Queenatletica, a page to visit

From time to time I link to an interesting page. Typically when I find one I keep a bookmark and when I decide to write something in the blog I go back in order to read more carefully. So, there was this bookmark starting with "queen"  and I was almost convinced that it was related to some australian site (because of Queensland). Well, no. It's an italian site, something I could have inferred had I been more careful. Anyhow, Queenatletica is a great athletics site, focusing on athletics in Italy (the website exists under the name atleticalive). If you can read italian I suggest you take the time to visit it.

Don't let yourself be fooled by the menu on the upper left corner. The english version does not exist. 

There is also a twitter page, this time indeed under the name of Queenatletica.

The page is somehow related to Stefano Mei (European champion  of 10000 in 1986), who is candidate for the president's position of the FIDAL. 

To walk or not to walk

The frequent readers of my blog may wonder whether all of a sudden I have become a race-walking fan. Not to worry! My opinion about race-walking has not changed by a iota. I am still convinced that the discipline is deeply flawed and should either disappear or be radically reformed. Unfortunately WA is just stalling, by discussing about new competitions distances: 10 km and 35 km aiming at replacing the 20 km and 50 km. (By the way the IOC made it clear that the 50 km competition is exiting the Olympics, just when WA was hoping to add the women's race to the program). And of course, there are no news concerning the ground contact sensor which was supposedly been developed and which would have put paid to cheating. 

No, in this post of mine I will discuss a point I became aware of while reading an article showcased in the WA weekend reads. The title of the article did capture my curiosity: "Yes, walking is sometimes faster that running uphill". I remember (that was a long time ago when I was still running, before discovering finswimming) having participated at races where there was a steep slope going uphill for more than one kilometre. At that time I was training in a hilly area and thus I had quite some experience in handling steep slopes. But one could observe that most of the participants of the race were just giving up running and were climbing the hill walking. I have always believed that one had some advantage if one could still keep running and this was born out by the fact that the runners I passed were not catching up with me once the steep slope was over.  It turns out that things are not so simple.

In some previous post of mine I gave the energetic cost of walking and running. For low velocities walking is more economic but when the velocity increases at a certain point it is more advantageous to run. However these estimates are valid when locomotion takes place on a flat surface. When one starts climbing slopes everything changes. Remember that walking does not involve an aerial phase: one foot is always on the ground. If at a certain point there is no contact with the ground this is running and not walking. Well, things change when it comes to going up a slope. If the slope is steep enough then even running keeps one foot on the ground at all times. You can observe this in the gif below where the subject is running on a 45 degrees inclined treadmill.  

(This is really impressive because most mountain runners find it difficult to keep their balance on treadmills with inclinations above 40 degrees). In case you are wondering how can one distinguish walking from running on an inclined treadmill, the answer is given by measuring the acceleration. 

As one sees readily in the figure above, walking and running have quite different acceleration patterns. So, how does one choose to walk or run when moving uphill on a steep angle? A recent experiment involved a selection of elite mountain runners who ran and walked on a treadmill during 5 minutes at a time, at angles going from 10 to 40 degrees. The speed of the treadmill was adjusted so that the "vertical" speed was always the same. In practice this means that the treadmill was moving faster for small angles and slower for the steep ones. The measurements of the metabolic cost of the exercise are summarised in the graphic below.

For inclinations up 10 degrees running is more efficient than walking. But once the angle exceeds 15 degrees, walking is more efficient than running. And, for the vertical speed imposed in the experiment, there is an optimum in energy expenditure around 25-30 degrees. 

How do these results compare with a real-life situation on mountain running competitions? It turns out that most competitors alternate between running and walking, despite the fact that the latter is more efficient energetically. This can be explained when one considers what is happening on a flat surface. A series of studies have found that the transition walk-to-run occurs at slightly slower-than-expected speeds, although walking is still more efficient energetically. The explanation to this is that certain muscles get fatigued  during fast walking and it is more comfortable to run, although this entails a somewhat higher energy expenditure. Comfort is the decisive criterion. In mountain running competition given the slope and the speed of the athlete walking and running correspond to comparable energy expenditures. So, athletes who walk think that they would be more comfortable running and switch, only to get the opposite impression after some time and switch back. There is no preferred style and they oscillate between running and walking, each athlete having his own mix of the two gaits. And what matters in competition is to be as fast as possible, never mind energetic efficiency.

