The World’s Fittest Humans
Exploring the Limits of Physical and Mental Performance, Training, and Potential
Foreword
Every sport has its unique skills and training that enable a select few to surpass all others in the elite realms of world-class competition. From the outside looking in we just assume that these outliers are genetically favored. But interestingly on a genetic level we are all about 99.5% the same, which means that if DNA were examined under a microscope it would be virtually impossible to distinguish a scholar with no interest in athletics from an athlete with very little interest in the theories of quantum physics, or for that matter, a world-class athlete with extreme scholarly curiosity who is willing to explore not only the physical but the metaphysical as it relates to human performance. But draw back a few magnitudes of vision and you start to see the differences among us. The influence on that small 0.5% variance in our DNA coupled with each person’s unique lifestyle and environmental activation of different segments of our common coding is what can take what’s ordinary and transform it over time into extraordinary. Through extreme stimulus those strands of information will express differences in health, athletic performance, mindset and sheer grit that are cavernous. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs experienced influences from very early years that activated a mind spring of innovation within each of them that changed the way we work and communicate forever. Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan activated genius through relentless and endless stimulation of their core genetics (hard work) that enabled them to manage the trajectory of a ball like very few on the planet. And if indeed dramatic stimulation or activation of specific areas of our DNA can create World Champions from seemingly ordinary folks, what might a person be capable of who works with relentless passion to stimulate EVERY positive strand of DNA they have!
We humans like to compare things. Small or tall. Fast or slow. Complex or simple. Wise or drifting aimlessly. We do it with just about everything even without thinking. We become accustomed to what is most frequent in our daily surroundings and in the people we see regularly, sometimes to the point where it all can eventually become more like background static. Just think of the first time you ran a new trail. You saw everything. But over time on that same trail if it becomes one of your staples, you eventually only notice something that is new or out of place. That’s how we survived in ancient times. We filtered out the commonplace things that happened every day and became alert when something subtle but out of place happened or when a normal occurrence stopped. You may not notice a spring of water that you walk by everyday while it’s running, but you notice immediately if it dries up.
The same holds true for athletic performance. That’s why we love to see the best in sports being tested until they fold. It’s unusual. It’s out of place. It’s not the ordinary day-to-day experience. Top level, world-class competition where people are testing their genetic boundaries is something extraordinary that piques our ancient interest in something happening that is out of place from the ordinary world we are accustomed to sensing and filtering. Each of us might go to the deepest well within ourselves on occasion throughout life and come up with something we never knew we had. But it is rare. Athletics at the highest level, on the other hand, begs that type of discovery every time out. And because of that just about everyone can feel the magic of a discus being thrown farther than ever before just as much as we can sense something great happening when a cyclist rides farther than anyone in history in one hour. It’s out of the ordinary. It’s extraordinary. We take notice!
Every system that allows inspiration through movement and that enables one to go to a place where competitive pain becomes a necessity to be embraced rather than avoided are all adaptations that our ancestors needed for survival. Going back to their lives for a moment, they did not have the predictability of driving to a Whole Foods Market to get their nutrition. They had to gather, to hunt. They had to endure periods of extreme hunger where the hunt went on even though they had not eaten for longer than most modern-world dwellers would be able to tolerate even if they were just sitting in a chair. And forget about keeping up with a trot or a full run for hours or days on end to catch the prey! They didn’t have refrigerators to store a big catch that was miles from their village. It had to be divvied up and carried home, or surrendered to the vultures circling above. Our ancestors became energetically extremely efficient. They could access carbohydrates in their system when they had it. They could access stored fats when that was the only thing remaining. They could put the misery of exhaustion aside and stay focused on the meal just minutes ahead but running away fast. They didn’t take the challenge of it all personally. It was just how they survived. And because of that selection process that inevitably happened out in the open plains, we are all here because we too have those ancient survival genetics intact. Most of us have never had to activate them, but they are there.
The one exception is during some forms of athletics, especially those that are testing the limits of speed, strength and endurance. These modern day tests light up the segments in our DNA that are ancient and have to do with survival. Setting the world record in the marathon is a modern, highly-tuned version of the hunt. The clean and jerk could be hauling the remains of an elk back to camp. But as I mentioned briefly, we all like to compare. Who is the best athlete in any given sport? Is there a way to compare athletic performances in diversified sports to come up with the elusive wager of who is the best athlete in the world? Who can take all of those ancient survival genetics and show us what is possible to accomplish if they are ignited? If we were to use our ancient survival genetics as the litmus test to answer this simple question, the results would be staggering. To date there has never been a competition that tests every energy system in our bodies. Yes, of course there is the decathlon and a myriad of other events that give a partial answer to this question. But none test every single energy system and human mindset capacity to its under-discovered limits. It just simply has not been done yet.
But we could wager! What if someone had to do a totally anaerobic event, a strength event, a lactate tolerance event and an endurance event as part of parsing out the answer? What if the final event was a survival race that lasted over 12-hours and had to be done without food? No nice aid stations with more calories than a small tribe would eat in a year. Now we are getting to the gore of the matter!
