8/7/2023 0 Comments Fastest runner in the worldYou might have shown your early promise as a teenager, like both Paula and Eliud, so that means you’ve got to train for about 15 years. This is especially true when it comes to the marathon because you might not hit your very best until you’re in your early to mid 30s. I don’t necessarily mean just in the race itself – clearly you have to have the confidence, the motivation, the ability to hurt yourself in the race – but it’s also about having the patience, the longevity. However, there are probably other people who are similarly physiologically talented, and so you also have to have the right psychology. You simply have to have the underpinning physiology. You’ve worked with some of the fastest marathon runners in history could you give us an insight into what makes them so special?įirst of all, they are physically phenomenal there’s no getting away from that. It’s those ultimate limits in terms of how fast can people run and what prevents them from going faster that continue to fascinate me. So when it came to the Breaking 2 project, it was about creating a real opportunity to discover what was humanly possible. The marathon is different because the athletes race the distance so infrequently, and the courses that marathons are run on aren’t necessarily ideal for the fastest times, and when the top athletes do get together it’s generally at a major championships, so the goal is to win rather that to run as quickly as possible. I think when it comes to distances like the 100m or the mile, those distances are run so frequently that we are probably approaching the limits. And what is the particular appeal of exploring and pushing those boundaries in the marathon? As scientists, we are fascinated by how fast people can run. Of course at some point it might be beaten, but at least for that period of time you can say that you are the fastest athlete who ever lived over that distance, and that really appeals. You know that debate that you sometimes have in the pub after a training session…would you rather win an Olympic Gold medal or set the world record? I was always in the latter camp because I thought you can win an Olympic Gold by beating the people who are there on that particular day, which is obviously no mean feat, but to beat the fastest athlete of all time at a given distance… I thought that was something really special. And it was the idea of enabling the human body to move as fast as possible that captured your imagination? So I kind of lived a bit vicariously through some of the athletes I supported over those years. Along with doing the more sophisticated lab-based work, which was all about trying to discover the mechanistic basis behind athletic performance, I was always keen to apply that knowledge in the real world to help athletes run faster. I did a PhD in exercise physiology and I became fascinated with the research side, but having a link with sport was always important to me. That led me to study sports science at university, where my various injuries and illnesses came along and my own running fell a little by the wayside, but I continued to be fascinated by physiology, by what it is that makes some people run faster than others and what we can do to make people run faster. Like a lot of people, I was somewhat self-coached, and I just became fascinated by the science that underpinned running performance. RW Where did your running journey begin?ĪJ It started with me as a reasonably successful junior runner. We caught up with him to hear about the scientific knowledge he has employed to help the world’s best get even better, what he has learned about them that sets them apart, and how we can apply it all to our own running. This year, he has been working towards a defining marathon performance that’s a little easier for us all to relate to – his own attempt to break the hallowed three-hour mark for the first time, at the age of 50 – and translating his unparalleled wealth of experience into his training. In a long and distinguished career exploring the science behind speed and endurance, Jones has written more than 350 original research and review articles, and worked as a consultant to UK Athletics and the English Institute of Sport. The University of Exeter professor of applied physiology helped to guide Paula Radcliffe to her stunning, long-standing world record in London, in 2003 and he also worked with Eliud Kipchoge on the Breaking 2 project, the culmination of which was the first sub-two-hour marathon in history. Professor Andrew Jones has played an integral part in some of the greatest marathon stories in history.
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