The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 4: Ellie Murray (Great Britain)
I think as a beginner to intermediate you are forced into relying on instrumentation because of a lack of development of classical Socratic “know thyself” ability. But where people make the big mistake here is totally relying on instrumentation in lieu of building the capacity to know what is going on in your body. As I said, feelings are your built-in instrument panel…plug into them! This awareness happens to some degree strictly as a function of training volume but to bring it up to the level of understanding at a masterful level mandates intense mental training over many years. A disciplined mind is the tool to build the qualified self: “know thyself” leads to that emergent sense of “trust thyself.” But I am not saying this is an either/or process. What you want is highly developed feeling and tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, the feeling of inner knowing in tandem with the thinking of outer knowing. Now you can judge — as opposed to rely strictly on calculation — to make decisions about your training. Your areté will be out of your grasp if you fail to understand yourself. Gadgets, big data and number crunching do not lead to heroic excellence. All of the tech combined is just a tool to aid a higher-order, judgement skill-set, not a substitute for it. But earning unassailable trust in yourself is the crown jewel of the training process.
— Ellie Murray
Ellie was born and grew up in London. Her father was a Parliament Member of The House of Commons for over 25 years and her mother was a ballet dancer that blossomed into a Principal dancer of The London Ballet for nine years. Ellie was entranced by her mother’s fluid movement not just in rehearsal or performance but just how she carried herself around the house or held a spoon or book. She appeared to float, feather-like. Their cat envied her flexibility and lithe line, always watching, taking mental notes. Cats embody beautiful movement and it takes one to know one, no doubt. Ellie always tried to mimic her mum and would twirl and prance and plié at anytime, anyplace, out-of-the-blue. She loved her mum’s barre, pine wood flooring and mirrors in that magical room in their house dedicated to dance. She imagined herself a dancer one day and dreamed she would have the spotlight on opening night — yes, Ellie the Dancer!
She started dance formally at the age of five and it was quite clear she had talent. As a young girl she displayed unusual power, quick movement, high jumps and superb balance. But her movement was not smooth, at least not enough to impress her cat.
She learned classical ballet and contemporary dance and excelled at both but there was a strange attraction to what “classical” meant, something with storied history, deep roots, and movements that take years to perfect to be peers in the pantheon of legendary masters.
She wanted to know why, she wanted to know how and she wanted to know what she was doing, not just do. She longed to know about doing.
About five years into her dance training her dad bought her a bike and she carried her thinking about dance into cycling. She started going on rides with her dad and immediately discovered she liked riding and she liked to go fast. By the time she was 12 she was pretty fast but wanted to go faster. She wanted to know how to go faster. Her dad didn’t have the answers but knew someone who did: he knew the coach in charge of junior development for Great Britain cycling.
They brought her to the Herne Hill Velodrome. She was mesmerized by a place dedicated to going fast on a bike, a sort of dreamland for kids desiring to go fast. She loved the feel of riding as fast as she could going around banked turns. Her dad got her a track bike and she started to learn the Way of cycling like she she learned the Way of classical ballet: She wanted to know why, she wanted to know how and she wanted to know what she was doing, not just do. She longed to know about doing.
Her mum exposed her to classic literature like Shakespeare and Chaucer with its quaint and queer Olde English. She learned about the origins of England and English, the roots of country and language. She had a fascination of following the roots all the way down the rabbit hole; she loved the discovery of the origins of ideas, the different schools of thought and a special fascination about masters and mastery. Mastery resonated with her like nothing else except for going fast. In high school she read Plato’s Republic and wondered about what it really meant, not just an interpretation. So much of the modern world — West and now East — rested on the shoulders of ancient Greek civilization. She wanted to know the root ideas, even where the roots came from. Who were the masters that created the world around her? Why did they think the way they did when they did?
Her dance training faded into the background as track cycling moved to the foreground but she still maintained her ballet flexibility regimen. Her cat began to take notice. She started doing Pilates to improve her dynamic flexibility and to improve her position for cycling. Then she found out about a more sophisticated system called Gyrotonic, a system of movement with specialized apparatus originating in movement patterns from yoga, dance and Chinese tai chi. She went through all the teacher training courses so that she could have the equipment installed in her mum’s magic movement room. Her complete stretching program was a daily 90 minute ritual with no exceptions. As she invested time, energy, and mental focus into her movement and flexibility training, she transcended flexibility into the realm of feeling energy move from muscle to muscle as each muscle relaxed and contracted. She could visualize and feel each muscle to the point she became aware of when muscles were compensating for other muscles, essentially wrong sequencing of muscles even if the movement looked correct from the outside.
She discovered that just because your body learns a movement to the point you no longer think about it it doesn’t mean it learns it correctly — automatic movement or movement that feels good does not automatically mean correct movement. Over time, by working the movements in her flexibility routine ultra slowly and mindfully, she trained the muscle sequences to flow properly within their optimal, correct ranges of motion. She unlearned bad movement internals. She understood how different movements should and should not feel; looks are deceiving she discovered, such as on video. She developed a training method to deepen her mind-body connection to the extraordinary level of a professional ballet dancer, world-class violinist or pianist, or accomplished yogini — she opened up her sense of feeling to the point she had the body awareness of a cat. And, of course, her cat knew the difference — her movements now were smooth and efficient and controlled and correct, flowing like a jaguaress on a track bike.
After graduating from high school she attended University College London and pursued her B.A. degree in Ancient Greek. Her studies focused on learning the ancient Greek dialects so that she could become expert in ancient Greek civilization, the only way to truly gain access to knowing the Greek classics. She was able to live at home while she trained for track cycling’s 500m time trial and 3000m individual pursuit, a 3 and ½ minute event. She had excellent success as a junior on the Great Britain National Junior Team but didn’t blossom until a few years later. At the Great Britain National Championships when she was 20 she just missed making the National team in the pursuit and 500m but discovered that she had more potential in the longer pursuit. Her aerobic power was extraordinary for a teenager but still needed a few more years to develop. She learned about weight lifting for track cycling and observed the differences between sprinters and 500m riders and longer distance events like the pursuit and Madison. The sprinters did far more training volume of plyometrics and strength work of squats, power cleans and heavy posterior chain work. Ellie was already 5 foot 8 with long arms and legs and a femur-to-tibia bone length ratio close to ideal for cycling. Ellie had a huge aerobic motor and awesome biomechanics but also had enough force development to have excellent starts in the 500m which demands very high levels of explosive starting strength.
In her second and third years at University College London while working on her undergraduate degree, she spent a lot of time at the British Museum, the British Library and the Institute of Classical Studies. This gave her a glimpse of what was to come the next year: her acceptance into the University of Oxford and beginning her Masters of Philosophy degree in Greek History.
Her mind could now soar at light speed into the mother of all rabbit holes, all the way down to the seeds that spawned the roots of Western civilization, the origins of philosophy and critical thinking — the bedrock of modern science, the meaning of life, and the fountainhead of logic.
Ellie took great discernment in the quality of the original source of the ancient Greek, be it from the original papyrus or stone or as a restoration. She felt great pleasure in the opportunity to learn from the minds of the master’s masters such as Homer, Plato, Socrates and Aristotle. Nothing was as pleasurable as assimilating this treasure with the exception of going fast on her bike and, maybe, the deference of her cat.