In 1997 I was called “The World’s Fittest Man” by Outside magazine in an honoring of my 6-Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Championships. It was flattering, but it didn’t necessarily come from competing in an event that tests all of our survival genetics. It lacked a true strength component. There was no truly anaerobic test. The endurance element was done on a course where you had aid stations with more calories available than our ancestors could eat in a year. A decathlete tests skills, some speed, but certainly no endurance with the longest event being 1,500m on the track. That would not track down a whole lot of prey in ancient times. My skill set although off the charts for a lot of people was still very focused and demanding on a specific spectrum of athletic development, but was in no way a test of every corner a human being has at their disposal should they have the guts to extract it.
During my time at the top of Ironman racing this book’s author Jim Autio was one of my small but potent core team of advisors who helped me activate every element of my makeup necessary to become a World Champion. He worked to provide every cell in my body with the micro building blocks necessary to enable each and every system to work at its peak when asked to in training, in recovery and most importantly in racing. That sounds easy on the surface…just eat healthy and you can’t lose! But the demands of endurance training and racing deplete the body to a point where no human could eat enough food to replenish the smallest of components the cells need to function correctly. Jim helped me supplement these natural factors so that I could on demand access full functionality deep within each and every cell in my body, and as an athlete that is all you are hoping to do. But my demands were still primarily endurance. I’m not a global representation of what humans are capable of.
No, The World’s Fittest Humans have to be culled from a very new breed that is willing to tackle all problems physiological, emotional and spiritual. Our ancient ancestors rarely killed without giving thanks. They never took life for fun and honored that which was taken to sustain another. They went beyond what science says we can. Sensors reading what goes on in the body of a hunter tracking prey for hours find that their core temperature goes well above what our modern world scientists say we are capable of tolerating and still being able to sustain a physical effort. Those sensors show that dehydration to extreme limits can be overcome and the hunters can get FASTER toward the end of the hunt as they close in on the goal even in the face of sweat losses that scientists today swear should make you slow way, way down.
What if someone vying for the title of World’s Fittest Human trained for the ultimate test of maximizing those parts of our DNA that are coded to help us survive? They would certainly be activating every bit of their 0.5% difference between each human’s genetics. They would also be activating a lot of our common DNA that likely lies dormant in most of the population. Their performances would be as far off the charts as anything we have seen in athletics and would certainly intrigue the difference-seeking part of our awareness.
The World’s Fittest Humans must have a tool chest of skills, training and will like nothing we have seen in competition to date. In the upcoming pages you will see the amazing job Jim Autio did at setting the stage for this showdown in provocative fashion. He unrolls the canvas with the most recent Phenomic Games, the yearly competition that crowns the winner of The World’s Fittest Human. Jim then scratches the intellectual itch we all have to know behind the scenes what it really takes to excel in a number of sports. He also takes us into the factual history of athletic performance in a way that creates a validity to the story similar to how Michener would blend real world fact into his epic novels. We get to taste a wide variety of preparation technics through each of the Games’ top competitors that spans the spectrum from approaching preparation with modern, 100% science and analytics to using the completely unquantifiable integration of deepening one’s spiritual connection to life, to one’s mind, to nature and how that can also be the foundation for stratospheric athletic performances, which are all a must at the Phenomic Games.
At this moment in time the Phenomic Games only exist on the pages of this book. They answer the question about who is The World’s Fittest Human. Each athlete profiled opens a door to a completely different universe filled with athletic potential and the magic of yet to be discovered capabilities of the human mind, body and spirit. You will identify with parts of each one of them. After all, we are 99.5% the same! And if you are anything like me, you will be on the edge of your chair as you absorb the detail Jim Autio has laid out that is necessary to take the brakes off of human potential and really discover The World’s Fittest Humans!
Mark Allen
About Mark Allen: Six-time Hawaii Ironman Triathlon World Champion, voted “The Greatest Endurance Athlete of All Time” by ESPN, “The World’s Fittest Man” by Outside magazine and selected as “The Greatest Triathlete Of All Time” by Triathlete magazine
Introduction
Lake — 28 years old, 5–11, 180 pounds and 6% bodyfat — looks like a jaguar with the fur pulled off. But it isn’t just the look. Or the numbers. He transcends mundane quantities with sublime qualities, namely an alluring athletic aesthetic. He moves differently…smooth, agile, loose, dynamic, elegant. With a pounce in his step, he radiates aliveness! His muscles do not look cartoonish — instead, his limbs have sleek line. His form is forged in the crucible of function; at first glance, some kind of hybrid between a triathlete and a gymnast, an impossible combination. Inspecting further, perhaps the wicked child of Race Across America and the Parthenon crossed with Usain Bolt? Closer, but no cigar. A freak? Or first of a new breed? Good questions.
Turns out, not a freak. Not a physical singularity or a genetic chimera. He is a competitor in the Phenomic Games. A very special challenge to determine the world’s fittest humans. This is the first year of the competition and it is so wide open…who are these people seeking to be the baddest on earth? And — more importantly — what motivates them to mentally and physically extend themselves beyond species-level comfort zones, stretching the performance envelope to the unthinkable in opposite directions, both long and strong? It was impossible to break the 500-pound clean and jerk weightlifting record, until it wasn’t. It was impossible to break the four-minute mile, until it wasn’t. It was impossible to break the eight-hour Ironman barrier, until it wasn’t. This is the equivalent of a single human accomplishing something of greater gravitas, extraordinary performance across the entire human energy spectrum.