Talking about maximal performance, the question that arises naturally is how does the running records depend on the slope. Kay performed such an analysis and his findings are given below.

The results are not surprising: a gentle downhill slope does favour the performance but when the slope becomes too steep it becomes quite difficult to maintain a decent speed even when running downhill. 

Towards a modern ancient pentathlon

I know, the title does not make much sense. But read on and things will become clearer.

I have already written about the ancient pentathlon and the way the winner was determined. In this I was inspired by the writings of Zarnowski, who is the world specialist of combined events. Saying that a huge amount of nonsense has been written on the matter by historians who do not have any knowledge of sports is an understatement. Those who are interested can go back to one of my first posts where I present a variant to Zarnowski's proposal, a variant I improved in a second, more recent, post. 

The myth has it that the pentathlon was invented by Jason during the Argonauts' quest for the Golden Fleece. The first stop of Argo was on the island of Lemnos where the queen Hypsipyle organised games in order to honour them. 

Peleas (he's Achilles' father) participated in all five events, discus throw, long jump, javelin throw, running and wrestling. He was twice second and twice fourth in the first four events, but he prevailed over all his adversaries in wrestling and was declared winner of the pentathlon. This would present a definite difficulty concerning the procedures proposed by Zarnowski and myself which allow only the winners of the first three events to proceed to the last two.  In fact there is an very detailed article in Wikipedia dealing with the subject (it's in german but Google does a good job in translating it). The overall opinion of the article is that the analysis of N. Suppanz is the most satisfactory. I will not spend more time on this matter and will stand by my analysis in the post mentioned above.

The question I would like to address here is how could one organise an ancient pentathlon competition today. This is not a rhetorical question. In fact since 2015 the island of Lemnos has been organising an international ancient pentathlon competition. I obtained a copy of the rules and I must admit that I do not understand how the event is judged. A point based scoring system is used for the first four events and then points are attributed to the wrestling results according to the classification. However nowhere in the rules is it explained how the wrestling competition is organised. Is it a round robin or something else? No matter. The municipality of Lemnos is organising their pentathlon according to some rules. And they are having some success in this, since last year there was a participants from Cyprus, Italy and Serbia as well as teams from various places in Greece. (The Lemnos pentathlon is a team event).

The existence of a contemporary ancient pentathlon competition got me thinking. How could one organise such an event? Remember Zarnowski's approach and mine were based on victories, since, as we argued, in ancient Greece only the victory counted. And this is, I am convinced, the only way one could stage a real ancient pentathlon competition. However for a festival-like thing, as the one in Lemnos, one needs a less selective approach. So here is a rational way to organise an ancient pentathlon today. I will give in detail a scheme for 8 participants which can be easily adapted to a larger number thereof.

The participants contest in pairs, i.e. in a kind of duel. After the first events we have four with 1v (one victory) and four with 0v (zero victory). The 1v compete among themselves in the second event. This gives two with 2v and two with 1v. The 0v do the same leading to two with 1v and two with 0v. At this stage the 0v are out. At the third event the 2v compete against each other and the same for the 1v. This gives one with 3v, three with 2v and two with 1v. The later are out at this stage. At the fourth event only one with 3v and three with 2v do participate. After this event we have either one with 4v, one with 3v and two with 2v or three with 3v and one with 2v. In the first case the two with 2v wrestle for the bronze medal (the first two obtaining gold and silver ακονιτί). In the second case the three with 3v wrestle in a round robin tournament. If a clear order emerges the medals are awarded accordingly. If not all three share silver. 

Extending the scheme to more participants, providing also for numbers which are not a power of two is possible, however there is no need to belabour the point. The main weakness of the scheme is that it is not quite fair. Since the pairs are chosen by drawing lots there is an inherent chance factor. Somebody who happens to be drawn against weaker opponents may be the final winner while not being the strongest competitor. But as I said the scheme is meant for a festive competition, giving a chance to half of the participants to progress beyond the third event.

On endless races

Earlier this year I wrote a post on the "Weekend Reads" section of the World Athletics site. Each week they present a collection of articles related to athletics. I am following the page and I must say that its content is always interesting. (Unfortunately no archive of the previous editions of the "reads" does exist: once the week is over the new content chases away the old one). 