At 21 years old, she finally came into her own as a world-class track cyclist. In between translating Homer’s Iliad, power cleans, and Gyrotonic, she made the British National team in both the 500m and pursuit. At the World Championships in Melbourne, Australia, Ellie placed 5th in the 500m and 3rd in the pursuit. She decided to just focus on pursuit for the next season and became World Champion in 2013 in Minsk, Belarus at the age of 22. Her studies clarified her thinking, intensifying her resolve to know more about the world of ancient Greece: How and why did they aspire to such idealism? What was the driving force to know about knowing? She was drawn into this ancient, magical realm like she was drawn into her mum’s magic room and the deep attraction to go fast on her bike.
Ellie delved deeply into the Homeric Greek dialect, dissecting the language that bore the Illiad and Odyssey. She quickly discovered the guiding idea of Greek culture, beginning with Homer’s epic poems, was the idea and ideal of areté. Her life for three years was translating something like this:
ἐστί τις λόγος
τὰν Ἀρετὰν ναίειν δυσαμβάτοισ’ ἐπὶ πέτραις,
ἐγγὺς δέ μιν θεῶν χῶρον ἁγνὸν ἀμφέπειν·
οὐδὲ πάντων βλεφάροισι θνατῶν
ἔσοπτος, ᾧ μὴ δακέθυμος ἱδρὼς
ἔνδοθεν μόλῃ,
ἵκῃ τ’ ἐς ἄκρον ἀνδρείας.
to this:
There is a tale that areté dwells on unclimbable rocks and close to the gods tends a holy place; she may not be seen by the eyes of all mortals, but only by him on whom distressing sweat comes from within, the one who reaches the peak of manliness.
— Simonides, Fragment 579, 6th to 5th century B.C. [translation by David A. Campbell]
She quickly found out that areté was a broad and deep concept which was foundational in their value system, how one’s life should be architected, and was central to all meaning on the individual and social levels. Areté on the most rudimentary level meant excellence but that is a grotesque oversimplification. She found it was more about the pursuit of excellence in a goal-directed, functional fashion often portrayed by great men in heroic terms. But as she discovered Plato, Socrates and Aristotle in her second and third years of study for her advanced degree in Greek History, she began to piece together the ancient Greek zeitgeist with greater clarity. The historical significance and meaning of areté evolved in three stages between early Homeric times circa 7th century B.C., with Plato in the 4th century B.C. and then later with Aristotle and onto the Hellenistic period. In the beginning, areté was projected in poetic, artistic and heroic terms as only peerless Homer could do. Areté primarily depicted physical prowess and heroic deeds in the service of the greater good but was not short on the use of guile or wit or strategy as means to better oneself and defeat enemies in the heat of combat. But with Plato and his Academy there was a tectonic shift in the Greek zeitgeist.
The idea of training, especially for combat, has ancient roots but the concept of a formal, dedicated location with building structures conceived for the purpose of training begins with the ancient Greek gymnasion, literally meaning “to train naked in gymnastic exercise.” Plato’s Academy started in a gymnasion in Athens. Plato’s philosophy took a different tack than Homer’s; he shifted the center of gravity of areté from mostly physical accomplishment with aid from the mind to a balance of mind, body and spirit. He harnessed the essence of the Socratic method which is the use of argumentation to foster critical thinking in light of exposing flaws in hypotheses. This is the origin of the scientific method: hypotheses — infant theories — are thrown to the wolves either by thought experiment, or later, real experiments in laboratories designed to falsify said hypotheses by directly facing the cruelties of reality. Thus science proves nothing — it only falsifies hypotheses — but this is the best process of seeking truth and distilling wisdom, wisdom being a persistent, useful truth that has withstood the onslaught of time and mind. Plato’s Academy thus produced the beginnings of the first modern way to develop a human to her full potential, to achieve Areté 2.0.
From this tectonic shift in the meaning of areté, Ellie unfolded the dawning of the first truly comprehensive educational process and system of Western origin known as paideia, literally “child rearing.” Plato’s Academy was the first educational system to not just codify the ideas of a culture but the ideals of a culture; the foundation of these ideals was set forth with the Homeric origins of areté appended to its Platonic evolutions.
Plato’s areté married Homeric poetics and aesthetics to the powers of Socratic rational and abstract thinking with the office and purpose of providing young, aristocratic, male Athenians with the best tools to achieve areté; to achieve a level of performance that transcends the mundane, mediocrity of the run of men found in the realms of proles to, instead, touch the unearthly and majestic peaks of the demigods.
The Academy’s gymnasion accommodated the physical development and the academics were provided by scholars, men of mental powers held in the highest esteem in subject matters deemed of merit. The ideals of Plato’s paideia never steered away from the pursuit of excellence, it is just that now the domains of excellence included mind, body and spirit on equal footing. Ellie noticed that other schools of thought on education in distant, foreign lands focused on the utilitarian side of knowledge whereas the Greeks afforded the highest value to teaching ideals, not just mechanics or mere practicalities. She noted that it is the Greek ideals — not utility — that elevated the Greek paideia to the greatest cultural achievement of all time, preserving the Greek Parthenon and its first inhabitants the laureate of civilization.
Aristotle — Plato’s student — introduced further evolutions into the principle of areté because of a fundamental difference of his opinion with Plato’s on the nature of Nature. Plato believed that ultimate reality resided in abstract Forms not of this world, in a separate realm out of man’s reach and that what we sensed were mere imperfect copies of the ideal Forms. Aristotle, on the other hand, was the world’s first authentic scientist, believing in the powers of observation and the empirical method. This shift in thinking changed Platonic areté which was anchored in Platonic idealism and his Theory of Forms to Aristotelian areté which featured the new concepts of ergon (function) and telos (purpose). Aristotle believed that all objects — animate or inanimate — had areté, ergon and telos.
In the case of humans, in the trajectory of the unfolding telos, areté signified talent and skill which affords ergon. If someone discovers their unique telos in life and works toward this end, in the course of their life they will achieve their unique, exalted potential — heroic excellence, areté — via performance displaying exemplary ergon. It is their innate areté that afforded the prowess but not without great sacrifice in the development of their telos. A cheetah and a turtle both can train as sprinters but the cheetah has much greater areté than the turtle for sprinting so that in the course of their unfolding telos of sprinting the level of ergon of the cheetah will dwarf that of the turtle. Ergo, the telos of the cheetah is sprinting whereas the telos of the turtle is not sprinting: the turtle needs to discover his unique telos because he will never achieve heroic excellence sprinting.
This may sound elementary but was actually revolutionary thinking because it transformed the pursuit of areté from a Homeric art to an Aristotelian engineering discipline. This was the origin of the most basic principles of design: materials have different end uses (telos) because of what they can do (ergon) and is based on what they are intrinsically and potentially capable of (areté). Ellie immediately thought of the phrase “form follows function” attributed to American architect Louis Sullivan in 1896 with his quote: “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law”: Aristotle meant exactly this but in the 4th century B.C. Sullivan’s assistant was Frank Lloyd Wright, a master of form and function and a cheetah amongst turtles in architectural areté.