Lake is not the only jaguar converging on Turin, Italy this August; his rivals come from all over the world and they live and breathe to be long and strong too. And there are jaguaresses. The epiphany is that in our modernity, a dearth of boldness in cahoots with the seduction of technology has resulted in our potential — our greatest human asset — being squandered. In slow motion over the millennia we forgot we are animals: we drive Jaguars instead of being jaguars. These people, however, do a 180 on that; they are ethereal mirrors to our lost essence and we can sense it in our gut. The look of a jaguar with the fur pulled off was there all along just waiting to be revealed, again. The crowd feels in their bones the power of seismic potential on display, human typhoons poised to blow away barriers and levitate the bar to a stratospheric standard of human performance.
Day One
Lake’s first challenge is the clean and jerk, an Olympic weightlifting event. A classic barometer of whole-body strength and explosive power. It is a two-part movement that is a heat-seeking missile for weakness in mind, body or spirit. He had lifted weights since he was 12 and was always pretty strong. He ran track in high school and college and weightlifting and functional strength training were trusted power tools of his for ages. The most he ever did was 305 pounds as a junior at the University of Washington at a weight of 202. But that was a sloppy 202, he was no jaguar. Since then he radically upped his game with better nutrition, recovery, mental training, coaching and improved technique. There will be stronger competitors here today but he didn’t enter the Phenomic Games to be the strongest; he is here to be the fittest man on the planet.
The arena was a venue from the 2006 Winter Olympic Games: where once there were skaters, now there are lifters. Performing in front of such a rabid crowd and swarming media with cameras everywhere is mind-blowing but his game face was locked and loaded. He made his first attempt with 275 pounds and it looked easy, easier than he had visualized it thousands of times in mental rehearsal exercises. From the mental dimension, weightlifting in the comfort zone is when you are doing — not attempting — but doing loads you have done not just before, but recently, without difficulty, particularly in familiar surroundings with the same apparatus: you have total confidence, no doubts. In your mind “an attempt” means failure is an option and that is a big torpedo to confidence and sabotages the body’s reach into the beyond. The word “attempt” plants the seed of doubt in your nonconscious mind: do or do not, there is no try or “attempt.” When going for it at the Phenomic Games in a fish bowl under the gun, the sophomoric mental approach you had in your own gym under ideal conditions is out of its depth.
Opposed to other events where hesitation is a non-factor, in weightlifting hesitation is the kiss of death: your body must be 100% autonomous — pure beast-mode, reflexive. No interference from doubt or thought, no mind. You commit — all in — winner take all. What this means is you have to seriously train your mental approach with different tools or else you are going to hesitate in a strange, hostile environment while attempting loads you have never done before in your life. In strength movements the ultimate mind space to tap into is what the Cold War Soviets called limit strength: limit strength is where a mother’s mind goes to temporarily possess her body to lift a car off her baby. A mother doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t think about her limits, doesn’t attempt, and, in fact, doesn’t think at all — it just happens. In Asian cultures the state of “no mind” is pregnant of all possibilities with one of them being fragile women lifting cars off babies. This is beyond the grasp of science; this is in the realm of pure mind, transcendent of the clockwork mechanics of the observable, mundane body.
Lake asks for 297 for his second attempt. The walk to the chalk bowl and thrusting his hands into the white powder is a mental ritual where he clears his head and pays his respects to the strength gods. Beads of sweat drip off his face into the chalk as he concentrates his focus to a single point at the center of his universe — driving and droning out everything — including his heartbeat detonating in his chest like a psychotic machine gun. He missed. Three red lights. He had a shadow of a doubt. Didn’t lock out his right elbow. He made good on his third and last attempt so he had 297 in the books. He really wanted 308. Turns out some guy named Ivan from Russia at a bodyweight of 191 did an ungodly 407. Did Ivan summon limit strength? That is super strong for just about anyone and put him on the leaderboard in 1st place after the first event. But how will that hold up after all the dust settles? The Phenomic Games is a metabolic and biomechanical pentathlon and this is just the first of five very different events over the course of four days. The competition, turns out, is very tough to predict because you must show no weaknesses yet everyone has one. Even alpha jaguars watch their 6.
Next up is Airi. She didn’t conjure up a visual of a jaguaress with the fur pulled off but the sleekness and attitude of a fox is sure there, front and center. There is no mistaking her for a bloated, squatty gym rat or a preposterous bodybuilder chick with a raspy voice and pimply face. Nor does she give off an atrophied runner’s look. As awe-inspiring Lake looks, she does likewise. Strong, resilient, kinetic, and confident come first to mind, then simply refined wildness, say a deer in stilettos. When she moves her lithe Amazonian line and muscle engage, you can see the biological motors and then — just as swiftly — they submerge beneath the beautiful surface of velvety skin like some new-age, beauty-and-the-beast magic trick. Truly a new breed of supermodel that women-kind can aspire to instead of ridicule. The first generation of supermodels focused on the outside, and it showed. This new generation of supermodel is a product from the inside out, and it really shows. The old supermodels fall by the wayside before their late 20s like disposable Potemkin mannequins; these new supermodels don’t peak until mid-30s or well beyond. Two women in the finals are in their early 40s but there is no way to pick them out of a lineup of deer in stilettos.
