he had occupied for 32 years, a low-ceilinged, cinder-blocked, windowless space, buzzy with fluorescent light, on the eighth floor of the grandly named Bellmont Hall, really a concrete block beneath the bleachers of the University of Texas football stadium. (“We call this ‘Bellmont Bunker,' ” he had told me by way of sardonic greeting.) Feet away sat a row of stationary bicycles hooked up to a bank of desktop computers. Plastic tubing, like giant bendy straws, was strung from some of these computers to the ceiling and then dropped down in front of the bikes.

In his pressed khakis, button-down short-sleeves, clunky black sneakers, and immaculately clean spectacles, he resembled a genial police detective more than a former running wunderkind. The only trace of a faraway past was the faint Queens accent, an accent I could place only because it sounded an awful lot like the voices of the super, the grocery-bagger, and the nurses who had helped my grandmother for so many years. He had been a stubby Catholic kid from Woodside, attending Mater Christi, a school that catered to both boys and girls—in separate classrooms, of course. The cafeteria had a divider down the middle, and you could hear girls' giggles on the other side. He had no jones for running, but in a forced P.E. run around Astoria Park in his freshman year, he scorched nearly the entire class of 250. His homeroom teacher was also the track coach and, in due time, coerced young Edward into quitting the swimming team, not that, being small, he had ever been particularly suited for the pool. Eventually, as a student at Queens College, he led the track squad in everything from the 800-meter run, a searingly long near-sprint, to the 5K, an event pregnant with psychological pressure and strategy, winning New York City titles in a clutch of distances.

It was in college that he began thinking about what separated his performance from others. How much of his track ability, he wondered, was due to natural muscle composition, and how much of
it was molded by relentless training? His workouts became a vocational pursuit, and Coyle became his own guinea pig. The muscle biopsies would reveal, precisely, what portion of his fibers were fast-twitch and what portion slow-twitch. Slow-twitch muscles use oxygen more efficiently to generate energy; fast-twitch muscles are less efficient but fire more rapidly and generate more force. There is a surprising amount of variation in the way these muscles are distributed among individuals. The leg muscles of someone like Carl Lewis might be composed of as much as 80 percent fast-twitch fibers, while the leg muscles of top-notch marathoners might contain up to 80 percent slow-twitch fibers. Meanwhile, the legs of average Joes, of you and me, tend to fall into a 50-50 mix of fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles. A fast-twitch muscle reaches its peak tension—or the point at which it's doing the most work—in a tenth of a second; a slow-twitch muscle takes two-tenths of a second. On the face of it, a tenth-of-a-second difference doesn't sound like much. But, of course, one is twice as fast as the other, and as two sprinters bound down the track, relaxing and contracting their muscles as quickly as possible, each tenth of a second makes a big difference. What Coyle found was that over time, as he favored longer events over shorter ones, the slow-twitch muscles were building up—even as the fast-twitch ones languished. Post-college, he was the anti-dunker, trading in the sprint for the lope.

But Coyle told me he was unwilling to put performance down purely to muscle makeup. “Remember,” he said, leaning forward in his swivel chair, “we talk about
neuro
-musculature. It's not just the muscle makeup but how quickly your cerebral cortex can send signals down through the spine to work.” Training ourselves to send quick impulses to our muscles to do work, especially the kind of rapid work involved with fast-twitch fibers, is possible, he said. For a runner like Coyle—a runner who only really got going late in college, with nearly seven years of instruction behind him—it wasn't
only muscle makeup that mattered. It was also the economy of technique, the ability to convert oxygen to energy. And, of course, the coaching.

Coyle told me a story about a group of heart-disease patients he worked with in the late 1970s at Washington University Medical School in St. Louis. These were 50-something men, recovering from serious heart problems—“Parts of their hearts were dead,” he said. “They thought their lives were over.” Coyle's job was to train them as intensively as they could withstand. Calling on his old running days, he began prepping them for long-distance jogs, starting with just a few hundred meters. Some of them were able eventually to run 10K races, farther than Coyle himself had covered competitively, and a couple went on to complete marathons. “It's amazing how much the body can improve,” he said, shaking his head even now, beneath the gently humming lights of Bellmont Hall.

The notion that humans can improve in measurable ways is now enshrined in the academy, tested daily in labs like Coyle's: Just about every university today has some sort of department dedicated to kinesiology, a field built on the inherently optimistic, essentially American premise that humans have all sorts of room to improve on their apparent potential. An equality of physical opportunity. The field has its own journals and it gives out doctorates. And, of course, every high school in America seems to have its own weight room and its own phys-ed teacher, dedicated to making kids think they can transform their flesh, like their minds, into something useful. Or at least to making them sweat awkwardly for 25 minutes before showering off in a grotty locker room. Nineteen twenty-four,
the year Dudley Allen Sargent, the inventor of the vertical jump test, died, marked
the first time a course in teaching physical education was offered at a teacher-training department. By 1930, a quarter of schools in a national survey said they had a physical education program; none had one at the beginning of the century. In a sense, the buildup of the business and study of self-improvement is the benign legacy of an age of hubris, one that saw humans increasingly confident in their abilities to classify everyone around them. This was a period when education “was consumed with a passion for precise measurement,” Harold Rugg, the now-forgotten progressive educator, wrote in his 1941 memoir
That Men May Understand
. “We lived in
one long orgy of tabulation. Mountains of facts were piled up, condensed, summarized and integrated by the new quantitative technique. The air was full of normal curves, standard deviations, coefficients of correlation, regressive equations.” At the outset of this age stood an idiosyncratic institution, the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory, whose elite researchers had the gall to carry out a singular mission: to pin down the breaking point of men. (They weren't particularly interested in women.)