Ellie was on to something, something big. She kept digging around in the ancient papyruses and came up with important insights regarding people and why they should sacrifice their life on the altar of areté. What is of utmost importance is knowing where your talents lie (areté) because that is your purpose (telos) since it undergirds what you do (ergon). Socrates, among other Greeks, belabored the Delphic aphorism “Know thyself” for good reason. Ellie looked deeper into Aristotle and uncovered additional motivation for achieving heroic excellence, that is, the reward for the consummation of your unique areté in the journey of life. Each of us has a unique telos that if properly developed will demonstrate increasing levels of ergon and will allow us to manifest our destiny and achieve sublime areté, which, according to Aristotle, is the key to eudaimonia, or “human flourishing,” life’s ultimate reward. Fast forwarding two millennia Ellie came to the realization that Aristotle brought together biology, psychology, aesthetics, science and engineering in one fell swoop, a poetic ingenuity that even Homer would envy.
Ellie contemplated her own life and immediately realized from the time she was a little girl that she had an inner knowing of her own specific telos, her raison d’être ( going fast on her bike, a burning desire to know the origins of things, movement, dance). She recognized that the road to the realization of stellar ergon was aligned with her destiny for both athletic and academic areté and that pursuit of anything less — taking the easy way, cutting corners — condemns oneself to a wasted life. Plato’s Academy and Aristotelian ergon and telos is preaching to the choir, Ellie thought. You have only lived the ultimate life if you possess insight into your own telos and do everything possible, everything in your power, to fulfill your destiny, to reach your potential, to approach life all-in, with white-hot passion and painstaking discipline while taking no prisoners. Your death will come with or without realizing your inner cheetah: It is sublime areté that gives life meaning and is the fuel for eudaimonia, the highest form of well-being composed of a balance between body, mind and soul with each of the three facets honed to sublime ergon.
Ellie was in her last year of graduate school at Oxford when a classmate showed her a video of the Turin Phenomic Worlds. What caught her eye immediately was the aesthetic qualities of the female competitors — especially Airi, Jōtara and Gabriela. Why did they look like this? In the last three years she had studied the Greek male physiques depicted on urns and marble statues but to her recollection there were very few analogous female athletic specimens. None of the women even vaguely looked like Airi and as for the men they were pretty different, as well. As is her nature, Ellie dug down to the roots of Greek athletics to reveal startling, hidden truths.
The precise date of the ancient Olympics is disputed but is probably around 776 B.C. in Olympia. Women competed in a short running event called the stadia, a sprint distance of around 200m (600 feet) but not much else. Ever since the Homeric period, aesthetics was a foundational idea and ideal of Greek culture and is quite different than the superficial meaning that aesthetics has shriveled to in modernity. Socrates spoke of balance between gymnastics (physical) and cultivation of music (spirit) and Aristotle developed the concept in depth in his ethical framework in regard to virtues with both too little or too much leading to vice and the appropriate course being the middle ground, the Aristotelian Golden Mean. The Greeks deployed the concept of the Golden Mean — of balance between extremes — throughout the paideia, be it architecture, politics, athletics or ethics. Ellie found out that in the most ancient games the most admired physical specimens were the pentathletes because they had a body fit for all efforts. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he outlines a young man’s ultimate physical beauty: “a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength…This is why the athletes in the pentathlon are most beautiful.” So what was the ancient pentathlon? It was the discus, javelin, stadia run (200m), long jump and wrestling. The logic behind the choice of these five events was that they had merit in warfare, which they certainly did. Fast forwarding to the introduction of the decathlon in 1904, the longest duration events of the ten events are the 400m and 1500m runs. That begs the question: why was endurance nonexistent?
Ellie inquired into the ancient Greek references to endurance and discovered that messengers relayed communications by foot up to 100km (62 miles) which by today’s standards would be considered ultra-endurance. Aristotle’s student, Alexander the Great, had his messenger, Philonides, run 238km (148 miles) from Sicyon to Elis along with the Spartan runner Anystis in a single day. The current 24-hour record is 304km (189 miles) set in 1997. There are stories of messengers covering 145 miles in 2 days. If you consider that messengers were the equivalent of email in 400 B.C., you quickly surmise how important messengers were. What we call “the Marathon” today was a messenger running between the city of Marathon to Athens to proclaim that the Persians were defeated at the Battle of Marathon. This distance is approximately 25 miles but depends on the route. The marathon was added to the Olympics in 1896 but there was no women’s marathon until 1984.
Ellie realized that the marathon, just like the pentathlon, were not events mapped to any physiological underpinnings or well-founded evolutionary truths; they were, instead, based on the physical demands of warfare and the commemoration of a single messenger who died communicating a message about warfare. There is no reason whatsoever that an event of a length of 100km couldn’t have been the gold standard for endurance running in lieu of 26 miles 385 yards. The choice of the “Marathon” was one of Royal decree, not one based on sound principles of deep biology. In any case, endurance was alive and well in ancient Greece but was not part of the ancient Olympic games or any recognized sporting venue until very modern times and only as stand-alone races. Was it because ancient Greek “email” was so common and was not done by warriors that it was not considered a big enough deal to add to the Olympic Games?
In a sense Ellie was stunned by these findings, that events in the modern Olympics that supposedly represent either a standard for a consummately developed human or a standard for ultra-endurance, are, in reality, not even close to the mark. She started looking into Phenomic Games and immediately recognized that the Phenomic 5 is a biomechanical and metabolic pentathlon that comprehensively addresses critical movement patterns and all of the power spectrum’s metabolic gears and their switching points. Nemesis is 1st gear, The Climb is 2nd gear, The Erg is the first aspect of 3rd gear, The Burn is the second aspect of 3rd gear and the clean and jerk is 4th gear. She cross examined her background in comparison and saw that she had world-class 2nd and 3rd gears and the makings of a good 4th gear but lacked a competitive 1st gear.
Ellie then conducted an inventory of her aesthetic qualities. The ancient Greeks believed that beauty was expressed in qualities like proportion, line and symmetry vis-à-vis the Parthenon, an aesthetic icon. When she danced, ballet also valued line and proportion — the human eye sees these qualities immediately thus squashing any aspirations of a portly, squatty ballet dancer. When she danced she had beautiful line; her long limbs accentuated this quality. But as she transitioned into cycling her appearance changed; she became out of balance between her upper and lower body. The sprint and weight training made her lower body thicker and bottom heavy — she lost proportion and line. The quadriceps should taper into the knee, not be squared off by thick, unsightly teardrops. Airi, Jōtara and Gabriela had definition, symmetry, proportion and line unlike any other female archetype. Frontend sports make you big and blocky and backend sports make you gaunt. When she began to do more training for the road time trial event — an hour long event — her proportion improved because her legs got thinner but she also lost substantial upper body strength. Aristotelian inductive logic took control of her: when she put all this together it was a revelation, the single greatest revelation of her life…what stuck in the back of her mind was Aristotle’s line, “a body capable of enduring all efforts, either of the racecourse or of bodily strength…This is why the athletes in the pentathlon are most beautiful.” Aristotle was correct in saying that “the most beautiful body is a body capable of enduring all efforts” but the pentathlon and the Olympic Games had no event to showcase this deep truth because of the lack of endurance — an absolutely mysterious and tragic flaw.