But killer looks are all but forgotten when you see their killer capabilities… can one woman do all that? They are man-eating jaguaresses, not chicks. Given 3½ billion men in the world, only a minuscule handful could beat these women in a measure of long and strong, and most of them are in Turin this week. They truly are some of fittest people — even mammals — on earth. As with Lake, Airi’s training is the engine of the look and feel: this is a creative process originating at bone, no, soul depth. Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” Almost a century later we finally get his drift; Ludwig had envisioned Airi. Plus she could kick his ass.
Airi performed well in the clean and jerk considering her background in middle-distance running. She is only in 17th place but she is a sleeper and the crowd knows it. Half the crowd are locals speaking Italian, French, or German but the vibe resonating from the mesmerizing movement of a highly-conditioned she-beast is a universal language that happens to be Airi’s native tongue. The frontend of the Phenomic Games are the strength events and the backend are the endurance events. Airi is really solid from the middle on but has been making inroads on her frontend game.
She was born and raised in Finland near Helsinki. She ran cross-country in high school and 5Ks in college but she grew up on skis. Alpine and Nordic skiing were second nature. She became no stranger to marathons and then long treks in the high mountains of the Andes on foot, skis and mountain bike. Now 35, in the last five years she gained some beautiful muscle mass to make her long lines pop when she moved. From her years of training her nervous system — specifically her motor control — is wired like an INDY car. At 5–8 and 137, she doesn’t appear big due to being a very dense 12% body fat. You would guess 120 by her appearance and dress size but looks are deceiving. But so it is with jaguaresses. Culturally she learned from her grandfather the Finnish mindset of Sisu, the ability of each one of us to reach inward in the face of extreme adversity and transcend all perceived limitations by going beyond perseverance until outlasting any challenge life throws in your path including facing down death. The underdog Finns as a nation did this against the overwhelming forces of the Soviet invaders during World War II. You can say Airi has stubbornness coursing through her veins; she understands very well that the root meaning of the word “endurance” is just Sisu translated into English.
Airi was getting ready for the second event, a drag race on a BMX bike in a single gear going up a continuous oppressive grade with no curves done the whole way out of the saddle. The distance and the vertical element make this event almost a minute long for yoked frontend men and a little longer for lesser mortals. This event tests the limits of your anaerobic capacity and a little beyond. Surprisingly, there is a lot more upper body involvement than it appears because of the fat knobby tires, big gear, standing start, out-of-the-saddle rocking of the bike frame and the steady vertical. A long distance runner gets eaten alive here. This event is unlovingly called “The Burn” because it makes your legs burn like hell. A hybrid of track cycling’s kilometer time trial and the BMX time trial, this event forces all your mental and physical cards to be placed on the table face up.
The Burn has four lanes where four combatants drag race against each other and misery sure loves company in this torturous spectacle. The crowd stands and roars like a Coliseum full of drooling, fasted lions in sync. Of the five challenges, it was this one that smelled of testosterone the most. If The Burn were a mixed drink it would be a Molotov cocktail with a dash of C4 and a Kamikaze chaser. To be any good at this, mentally you have to channel the mindset of a mouse being chased by a bobcat, a controlled panic at escape velocity while sweating bullets. The first few pedal strokes are like doing heavy one-legged squats as the upper body strains to counter the fiendish torque that wantonly craves to twist your torso into a pretzel. After that obstacle the hellish burn begins and then reaches a crescendo at about 40 second as the tenuous state of metabolic, thin-ice self-destructs. Beyond that, it is an unbearable eternity of hanging on for dear life.
Airi was in third place at the halfway flag and nearly caught the next rider at the line. But she finished way behind this hypersonic Brazilian lady named Gabriela showcasing carbon muscle fiber legs, terminator glutes, wildly long jet black hair and a charismatic, ear-to-ear, Cheshire-cat smile. She abandonedly rode her bike with the turbulence of a Tasmanian devil kicking in an afterburner. Granted, Gabriela’s legs weren’t really carbon muscle fiber but she performed like they were by crushing the women’s Burn and was the overwhelming crowd favorite. It mattered not that she was a crazy Latina in conservative Italy near the Swiss border. Airi’s style was not devil-may-care pedal-to-the-metal; she opted for the fluid efficiency of a cheetah — no wasted motion, paralleling her Nordic cross-country skiing roots. Her placing in The Burn was 11th, not bad. A near top-ten finish in an anaerobic event will bode well considering her lethal backend chops. All she wanted to do was lie down and curl up in the fetal position while muzzling the urge to puke. It is the world’s most miserable way to spend one minute of your life. The Burn, however, is just one satanic verse in the Phenomic Games’ devious playbook.