In 1927 a plump, red-bearded, suspenders-wearing, pipe-smoking Harvard biochemist named Lawrence Henderson had an idea: He would collaborate with American corporations to research ways to wring efficiency from American laborers. Known lovingly by his colleagues as Pink Whiskers, Henderson was a pompous gourmand who favored the word “superior” and who compulsively ranked things as relatively meaningless as types of denim overalls. He saw himself as “
a modern-day Socrates,” one of his former colleagues
later wrote; it was a role he performed beautifully. With young scientist-devotees clinging to him, Henderson led the laboratory on a series of tests meant to get at the empirical limits of human capability, as if a human were a type of metal with specific boiling, melting, and freezing points.

Henderson's right-hand man was, in many respects, his opposite: a workaday, crew-cut-wearing research scientist named Bruce Dill, who, orphaned at age eight, cut a character austere, subdued, Presbyterian. For his meticulousness, his objectivity, his honesty, and his curiosity, he was remembered by a colleague as
a “scientist's scientist.” He was also, like Edward Coyle after him, something of a willing human guinea pig, a kind of comic-book hero who urged other researchers to bypass the usual tests on chimps or other creatures and run their experiments on him. (In my experience as a onetime reader of comic books, that person usually turns out to be the headstrong villain—Dr. Octopus, for one, or the Green Goblin—but by all accounts Dill was a wholesome, patriotic American.)

Thus, after Dill and other researchers conceived of the 40-40-40 Club, to honor investigators who lingered in a chamber that simulated conditions of negative-40 degrees Fahrenheit and altitudes of 40,000 feet, and undertook arduous 40-mile walks, Dill himself, physically courageous and unflagging,
became the first member. (He stuck it out in the “cold room,” as it was known, for 20 minutes.)

Besides the cold room and a hot room, which could reach 115 degrees, the 800-square-foot lab, tucked into the basement of a redbrick colonial building on Harvard's campus, was equipped with an X-ray machine, standard treadmills, and, for God knows what purpose,
a dog treadmill. Reading the lab members' research accounts, you can't miss their cheery, Sargent-like optimism in their own capacity to pinpoint the extent of human capabilities. What were our parameters, as a species, they wondered, and what happened if we
overstepped those boundaries? The lab's researchers accompanied pilots on flights from California to Hong Kong to monitor their alertness, and collected the perspiration of sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. They studied the relationship between fatigue, recovery, and lactic acid accumulation among
Harvard football players. They devised a formula—“
the Hobbling Effect”—to calculate, in units of energy, the encumbrance of heavy garments worn in the snow. They established, after a spate of deaths during the building of the Hoover Dam, that sweat pouring off laborers in the Nevada desert had half the salt content as sweat produced by Bostonians during a Massachusetts winter, leading the researchers to recommend that copious amounts of salt be added to the workers' victuals.

By 1942, Henderson had died, and Dill had enlisted in the military. Competition for money within the university, territorial battles between the business school and the lab over corporate sponsors, and academic politics crippled the lab's work. Five years later, the Harvard Fatigue Laboratory was disbanded, its equipment and records absorbed by the school of public health. The lab had lasted only 20 years, but its alumni fanned out across the country, sowing the seeds of the lab's optimism to the Arctic, where a Fatigue Laboratory biologist studied circadian rhythms; to Florida, where a Fatigue Laboratory cardiologist studied the effect of weightlessness and acceleration on human balance as he prepared astronauts for manned space flights (his research led to the development of drugs to combat motion sickness); to the Army, where the lab's chief technician served on a committee called Nutrition for National Defense; and to office parks everywhere, whose chairs and desks were inspired by the research of a Fatigue Laboratory alum who is remembered as “the
founding father of ergonomics.” Encouraged by the example of the Fatigue Laboratory, universities around the country began establishing their own human performance labs.

Edward Coyle told me to clamber aboard one of the “power/cycles”—stationary bikes hooked up to computers—that were standing around his lab. He had made a name for himself creating an abbreviated version of the Wingate Test to test the fast-twitch abilities of humans. He has counted among his clients the San Antonio Spurs basketball team, the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team, NASA astronauts, and, of course, University of Texas sports teams. With players tracked over the course of a season, he can look at the results to rank talent and guard against overtraining. “If that rating goes down, something's the matter,” Coyle told me, as I slipped my feet into the cage-style pedals.

Nearly two decades earlier, Coyle's most famous client strapped himself into the very same stationary bike, sucked on one of those plastic straws, and blew the VO
₂
max ratings off the charts. At the time, Lance Armstrong was just a brash second-tier cyclist from Texas, still unknown to the general public and still cancer-free. Over seven years, Coyle tracked Armstrong's improvement, growing as close as one could hope to an athlete whose eyes were on a prize much bigger than anything that could be had in Texas. In a 2005 peer-reviewed article in the
Journal of Applied Physiology
titled “Improved Muscular Efficiency Displayed as Tour de France Champion Matures,” Coyle argued that Armstrong
dramatically increased his power output by remaking his body after cancer and becoming a more efficient cyclist. Around the same time he wrote that article, Coyle served as a witness for Armstrong in a suit against Dallas-based SCA Promotions, which refused to pay him bonuses, citing doping suspicions.

“You tested Lance, right?” I asked Coyle.