None of these athletes — from antiquity to modernity — expressed the ultimate human form, a cosmic aesthetic never emerged.
Form follows function: If she trained for phenomic ergon then her present form would evolve toward the ultimate female aesthetic — a cosmic jaguaress. The first true supermodels of the ultimate female form are Airi, Jōtara and Gabriela: they radiate Areté 3.0, a serious upgrade in looks. The reason nobody looked like them is because nobody had phenomic ergon. Looking good without being good means ergon deficiency and it shows — the Way is in training, phenomic training. Ellie deeply desired to prepare for Whistler Phenomic Worlds. To realize her potential phenomic aesthetic she needed to recalibrate her telos and ergon a notch toward the endurance pole. Ellie envisioned the majesty of experiencing phenomic areté, a destiny of heroic excellence mandating a harmonious and balanced recipe of mind, body and spirit that, at the moment, was out of her grasp. But she could taste it; she just needed a preeminent chef with the finesse and chops to cook up a jaguaress.
Ellie was now in her 3rd year at Oxford and one of the most beautiful things about Oxford is the rowing program. Mesopotamia may be the cradle of civilization while Athens is the cradle of Western civilization but the River Thames between Mortlake and Putney in London, England is the cradle of rowing. The famous men’s rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford began in 1829 and the women had their first race in 1927. She could have chosen to be coached by the world-caliber UK women’s Olympic rowing team but, instead, chose a new coach on the Oxford team, Dr. Jan Edelman. Jan just graduated from Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK with a PhD in Sport Science. Her doctoral thesis was: “Theory and Methodology of Program Design for Optimizing Performance in Olympic Rowing: An Integration of Biological Information Science with Exercise Physiology.” This caught Ellie’s attention straight away and they hit it off brilliantly. They had a meeting with her coach, Berry Sherman, on the British National Track Cycling team and got the wheels turning for a plan of attack for Continental Phenomic qualification and Whistler Phenomic Worlds.
When it came to rowing, she wanted to know everything about rowing and that included knowing how the racing shells were built to the history of rowing going back to ancient Greek galleys in Homer’s Iliad. She wanted to know why, she wanted to know how and she wanted to know what she was doing, not just do. She longed to know about doing. She insisted on learning the basics of real rowing on real water and the Oxford Fleming Boat House at Wallingford was the perfect place to grok an authentic rowing experience. She quickly discovered the three-pronged process of rowing skill development: the Concept 2 rowing ergometer for developing the motor; the indoor rowing tanks for learning how to use the oars and the blade’s intimate feel with water without the instability and balance required for the shell; and real rowing where you integrate motor, use of the oars, and feel for the boat, that is, real rowing like in the Olympics.
Dr. Edelman and Coach Sherman assessed Ellie’s background versus the Phenomic 5 and it was clear that she would dominate The Burn and probably win The Climb. Physiologically she was world-class in the 1st aspect of 3rd gear with her performance in the 3000m pursuit which metabolically matches The Erg but she had never rowed before. Her upper body strength needed to be beefed up for the clean and jerk and her technique needed to be dialed in. Nemesis — meaning 1st gear — was the glaring weakness. Jan theorized that Ellie had the perfect motor for The Erg; she just needed to wire her nervous system for rowing’s force production curve. In six months she can learn excellent technique because of the world-class expertise of the coaching and the overall environment at Oxford. They could tap into additional ideas from the British Olympic rowing National team coaches. She can become a superb rowing machine in 10 months. But Athens was not built in a day; one year cannot make her the world’s fittest woman but she will scare the shit out of the best in the world this year — that is the plan. In her second year she can do immersive, ultra-endurance work to solidify her backend and tweak her lifting. Two to three years of technique and strength work for the clean and jerk along with ample use of the Adjunctive Tool Pool will elevate Ellie to phenomic areté.
By the looks of Ellie’s body everything was coming together like the Manhattan Project with about three months to go before Continentals. Her structure was a superb ballet body when she was a kid with her long, lean flowing lines but now she is a ballet dancer that front squats, power cleans, and does jerks from wood blocks along with 1-arm heavy dumbbell supine presses off a Swiss ball. She had to be leaner than a ballet dancer; her body fat had come down and now you could see that her form and function were intertwined, two sides of the same Möbius strip. She is going to be dangerous game with her killer body, a form forged in the kiln of phenomic ergon.
She just got a call from a local paper, the London Herald, that Dr. John Beasley is going to drop in and do an interview in a couple days. Team Ellie is thrilled.
It is Thursday at around 11:30 in the morning and there is stubborn London fog still shrouding the Oxford Fleming Boat House. Ellie had just finished a serious training in the rowing tank and is pumped up with crimson fire coursing through her veins.
When Dr. John Beasley and his cameraman Ralph Towers arrived at the dock they knew who Ellie was and John asked, “You must be Ellie. I take it you just finished a long piece on a Greek trireme.”
Ellie replied, “Oh, Dr. Beasley, I am impressed, you boned up on Greek navy vessels. Yes, that is what training feels like around here. You want to set up on the dock overlooking the boathouse?”
Ralph piped in, “That would be great. The fog adds a nice touch. Will be ready to roll in a jiffy.”
“Sounds great, Let me round up the coaches.”
____________________________________________________________
May 16, 2015
Emailed transcript to the LONDON HERALD for the weekly column:
Portraits of The World’s Fittest Humans: Preparing for The Phenomic Games
Ellie Murray, Women’s 3000 Meter Pursuit World Champion (track cycling) in 2013
Dispatch from the Oxford Fleming Boat House at Wallingford, United Kingdom
— — — — — —
by Dr. John Beasley, PhD
Scientific Journalist
My mission is to track down the leading contenders for next season’s Phenomic Games World Championship in Whistler, Canada and bring their dreams, beliefs, and training approaches directly to you every Saturday.
Who are the world’s fittest humans?
What do they do to prepare?
Why do they do it?
__________________________________________________________
Ellie Murray
Phenomic Human Ranking: unranked
Age: 23
Height: 5–9 (1.75m)
Weight: 142 lbs. (64.4kg)
Birthplace: London, England
Education: City College London, B.A., Ancient Greek
Oxford University, currently in 3rd year of Master of Philosophy degree in Greek History
Occupation: Great Britain Track Cycling National team
Background: World Individual Pursuit Champion at 2013 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Minsk, Belarus
4th place in Road Time Trial at 2013 UCI World Road Championships in Tuscany, Italy
3rd place in Individual Pursuit and 5th place in 500m Time Trial at 2012 UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Melbourne, Australia
Started training for The Phenomic Games in 2014
Favorite event: The Burn
Most challenging event: Nemesis
Favorite exercise: Romanian deadlifts
Coaches: Dr. Jan Edelman and Berry Sherman
Diet: omnivore
Favorite food: Surf and Turf (lobster and steak)
Status: single
Current residence: London, England
Nickname: none
Interview
Dr. John Beasley: Hello, today I here with Ellie Murray and her coaches Dr. Jan Edelman and Barry Sherman. In the background is the Oxford Fleming Boat House at Wallingford outside London, England. Ellie, from your background you are an amazing young woman, so accomplished at the age of 23 both academically and athletically. What drives you?