Day Two
Day Two begins with a 2000-meter rowing event on a Concept 2 ergometer affectionately called “The Erg.” The results are ranked by specific power measured in watts of power per kilogram of bodyweight. Similarly, the clean and jerk is measured in kilograms lifted per kilogram of bodyweight yielding specific strength. The Erg assesses your power-to-weight ratio at approximately VO2 max intensity while in excess of what is called the lactate threshold, physiologically-speaking the line in the sand separating aerobic from anaerobic power. Ranking by specific power allows lighter competitors to compete on a level playing field with the big guys and gals. The Phenomic Secretariat wanted to have the world ranking be inclusive of both jaguars and jaguaresses so there would be no hokey apples and oranges comparisons. Specific strength and power measurement along with gravity for the other events make this a reality, meaning, for the first time in history, performance is assessed per pound and across the full metabolic spectrum. The women may be the fairer sex but they are no joke—even a troglodyte knows that gürlpower has a cold-blooded blast radius incinerated by a quasar’s freaky thermal signature. With the revelation of no gender separation, the world is now paying attention on an entirely different wavelength as all comers go toe-to-toe: given the savage battery of mental and physical tasks imposed by the Phenomic Games, can women compete against men for the title of fittest Homo sapiens?
To be taken seriously in The Erg you have to be big caliber in both the front and backend and if you have balance it will show here. You must make every pound count — thus the lower the body fat, the better. The better the balance between upper and lower body full-spectrum conditioning, the better. The better the balance between pushing and pulling movements — in both upper and lower body — the better. The better the balance between aerobic and anaerobic capacities, the better. The better the balance between balls and risk assessment, the better. The better the balance between mind and body, the better.
The Phenomic Games is about who is the baddest on earth — pound-for-pound — across the entire energy spectrum.
The Phenomic Games through a diabolical natural selection process weeds out by attrition the mortals leaving only the ultimately-fit specimens standing after the final body count. Pure strength or endurance athletes are prey, road kill for the better armed. The Phenomic Games places the potential of the human phenome under the microscope through a series of benchmarks where each event places crosshairs on a very specific physiological capability. To be considered the world’s fittest human there are two, absolutely non-negotiable capabilities you must demonstrate: you must be able to perform at a relatively high level of energy output for 12 hours or more under adverse environmental conditions without access to food and you must demonstrate high levels of upper and lower body maximal strength. Simply, long and strong. Our ancestors needed these two qualities the most to survive. Homo sapiens are the best performing mammals on land for traveling long distances in vastly different environmental conditions, even superior to Arabian horses or elephants: this, along with ingenuity, define humanity’s signature capabilities. We are the supreme members of the penultimate migratory mammalian order, only outperformed by cetaceans: whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Fossil fuels subverted the necessity for a well-conditioned, metabolic first-gear; one of our greatest evolutionary prizes has been thrown under the bus, collateral damage in the name of progress.
Next on the list, you need to demonstrate high-power output for one minute produced predominantly by the lower body. These three capabilities, in toto, underwrite a human’s ability to remain alive for long periods without access to food while walking great distances under variable conditions and the ability to offensively run down and subdue prey or defensively fight off or run away from predators. Other metabolic capabilities are relative luxuries when it comes to staying alive in the wild. The sum of the five events of the Phenomic Games address the full energy spectrum from maximal strength to ultra-endurance while minimizing the need for specific skills such as martial arts, throwing the javelin, or herding cats. The Phenomic Games does not produce the world’s greatest athlete; it produces the world’s fittest human.
The rowing event targets the body’s maximal aerobic power, or VO2 max. Rowing wizards will finish in about six minutes. Lake was no newbie to the perils of The Erg by doing real rowing in a single scull on Lake Washington during his college years. Long limbs are a big disadvantage in the clean and jerk but are an advantage on The Erg and his limb lengths were longer than average. The 6-foot-5 guys who rowed in college or in the Olympics will dominate with their 747 wingspans but he only needs to perform well for his weight. Lake knew what time he needed to stay in the game.
Lake displayed fantastic form and locked into the mental zone of a bat out of hell. Not quite the machinic metronome displayed by Olympic rowers but still a work of excellence. Lake knew this event is 70% legs and the rest is upper-body pulling muscles and he displayed exceptional balance with no fade near the end. His maximal aerobic power-to-weight ratio was solid and he finished in 6 minutes 33 seconds. Pound-for-pound his specific power ranked him 11th, a very good result considering some of the monsters that showed up, including two bad asses from the British gold-medal winning Olympic Rowing team and a Goliath clone from Ohio State’s National championship squad. He was stoked. Lake was so balanced across all five challenges that he had a good chance of winning overall while never posting a top-10 result. This would be like winning the Tour de France without wearing the yellow jersey until the Arc de Triomphe.
Most competitors have extensive background in back or frontend training and, consequently, are desperately striving to create balance, but learning how is fraught with difficulties — strength athletes are from molten Mercury and endurance athletes are from frozen Pluto. Mental training for maximal strength is about excluding everything by contracting attention to a single point whereas mental training for ultra-endurance is about including everything by expanding attention to infinity. Said differently, the aperture of your mind closes as intensity increases and the aperture opens as duration increases. Very few master the dual tandem worlds of mind and body and long and strong; the cultures, beliefs and mindsets have little in common at the extremes.
The Phenomic Games is about who is the baddest on earth — mind-for-mind — across the entire mental spectrum.