From time to time I stumble upon an article that I find inspiring and/or worth reporting here. This is the case with an article from Globe and Mail: "COVID-19 is like running a marathon with no finish line. What does sports science say about how we can win it?" The article focuses on the current pandemic and the fact that there appears no tangible end to it. But the angle of the article was interesting: how do we tackle an effort where the end is not fixed in advance?

The article started discussing the Quarantine Backyard Ultra race, a virtual race held back in April in which runners had to complete a 6.7 km loop once every hour. That meant 100 miles every 24 hours (again, those pesky imperial measures). There was no finish line to the race: the winner was the last man standing. The authors of the article go on to discuss the analogies of this open-ended race to the current pandemic. If this is of interest to you, just read the original article. What attracted my interest was the fact that a potentially endless race presents unfamiliar challenges. How do you pace yourself in such an event? How do you motivate yourself?

But first what is happening in "normal" races, i.e. ones where the distance is fixed. I have been regularly referring to R. Tucker and his works. Tucker is not only a brilliant physiologist, he has also the gift of explaining things in a way to make them intelligible to the layman. In a work of his, in collaboration with M. Lambert and T. Noakes, they present an analysis of pacing strategies during world record performances for 800 m, 5000 m and 10000 m. 

While for the 800 m the second lap is almost always slower than the first, in the longer races the first and final kilometres are significantly faster than the middle kilometre intervals. This means that in these races there is an end spurt because of the maintenance of a reserve during the middle part of the race. They conclude that "pacing strategy is regulated in a complex system that balances the demand for optimal performance with the requirement to defend homeostasis during exercise". 

H.V. Ulmer has proposed that the self-selected pacing strategy plays a key role in a complex regulatory system in which a central governor regulates exercise intensity specifically to ensure that potentially catastrophic derangements to cellular function do not occur. What I find interesting in the work of Ulmer is a confirmation of the validity of the Borg scale of Ratings of Perceived Exertion (RPE). 

A parenthesis here: in his work Borg presented not only the scale that carries his name but also gave a formula for the maximal heart rate P as a function of age A

P=195-0.75(A-20).

Compared to the traditional one P=220-A, Borg's formula predicts a lower maximal rate up to 40 years of age and a higher one afterwards. 

The work of Ulmer presents a most convincing correlation between Borg's scale of perceived exertion and the load of an exercise.

But what is most interesting in the work of Ulmer is the questions he addresses in his article, concerning anticipation. He introduces the notion of "teleoanticipation" (from the greek word τέλος, end) which has to do with the optimal arrangement of exertion, aiming at avoiding early exhaustion before reaching the finish point. A work by Wingfeld, Marino and Skein shed some light on the question through an experiment with cyclists on a 2x30 km time trial. One group was provided with performance information and distance feedback while for the other group information was withheld. The time of the group with information was 4 % shorter than the one without, although both groups reported the same RPE. Again the group with information increased their speed over the final 2 km, just as in the studies of Ross and of Ulmer. The authors conclude that "when withholding information pertaining to remaining distance, performance was reduced due to the application of a conservative pacing strategy". 

So the question is, how do you handle a situation where the effort is a priori open-ended. Looking at the Quarantine Backyard Ultra competition it seems that people invent an end point. While only one runner dropped out after 23 hours of racing, half of the remaining competitors gave up after 24 or 25 hours. Focusing on a fictitious finish line helped those competitors hold on. But once that objective was reached they ran out of steam. (I don't know why, but this reminds me of the "birthday effect").

Experience is of the utmost importance in this domain. A study of a team of british physiologists, involving experienced and novice cyclists over the same time trial, led to a most interesting conclusion. Novice cyclists have a dependence on distance feedback: they check their kilometric progress quite frequently. Experienced cyclists are more selective and primarily look at their speed.

How does all this help in an "endless" race? Since the idea of not seeing the end appears unbearable, my suggestion in such a situation would be to fix a high objective, one where reaching it would already be a success. Once you are close to it, monitor your state and if you are not utterly exhausted fix another somewhat higher objective. Repeat this till you are really completely washed out. Only then you are allowed to stop. But, of course, a better suggestion is not to enter such crazy races and focus on more psychologically manageable situations: they are already challenging enough.