Ellie Murray: John, ever since I can remember I wanted to know about the origins of things, not just what they are now or appear to be. I want to know the root cause or the original idea, and about its history from day one to today. For me, life is about understanding how something works and how it evolved. I want to develop a deep feeling about something, to profoundly appreciate it, not just memorize a list of facts the way school programs are structured. Facts are only a small part of really knowing something; to know something to the level of mastery requires experience working with it hands-on with people that are masters like in the middle ages with guilds and apprenticeships. This goes all the way back to the Greeks and Romans. The word “apprentice” from ancient Latin is “to grasp — prehendere — seize, or get hold of.” You have to roll up your sleeves and be tactile — literally hands-on — that is how we learn to achieve mastery, to truly understand; it is not just a cerebral process. Parroting facts to get an “A” on an exam is memorizing — not learning — and does not lead to expertise or mastery.
Dr. John Beasley: That sounds to me like the essence of learning is training by experience, I bet your mum taught you that in your early days of dance, yes?
Ellie Murray: Absolutely! When I was 5 I didn’t know all the fancy French dance terms right away but I could do the movements. Dance opened my eyes to deep learning because I could do the movement and then learn what the movement is called and then learn the origins of the term and the movement. For example, “ballet” is a French word but its origin is Greek — ballizo — which means “to dance or to jump about.” I use that approach today with everything.
Dr. John Beasley: And that connected the dots to studying ancient Greek history at Oxford?
Ellie Murray: When I was in junior high school, I found out that modern society had its origins in ancient Greece. Knowing that didn’t help much because it was all Greek to me! So I needed to fix that problem. By learning ancient Greek dialects and dissecting the original ancient papyruses, it opened my eyes to how to compose one’s life, to design a life plan. We all have this latent, hidden potential — areté — that is the key to happiness and this happiness is not the superficial kind like winning the lottery but is a much higher form of happiness. This is where people misunderstand and as a result find themselves as they reach adulthood in the empty shallows of bare existence; they view happiness as a function of material gain and continually chase after superficial pleasures not realizing the higher form of happiness.
The higher form of happiness is more accurately a consciousness of well-being and it emerges from within us provided there is a balance of mind, body and spirit and that these three facets are highly developed. Now if you discover your unique purpose, your telos as Aristotle calls it, and develop it to the point that you reach your potential, your calling, your unique areté — then this is the pinnacle of life, a fulfilled life, eudaimonia as he called it. Your life is something you build, or compose. You exchange time — a fleeting asset — for building out and perfecting physical, mental and spiritual assets, assets that define who you are, your character. As Heraclitus said, “Character is destiny.” You don’t automatically manifest or experience your potential; no, you must architect your potential over the course of your lifetime. A structure must be composed in order to connect to your areté and that structure is your life and becomes your destiny.
There is a parable told by Prodicus in the 5th century B.C. about the destiny of Heracles. When he was young he came to a crossroad where he was met by two goddesses, Areté and Kakia. Areté offered him a life of struggle and turmoil facing obstacles but eventually realizing heroic excellence whereas Kalia offered bountiful earthly pleasures and riches of extreme proportion. Heracles chose Areté’s offering. I chose Areté’s offering but most people go with Kalia and end up marooned on the shoals of life. King Midas also comes to mind or the story of the three little pigs.
Dr. John Beasley: Ellie, in many ways eudaimonia sounds like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, is it not?
Ellie Murray: Maslow ripped off Aristotle! [everybody laughs] Many great ideas in modern times were really developments of the ancient Greeks. Mark Twain said it best, “The ancients have stolen our best ideas.” There is a lot of truth to this. People today talk about functional training but know very little about what that means. Functional training began with ergon and the Academy’s gymnasion; these are not 20th century concepts. If you desire to know what “functional training” means you begin by studying Aristotle and then you study design from an engineer’s perspective and then study biomechanics which is really mechanical engineering of biological systems. After that, become an apprentice and learn firsthand, hands-on. Jan, do you agree with that approach?
Dr. Jan Edelman: That is asking a lot but that is what it takes to gain a true understanding of functional training given the Greek origins of function. There are two different knowledge domains in play here that have far less in common than people believe: “function” and “training.” By “function” in this context we mean performance to some standard of measure in the real world or its utility value — “function” or “utility” implies real world which is in the domain of engineering, not science per se. The Phenomic 5 is a set of real world demands, for example, that is designed to be the precise fitness function equating to the mental and physical survival performance requirements for Homo sapiens. But something as mundane as unloading groceries from your car is also functional.
By “training” in this particular context we mean doing some movement protocol in a more controlled, safer, simplified environment with less moving parts than the real world so that the adaptive response yields demonstrable and reliable transference to performance in the real world. The process is to overload a small set of physiological parameters to trigger an appropriate adaptive response. The key is the bridge and the quality of the matching between the two domains: the concept of “yield” is the bridge and is an engineering concept. Are you using the optimal tool for the task at hand? “Yield” measures the result of the training process as measured by ΔP [Ed. change in performance] in the real world application in functional terms. In other words, what can you do in training in terms of energy and time investment including risk exposure to yield the greatest impact on ΔP in a given time frame? More precisely, how effective is your training process to improve ΔP under real-world circumstances?
But in theoretical biology, the word “function” is a heated topic because it brings into play reductionism, design and teleology, which are man’s conceptual and descriptive terms from the outside looking-in relative to utility, not terms appropriate for organisms unless framed in a survival context relative to heredity and even then is considered taboo. Evolution is not about creating design relative to need, it is about emergence of properties by happenstance that allow an organism to better persist in its environment. So functional training only has value when discussing utility which is the province of physics, biomechanics and physiology — the use of levers, strength of materials, reliability, motor and motor control function as measured in terms of energy, power and torque. You are ultimately limited by your capacity to adapt. So given knowledge of that, you are then positioned to discuss real world applications. What I mean is: if you are going to perform this set of movements in real world contexts, what exercise regimen would I assemble to execute said movements safely, reliably and efficiently?
Dr. John Beasley: Jan, that describes the purpose of the Adjunctive Tool Pool, yes?
Dr. Jan Edelman: Absolutely. The A.T.P. [Ed. Adjunctive Tool Pool] is a global and historical body of knowledge from diverse sources that is a melting pot of science and experience for the purpose of applying specific training tools and the skill sets to implement them in order to remedy weak links that currently block your access to greater ΔP. The A.T.P. provides tools that are implemented in a mapping process between your training and targeted ΔP objectives. Conceptually it is part of the bridge I was talking about between training and competitive outcomes. If this had no validity, then there would be no need to do anything other than the events themselves. The Greeks were the first to see that that is not true, thus exercise science was born with that observation and here we are.