Airi was disappointed with her rowing piece. No, actually she was pissed. Her time was about what she expected but she didn’t expect to see so many unknown faces beat her. She was stunned that Jōtara, a 22-year old from Japan that was rumoured to be in the bloodlines of Miyamoto Musashi, the ultimate samurai warrior from the early 17th century, posted the 2nd fastest female time. Musashi is iconic because of his maxim, “The Way is in training.” The rumour may be false but Jōtara surely was a warrior able to marshal special forces, unassailable evidence for knowing the Way. The samurai princess projected a peaceful but powerful Zen energy whose source was not her muscles but she had a serious back and butt and they were primed for go, not just show. Airi knew she had to make up some ground this afternoon if she wanted to make the podium. Gabriela, the Brazilian she-devil, had the crowd behind her and smoked Airi again, finishing just behind Jōtara. The Phenomic Games is not the place to let doubt hack your mind. But that is easier said than done. Pain may be weakness leaving the body but doubt lets weakness right back in through the back door. At this level, if your mind is not invincible then your body is vincible — you must be master and commander of a phenomic mind.
The next event was a mountain bike time trial that after the first half-hour of gently rolling hills shifts gears into an uphill climb with some sections being so steep and viciously long that the weaklings will be forced to walk their bikes. That is why it is called The Climb and yes, there will be blood. It will take the top gun a little over two hours if the conditions are not brutally hot. The course partially intersects the mountain slope where the alpine downhill and Super-G events were held in the 2006 Olympics except this is going up. Weather plays the Joker card in events more and more as the events shift from strong to long. Similar to road cycling time trial stages, each rider starts two minutes apart. Airi knew she had to pace herself very carefully because any miscalculation would prove deadly. The rowing event may only have been 7:28 but those 7 1/2 minutes depleted a big chunk of glycogen, the carbohydrate stored in muscle that you use for sustained, high-intensity efforts.
A 2-hour event is of the duration where you must face the wall. The wall is when you deplete your glycogen stores and have to rely on fat for fuel. Since you can’t produce energy from fat at the same rate as from glycogen aerobically, you are forced to slow down and that would be fatal on the long, unforgiving climbs late in this event. Or worse, enduring the humiliation of walking your bike on a globally-viral, YouTube bloopers video. This event, like the marathon, tests the endurance capacity of your energy stores of glycogen and intramuscular fats, called intramuscular triglycerides or IMTG, and by the end of it your willpower is warmed up for going one metabolic gear longer in the final event. But The Climb and the marathon are not interchangeable. You would assume that world-class African marathoners would be fast on bikes in a long time trial but that is not the case because of lack of leg strength and the ability to stabilize the trunk from the prodigious torque of 400 watts at a cadence of 85 RPM in an aero position. Mountain bikes amplify that problem because of inertial, drag and frictional forces beyond what you face on expensive, high-tech, time-trial bikes. You need whole-body functional strength and a big aerobic, carb-gulping motor to make the podium of The Erg and The Climb.
The blind natural selection process of the Phenomic Games eviscerates all the one-trick pony competitors while rewarding the masters of versatility and the headstrong: it chooses the very lean and balanced over the extremists — niche players are destined for extinction.
Airi paced herself very well early on and then upshifted into an amazing groove for a solid hour and overclocked in perfect flow. When in a state of flow, even at the redline you just never blow up, you seemingly float away from the universe in your own private bubble. Your mind is still but concentrated, concentrated beyond the threshold of some unintelligible form of amplification. This is the mind groove of a time trialist on a magic carpet ride like Greg LeMond in that 1989 Tour de France stage from Versailles to Paris. Anything less on that crazy of a wavelength and the bubble pops, you go sideways and it’s game over. This is beyond the grasp of science; this is in the realm of pure mind, transcendent of the clockwork mechanics of the observable, mundane body.
Airi felt a fiendish pleasure passing two competitors at about the hour and fifteen minute mark but her greatest satisfaction was seeing a few fried carcasses that beat her badly in the clean and jerk having to walk their bike where it got really steep, unable to even save face by feebly inch-worming up in their granny gear: she realized how little brute strength means when you are running on empty. A frontend, interval-trained strength athlete has a big advantage in The Burn but not here: fuel regulation and efficiency is what matters going long and Airi had something in the tank and finished with a powerful, statement-making kick more than making up for a disappointing row earlier. Moving way up in the leaderboard, her logging time in the Andes above the clouds was paying sweet dividends. She was now in striking position to be top female but Gabriela had a substantial lead with just one dragon left to slay.
Day Three
Day Three is a rest day and is all about refueling, recovery and licking wounds before the ultra-endurance spectacle tomorrow. Lake was now in 3rd place but the two leaders looked shaky when he caught them easily on the beginning of the steep sections late in The Climb even though they had huge headstarts. Their hollow backends were exposed, no worries there. But he couldn’t be conservative because moving up from 10th to 5th place was Ji from China and Lake only put 8 seconds into him. The competitors will travel north from Turin, close to the Swiss border where the high Alps beckon. Several peaks are over 15,000 feet but they are glaciers, ice and snow year round. The venue for the final event terminates at 9,600 feet, lofty enough to second guess the solidity of your preparation. But all you can do now is recover and mentally rehearse for what’s coming down the pipe. Besides the take-no-prisoners nature of the events, recovery capacity is a colossal, in-your-face challenge to the competitors. The first two days extract such deep costs on body and spirit that by the time you begin the ultra-endurance feat you may already be dead man walking. There is a big difference between training for a single endurance event like a marathon or single, long cycling race and then doing another one, back-to-back. Day racers rudely discover this when they attempt stage cycling. In the Phenomic Games, first you get shocked, then you get awed, and finally, nuked. No one escapes unscathed so the winner emerges from this orchestrated maelstrom by being the last to fold.
It was now crystal clear why the Phenomic Games is impossible to handicap: reliably predicting the fate of any given combatant given the cumulative trauma in such mentally and physiologically-diverse contests is tricky business. All weaknesses are cruelly exposed including your capacity to recover and the mental discipline to keep your head on straight. It is possible that the heroic Greek demigod Achilles, the world’s greatest warrior and fabled runner, with a fat lead going into the final day would DNF. At the bitter edge of the human performance envelope, whilst totally swallowed up in the mother of all uncomfort zones, there is a hair-trigger threshold between a world record and collapse, between control and out-of-control, between survival and death. It is a fragile state far out into uncharted no-man’s land while walking a tightrope composed of chaotic, unstable forces in a gooey matrix of Joker cards, black swans and autopilot survival instincts. The wisdom of the crowd collectively and intuitively channels this frightening place because buried in the catacombs of our ancestral memory lives this dormant source code: we all have been here before, there are no virgin spectators if you rewind the past long enough. Yes, the crowd feels this visceral echo in their bones once again, recollecting the fact that we are all animals — jaguars incognito and migratory exemplars.
Day Four
Day Four is the final event: for the ultra-endurance backenders this will be a 12-hour trek featuring Sisyphean climbs that go on forever until you cross the river Styx and enter the Underworld, or so it seems. But for strength athletes and the fatigued this will be a day of agony to quickly forget that could endure into tomorrow if there weren’t a merciful cutoff time. For this reason, the final contest is called Nemesis, after the Greek goddess of payback, the punisher of paper tigers. The strength and power athletes had their day to bask in the sun on Day One with the frontend’s clean and jerk and The Burn. Now is the time for ultra-endurance folks to dominate and for the strength crowd to suffer Darwin’s indefatigable wrath. It will be pure survival mode for them, nothing but pitch forks, torment and irreversible mental scarring that only Nemesis knows how to spitefully dole out.
Unlike other long-distance races, you are only allowed to drink water on the course. Zero carbohydrates or food. Like qualifying for the Navy SEALs, you can pull to the curb, ring the brass bell and say no mas anytime you please. This is an old-school test of extreme endurance with no fancy technology to harbor weaknesses: it benchmarks your ability to move your body against Nemesis until all vestiges of physical dross are burnt off leaving just the steel of your will. The source of fuel once those muscle and liver stores of glycogen are empty is you: what can you put out for hour after hour under abominable environmental conditions while the fuel gauge needle is petrified on E? Doing a marathon is light-years from that: world-class marathoners are running a warp speed 4:50 per mile pace the whole way fueled by glycogen and IMTGs. The extreme endurance event is about cannibalizing yourself via the hormone adrenaline mobilizing fat stores around your waist and burning amino acids for fuel that were your muscles powering up that clean and jerk on Day One. The better you can cannibalize yourself, the better your chances of staying one step ahead of hyenas, jackals, and wolves — the scavengers and cull artists of the weak — just like our old migratory times before the spear, wheel and Clif bar.
Lake spent a big chunk of training time the last two years biking and hiking in the mountains of Colorado above 10,000 feet. It took him 10 months of grueling training to realize the conditioning difference between a 2-hour and a 12-hour event and then another year to comprehend that you need to be a Spartan from Pluto to do both a 2 and 12-hour event back-to-back. Yes, both are aerobic “endurance” events but one is about optimizing glycogen and IMTG fuel regulation while the other is about what happens to the body after glycogen and IMTG stores are long gone — really long gone as in buzzards patiently circling, waiting for your feeble, imminent expiration. Exercise physiology textbooks and the ivory tower monoliths don’t address this problem but in the real world of serious ultra-endurance training you can’t wish away such stark realities. You would think that the buzzards uncanny estimation of dinner time computed to three-decimal place precision based on your cadaverous snail pace and defeated body language would be potent clues but even then many never connect the dots. Every battle-tested challenger, however, comes to know Nemesis in Her many nefarious guises on an intimate basis until they are tattooed into the deepest nooks and crannies of their cranium.
Training for a marathon is not the same as training for ultra-endurance and doing each back-to-back and living to tell about it will require you to become a different person from the ground up: your endurance resume is built like a Sequoia tree putting on its annual rings, one mile at a time and one season at a time. At first your body freaks out about hitting the wall but once you are properly conditioned you adapt: the wall is something the poorly-trained fear, not ultra-endurance types or your ancestors. What happens is you get a lot better at burning fat for fuel and not just when you train but also on a 24/7 basis. The maximal amount of fat you burn is called maximal lipid power. The stimulus for increasing maximal lipid power is prolonged exposure to low energy expenditure at low heart rate with no access to carbohydrate until you severely fatigue; this is called “bonking.” Our bodies then adapt to conserve energy by using stored fats very efficiently. This considerably extends the point when you run out of high-octane fuel at a given pace and the wall shrivels back to its speed bump stature of yesteryear. Yes, of course when you deplete your glycogen and IMTG stores there is a drop off, but the pace you can continue on beyond that is formidable once you become wired for extreme endurance.