Dr. John Beasley: Jan, that leads right into Phenomic Games and the origins of the Phenomic 5…
Dr. Jan Edelman: Of course. Pentathlon 2.0. That is precisely the approach used by the Phenomic Secretariat but on an unprecedented scale. The creation of the Phenomic 5 addresses the question of what is the nexus of functionality in both biomechanical and metabolic dimensions for humans to optimize survival given a fully comprehensive fitness function. Each element of the Phenomic 5 targets a specific biomechanical and metabolic challenge that directly maps to the four metabolic gears and to biomechanical movement patterns instrumental to our survival from an evolutionary perspective. This is tantamount to defining the world’s fittest human. It is this specific collection of challenges — the clean and jerk, The Burn, The Erg, The Climb and Nemesis — that make Phenomic Games so fascinating to watch yet so diabolical to prepare for. No stone is left unturned, if you have any weakness it will be exposed. Turin Worlds sure taught us that.
Dr. John Beasley: But it was the exposure of human weaknesses — the abject failures — that served as foils for the magnificent displays of heroic excellence. The stark contrasts of human frailty and transcendence were the big headlines of Turin and these story lines appeal equally across all cultures throughout history. Plato and Homer would have been mesmerized, glued to the edges of their chairs. Ellie, what appealed to you about Phenomic Games?
Ellie Murray: Two things captivated me: the balance a competitor must have across all five challenges and the aesthetics of the best performers. Form and function become two sides of the same coin at the highest level and this is the ultimate Beauty, a pure expression of areté. Aristotle if he were alive today would have realized the grave error of the composition of the ancient Olympic Games and would stand behind Phenomic Games as a successor and exemplar of Areté 3.0, a serious upgrade to the paideia and gymnasion. I realized I had flaws in my physical development and the deficiencies were manifested in my imbalanced form. I am deficient in 1st gear function, my lower body is too thick looking and my body fat was too high. Also, the shape and level of muscle development overall just wasn’t there. Shape is a real important factor in overall aesthetic form. In the bigger picture, quality of life is founded on a balance in mind, body and spirit. As you learn more about yourself and see yourself as you truly are, you remedy your faults to the best of your ability. I am not one to put the cart before the horse. I am patient to build a team of thoroughbreds before connecting up my chariot. Deep development of mind, body and spirit cannot be achieved with a few cheap tricks and by cutting corners, it takes years, decades to cultivate mastery; I want to build a chariot of the gods.
Dr. John Beasley: After spending so much time translating the original Greek of the masters, have you created a philosophy of your own? It sounds like you have brewed up something special.
Ellie Murray: I don’t pretend that Socrates and Plato are passing me the baton but I have some observations on life that at least make sense to me. First, you are not just alive or dead. There is a continuum of aliveness which gives rise to the question “how alive are you?” This is a very real question, one worthy of the highest gravity of contemplation. I feel most alive when I am the most highly conditioned and being conditioned phenomically — that is, full spectrum — is when I feel most alive and vibrant. My energy feels sort of like an “all systems go” vibe. A pure and swift tailwind-like feeling in regard to my bearings in life. This is my philosophy on the role the body plays in a consciousness of well-being. Mentally, life is about appreciation, and appreciation, like happiness, has several levels that most people will never experience because of lack of awareness. Appreciation is a quality, it is a quality of life that has an infinite depth dimension. Appreciation has no limit just like knowledge, subtlety and experience have no limits.
For example, let’s take two people listening to the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, also called the Leningrad Symphony. One person is Itzhak Perlman, the world-renowned, Israeli violinist, and the other is a person at random from the bush in Nigeria. Both are sitting next to each as the orchestra plays in Moscow. Itzhak is going to know what everyone in the symphony is doing, he is going to have deep, intimate understanding of what all the stringed musicians are doing, he is going to understand that the symphony is about the 25 million Russians that died in the Siege of Leningrad, and he is going to know that their deaths were at the hands of Hitler’s Nazi Germany who murdered 6 million Jews. The other person will be hearing strange and perhaps pleasant sounds and not much else.
This is not about the superiority of Itzhak Perlman over an illiterate Nigerian, it is about the meaning of one’s life when the depth of understanding of what is happening around you is at an extraordinarily high level. The feeling and knowledge you possess gives you a level of understanding that elevates your appreciation of being alive to soaring heights — you feel more alive because of this exalted appreciation. This is not something that automatically happens over time or by getting “A’s” on tests because you memorized Russian composers and the history of World War II. You have to build it — your subjective, inner life is an internal structure that you and you alone are the architect of. Not doing this results in a wasted life. The ancient Greek philosophers knew this. Most people today don’t or don’t care.
Dr. John Beasley: Ellie, I bet your philosophy carries right over to your training: dance, cycling, Phenomic Games. I bet you cycle like a violinist!
Ellie Murray: I really do. It’s just like that. I did it from the time I was very young, I just didn’t fully grasp its power on the meaning of life. Like Perlman or any great musician, it is about the feeling of the music, about your ability to express something from deep inside you that only you can express and if you get your cluttered mind out of the way it will happen in a way that connects with the audience. Even the Nigerian, who knows no facts about the music or musicians or history, will probably feel the power of the connection if it is pure enough, or, should I say, a soulful expression of the sublime quality of a master which is a byproduct of 20 years of disciplined practice in the pursuit of perfection.
For me, I must understand my body’s movement in terms of a feeling of flow. To master any sport it is imperative that you deeply understand and appreciate what every muscle, every bone, is doing in the act of performance. I learned in ballet that our body is a performative instrument and that the key to unlocking our potential — our areté — is using our mind to feel the energy moving through our body, through each body part. After years of tuning into the inner workings of the body you gain a deeper feeling of what is going on and what is going wrong. For many years it is trial-and-error but eventually you have a new sense, a sense of reliably calibrating how you feel with how you perform — this is our deepest form of trust; it means “trusting yourself with your life is a go.”
It is an innerstanding, not an understanding, just like Perlman with his violin, he doesn’t need to have any measurements of how he sounds — he knows how he sounds. A beginner would have no clue how they sound because their mind is so tunnel-visioned and busy making sounds. I can run a diagnostic test on myself just by feeling my movement pattern. I can set the heart rate monitor and power meter aside and trust myself with no reservation; it is a feeling of freedom, really. But it takes years of disciplined focus to build such awareness, such innerstanding to be a virtuoso violinist or a world-class Phenomics competitor. That is why I do Gyrotonic, yoga and other slow movement patterns 90 minutes a day. It is a focus on the intersection of mind and body and the synthesis of that practice is spiritual — a consciousness of well-being. I feel the unification of mind, body, and spirit. I am connected to my essence, or as Bruce Lee, the martial artist said: “Express your true self through your root.”
I don’t just do a movement with correct biomechanical execution, I also tune into the muscle contraction and relaxation patterns to know if they are correct or not. When you do this long enough you just know when something is right or not — innerstanding means an inner knowing. The combination of video analysis and how a movement feels are the ways that guide my progress in movement quality. Understand I do not use my mind to interfere with my movement or motor control while I train on the bike, run, or resistance train. That is not only counterproductive but is catastrophic to performance. Training for feeling is to know what my movement and performing body feels like so that that when I compete I am directly connected at the root level with communication directly from my muscles and body in general. That’s what feelings are: feelings are signals from your body — develop this awareness as much as possible until feelings precisely reflects your performance. Feelings become your internal instrument panel.
Just knowing quantity: sets, reps, cadence, heart rate, stroke rate, etc. are not enough to compete at the level where I am heading. Looking at a composer’s score is like the quantitative element whereas the musical interpretation — the actual playing, the musical expression — is the qualitative element. In fact, Jan and I used my training method to rewire my cycling motor to a rowing motor.
Dr. John Beasley: Ellie, from what you are saying I think you are in the camp that the qualified self trumps the quantified self. Would you say that is true?
Ellie Murray: I think as a beginner to intermediate you are forced into relying on instrumentation because of a lack of development of classical Socratic “know thyself” ability. But where people make the big mistake here is totally relying on instrumentation in lieu of building the capacity to know what is going on in your body. As I said, feelings are your built-in instrument panel…plug into them! This awareness happens to some degree strictly as a function of training volume but to bring it up to the level of innerstanding at a masterful level mandates intense mental training over many years. A disciplined mind is the tool to build the qualified self: “know thyself” leads to that emergent sense of “trust thyself.” But I am not saying this is an either/or process. What you want is highly developed feeling and tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge, the feeling of inner knowing in tandem with the thinking of outer knowing. Now you can judge — as opposed to rely strictly on calculation — to make decisions about your training. Your areté will be out of your grasp if you fail to innerstand yourself. Gadgets, big data and number crunching do not lead to heroic excellence. All of the tech combined is just a tool to aid a higher-order, judgement skill-set, not a substitute for it. But earning unassailable trust in yourself is the crown jewel of the training process.
Dr. Jan Edelman: I learned a lot from Ellie. We combined her qualitative intuitive sense with scientific instrumentation to navigate the training process. The 3000m pursuit and 2000m rowing are metabolically in the same part of the power continuum, they are both the 2nd aspect of 3rd gear, that is, they both are at sustained intensities very close to VO2 max. They also engage the same prime mover muscle movement patterns with great overlap. The Erg is around 30% upper body pulling movement but her 500m time trial track cycling event and The Burn require a lot of upper strength of similar muscle groups as rowing but there are differences in range of motion. There is a difference in the frequency of muscle recruitment; the pursuit is at 90 rpm whereas rowing has a stroke rate in the high 30s and is bilateral [Ed. both legs engage at the same time] which means a much greater force production requirement in rowing.
We figured we can add the rowing neural recruitment patterns to her motor control repertoire in 10 months. It would not be at the masterful level but it will be very good. A big advantage that is counterintuitive is she has never rowed before. She has no bad habits to break which is more time consuming than learning from scratch, especially someone like Ellie that knows how to learn movement patterns. By learning in this context I mean the process of using the voluntary, conscious mind to engage the body in a very specific, repeatable way to achieve the correct biomechanical technique and once that is locked-in then let the premotor cortex, cerebellum and peripheral nervous system take over from there so that the neural programming will consolidate at an accelerated pace.
Ellie Murray: Jan showed me videos of the muscle sequencing of perfect rowing mechanics and I set to work visualizing the transfer of energy flowing through the kinetic chain of muscles of the rowing stroke. I did this on the Concept 2 rowing ergometer super slow at low resistance until I began to feel the correct firing pattern. I spent a lot of time just getting the sequencing right before doing work sessions at normal velocity. I wanted to get the feel of the movement burned into my brain before stepping on the gas. Understand my intension was not to focus my attention internally by telling my muscles what to do beyond initially getting the biomechanics dialed-in while tapping into what the right kinetic chain feels like. Once that was done I focused my attention externally on what I was doing and not internally on how I did it. There is a mountain of studies on attention and performance and they all say do not focus your attention internally trying to control your movement — ever. Instead, focus attention externally and let your body operate on autopilot. Do not even focus on breathing, that is still internal. Just get out of your body’s way! Now I have an awareness through feeling in my mental background on how my body is doing and this is not to be confused with foreground attention interfering with motor control. In other words, read — don’t write. Feeling is an input from my body whereas attention acting intentionally or unintentionally to control movement is an output. I only want consolidated, autonomic motor control happening. This creates an ideal mind-body setting to get into a flow state as you approach your red line. Flow is impossible if you telling your body what to do.
The motor element for me is already highly trained from cycling; what I needed to do was accelerate the process of motor control consolidation via neural plasticity. The wiring is what I lacked, not building the motor. There are three things to be aware of: the motor, the control elements, and motor control. The motor and control elements are hardware and motor control is software. I am essentially doing a software upgrade that takes a year to download. It is not quite that simple because motor control also involves modification of the control elements — that is what plasticity is about. We dialed in the micronutrition to amplify the adaptations of plasticity, to speed up the download, if you will. After all, ΔP is directly proportional to the rate of adaptive response.
Dr. Jan Edelman: Several high level rowing coaches and I scrutinized her biomechanics and we debugged any defective movement patterns before they could be consolidated into bad habits. Once the biomechanics were dialed-in then we started work on engaging her nervous system for power output at loads exceeding the force production of the actual 2000m event. We had her get on a WattBike right next to the Concept 2 and she did high intensity 5 to 7 second intervals at full power and then rapidly switch to the Concept 2 at high power to aid in the transfer of recruitment of the entire nervous system utilized for rowing. The big motor units of her nervous system would have a lower activation energy after the cycling given she is a pursuit world champion and would more readily convert to engaging in the different stimulus of rowing. You want to do this with the afferent and efferent nerve traffic “running hot” all the way up the spinal cord to the cerebellum and premotor cortex. Minimize the refractory period in the transition from bike to rower. You want to amplify feedback and feedforward activity throughout the motor control process — you want it buzzing. So we would go back and forth with very short, alactic, full-power intervals but with long rest periods between matched pair intervals to avoid fatigue and producing metabolic waste byproducts that would interfere with the firing and sequencing of motor control.
We then started to perform work sets and carefully monitored heart rate and lactate levels to get an idea on how much muscle mass for rowing was not in common with cycling. It was there at first but rapidly declined over 3 months. The experiment was working, we were successfully using her cycling motor control to leverage motor control adaptive response for rowing. In rowing for women there are two weight classes, 130 pounds or less and greater than 130. Ellie weighs in at 140 to 142 and is 5 foot 9. If she dropped down to 130 and retained her Concept 2 output she right now would be 6th on the Oxford team. In the heavyweight class she would be 10th. World-class female heavyweight rowers are 6 feet tall. That is not what she would be able to do in real rowing because the motor control of using oars and the kinesthetics of the body/rowing shell relationship is another problem altogether that would take years. But for The Erg, we only need the motor wired correctly and she is getting close to some really high power output levels and there is quite a bit of upside on the table. By Whistler, Ellie the pursuit animal will be a rowing animal. Berry, what did you see from the cycling perspective?
Berry Sherman: I have been Ellie’s cycling coach for eight years and I know her mental approach to perfecting movement patterns. She squeezes out every watt of power possible in the service of locomotion as opposed to being lost as heat because of wasted or inefficient motion. At pursuit and rowing intensities, you need to have every watt be a net watt showing up at the pedal or into the oar and you can gauge this from a comparison of net power output to oxygen consumption. As the ratio of net watts per liter of O2 increases you know energy efficiency is improving.
Dr. Jan Edelman: Yes, exactly. When Ellie started her work sets this ratio was low; she had a monster O2 consumption but it wasn’t showing up at the ergometer. Lactate was high and net power was not there at competitive levels. Now it is closer to members of the Oxford team. Also, her O2 consumption has moved up as well as she was able to recruit more muscle. Because cycling has a higher frequency of muscle engagement we had Ellie apply force more evenly during the stroke as opposed to an explosive catch. We are having her target the “fat middle” of the power stroke where her most trained, large muscle mass lies and this reduces lactate production at a given stroke rate. This is optimal for anyone doing the 2000m as opposed to a 500m rowing sprint.
Ellie Murray: I caught on to that right away and used it in my mental visualizations with my Gyrotonic work and slow speed Concept 2 work. It is all part of getting the sequencing down and improving net efficiency; you work on these facets after the biomechanics are debugged.
Berry Sherman: Part of the overall conversion of Ellie’s cycling to rowing motor process was bringing the A.T.P. into play. Jan and I met with a couple of Great Britain’s National Olympic weightlifting coaches and we assembled a periodized training plan that addresses her weaknesses in movement patterns for the clean and jerk, The Burn and The Erg. To maximize ΔP for the Phenomic 5 this is an imperative and requires knowledge from a variety of coaches. Together we had the expertise to make this happen. We prioritized synergies — that is, focus on movements that benefit multiple events.
Dr. Jan Edelman: Ellie had some forward flexion in her spine from the lower thoracic spine upward during the rowing stroke, particularly between the catch and the first half of the drive phase where you have very high force vectors. Your spine needs to be a lever transferring energy from hip and knee extension to the arms that then attach to the handle. If there is excessive spinal flexion in this process, energy is lost as heat. Her spine was flexing during the drive too much. We also ascertained her triceps strength was deficient. We also wanted more gluteus maximus strength.
Berry Sherman: One thing we did is shift her from Romanian deadlifts which emphasize hamstrings over erector spinae strength because the bar path is close to the legs decreasing the lever arm of the spine. So we introduced good mornings which fix that problem directly. The Olympic lifting A.T.P. also fixed her posterior chain and erector spinae shortcomings. Her abdominals and hip flexors were already good to go.
Ellie Murray: When we started the interval training with a load close to maximal intensity, my leg and hip extension overpowered my ability to keep my spine rigid to transfer power from pelvis to shoulders, almost like my hips would rocket down the rowing slide but my hands would stay put! I was compensating with spinal flexion. We introduced some very specific eccentric training for my spine from the A.T.P. to remedy the problem. Now I can blast from the catch with a tight spine, no significant warping. I have the strength in my erector spinae but the endurance to stay rigid is not there yet for the full 2000m.
Dr. John Beasley: I noticed you said “eck-centric” and not “e-centric.” I hear a lot of…
[Ellie cuts John off]
Ellie Murray: Pronouncing it “e-centric” is incorrect, period. Eccentric is derived from the Greek ekkentros, from ex “out of” and kentron “center.” There is no possible acceptable alternative pronunciation. As you can imagine, given my background this is major peeve of mine.
Dr. Jan Edelman: I agree with Ellie. Originally it was always pronounced correctly because it is a direct Greek etymological derivation — why would the adopter of the term mispronounce it right out of the gate? You can’t possibly get “e centric” out of its etymology. I heard it was Arthur Jones, the inventor of Nautilus machines back in the late 60s and early 70s, that started saying it that way and other people just mimicked him because he made eccentric training popular. He was an inventor and certainly not a Greek scholar. He advocated eccentric training as part of his method. But I don’t know for sure. It was a bad meme that caught on. Just because someone like myself is a professor in exercise science doesn’t make me a Greek scholar like Ellie. The real problem is that the terms eccentric and concentric are egregious misnomers, they have nothing to do with the actual intended concept of a muscle lengthening or shortening; they have to do with having a common center — concentric — or being off center — eccentric. So it really is just a big mess that is hard to fix. I cringe every time I hear some one say “e-centric.”
Ellie Murray: So back to my training, we were able to fix my problems very efficiently, a good example of functional training with a directive of utility like we discussed earlier.
Berry Sherman: I think that just getting her properly trained for the clean and jerk fixes a lot of these biomechanical issues. Her triceps were weak because cycling — even the 500m — doesn’t have super demand for triceps extension. The jerk really does and rowing also requires the long head of the triceps to be pretty strong and endurance trained.
Dr. Jan Edelman: It is all coming together. She will have no major weaknesses by Whistler.
Dr. John Beasley: OK, that really pencils out the frontend pretty well, what’s the plan for the backend?
Dr. Jan Edelman: Our strategy is to bring the center three of the Phenomic 5 up to elite level this season and manage the pole events. Ellie will be in position to win The Burn, The Erg and The Climb or be close to winning the center three. She will attack technique for the clean and jerk. Her weightlifting coach will bring her upper body strength up as much as possible in a short time. She will do running track workouts to improve her running economy for the horizontal endurance dimension of Nemesis. As for the vertical dimension Ellie has a plan for that.
Ellie Murray: Yeah, I am going to be on an extended mountain bike and hiking trek for many weeks in Germany’s Black Forest with Loris Ferraris. He knows his way around Germany given how much he has trained there. There will be a significant volume of climbing both on bike and on foot.
Dr. John Beasley: Ah, I heard that Loris “Maximus” Ferraris, the holder of cycling’s hour record and four-time world road time trial champion, is your boyfriend. True?
Ellie Murray: [Ellie blushes] Yes, that is true. We met at the 2011 World Track Cycling Championships in the Netherlands.
Dr. John Beasley: Ah, now I understand why you want to work on your backend in the Black Forest with Maximus. [everybody laughs hard]
Ellie Murray: I know that I lack Socrates’ acumen or I would have seen that one coming!
Dr. John Beasley: Well, on that note, Ellie, I am sure your fans have gotten to know you better and they can appreciate your many accomplishments and goals. Thank you for opening up and letting us in on your philosophy of life. See you in Whistler!
<end transcript>
The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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Traveling to one of the most remote places on earth, John is next scheduled to go to Tengboche, Nepal, a village on the outskirts of Mount Everest only approachable by yak and the home of Janu Tsöndrü Sherpa.
You may recall Janu destroying the field on Nemesis last year. You will discover a place where time has stood still since the 1500s and nobody has even heard of training but, somehow, they redefine the meaning of endurance from the ground up — and that means way up. The Sherpa community is a very spiritual people and you will get an up close and personal view on why this is so as you learn about the fragility of human existence while treading in the devil’s playground at 25,000 feet and beyond. John has no words to grok this way of being and you will be in the same boat. It may be a small world but it is a big universe when you include the life of a professional Sherpa facing K2 and Annapurna.
Don’t forget your goose down parka and see you there!
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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