At Ironman in the last half of the marathon do you honestly believe the feverish pace of the alphas in the hunt for victory are fueled by glycogen? Before the invention of the spear, bonking was our modus operandi, primate’s original mantra. We were calibrated right out of the box to be fat-burning turbo diesels, batteries included. Modern times created the wall; it is a witch’s brew of sloth, atrophied calibration, culture and hype all rolled into one wrongheaded meme. Our bodies are designed to function incredibly well on not eating for days while having to hike several hours a day looking for food provided you do it enough. Nemesis ruthlessly exposes endurance poseurs lacking suitable metabolic and mental toughness credentials; even though the finalists had to qualify to get here in a tough 8-hour event, this is the final event — the pressure is on — and Nemesis’ state of readiness is at DEFCON 1, commandeering an air force of buzzards and black swans so inexhaustible they block out the sun.
The crowd is salivating over who is going to emerge victorious and who is going to submerge as road kill once the dust finally settles near the mountain summit. Can Gabriela pull a rabbit out of her hat? Or will Airi terminate her? Can Jōtara, the samurai princess, do mission impossible and levitate the climbs? Is Ji a wunderkind or is he fated for the bone yard? Everything is on the line today and the day will unfold with both stories of ebullient triumph and of stunning catastrophic collapse. When you factor in how grueling the qualification rounds were to just make the final cut, it is hard to believe that some will not finish this final event. But anything less, and it wouldn’t be worthy of the Phenomic Games.
Extreme endurance at the upper echelon is about how you handle pain: you don’t ever learn to relish pain and mentally blocking out pain bleeds out your precious energy while preventing you from evolving to the next level. You need to become one with the pain because pain is the bridge between mind and body: pain originates in the body from a vast nerve net of sensory nerves in the peripheral nervous system but then it bridges over to mind as felt perception of pain. If you fight it you will remain divided in an energy-draining duality of mind and body like two cats in a sack. However, if you mind-meld with it, the illusion of the physical body transmutes into a bigger mind that is no longer limited to your mini-me mind. Pain no longer feels alien once you let it inside the innermost circle of your consciousness and that transformation magically flips your perception of everything.
In this altered state of awareness a new form of freedom you never knew existed emerges from the pregnant nothingness. Also, you can tap into a different source of energy you never knew existed, imagine plugging an umbilical directly to the Source. You become a single, unified big energy-mind, sans physical baggage — no duality. Brain and muscle fade away while energy and mind expand into the limitless void — your mental aperture is opening up access to your mind’s second wind. Energy and mind are a complementary unity like yin and yang; they are as inseparable and indivisible as the North and South poles of a magnet. Einstein near the end of his life said that the universe was a single energy field where perceived matter was just high density energy — matter, such as brain and muscle, are not real. You become this single field of energy and mind. Extreme endurance is a door to this higher level of consciousness and pain is the key to that door. Our survival a long time ago depended on it but in today’s world few will experience their inner jaguar. This is beyond the grasp of science; this is in the realm of pure mind, transcendent of the clockwork mechanics of the observable, mundane body. It has been said of Jure Robic, the greatest ultra-endurance cyclist of all-time, that he could die on the bike and keep going. Finnish Sisu is on the same page: persevere — endure — in the face of adversity beyond all limitations, including death. Summiting this mental pinnacle is the sine qua non of ultra-endurance performance. Mastery of the body is a stepping stone to mastery of the mind. Nature — and Nemesis — cannot be fooled by fools or endurance poseurs.
Airi needed to beat Gabriela by seven places and hold Jōtara at bay. The women started one hour behind the men at 5 AM. The race course is not far from the ski resorts near Monte Rosa Massif in the Pennine Alps. It was a dark, starry night: van Gogh would have been tickled by the eerily swirling clouds completely enveloping the alpine summit at 15,203 feet. There will be over 8,800 feet of vertical climbing counting all the rolling hills but the lion’s share is steep, late in the race, and at over 7,500 feet. Airi needed to find out what Gabriela had in the tank as early as possible, say by the 4th hour to calibrate her tactics. But Jōtara worried her more because she was a wild card of the silent but ninja type and wise way beyond her years, maybe even channeling strategy from Musashi’s A Book of Five Rings directly to her warhead. Airi went with the lead group and felt pretty good considering The Climb. Her legs were a little sore at the start but felt better by the end of the first hour. Ultra-endurance competitors often feel crappy for the first couple hours but by hour 3 or 4 begin to switch into turbo diesel mode while opening up their mental aperture. Airi’s legs had plenty of juice, a good sign but this is way too early to be counting any chickens. It was clear by the 2nd hour that many competitors had wooden legs and shortened strides even on the flat sections. For these dodos, the bone yard.
Lake at the quarter pole was well positioned to unleash his strategic assault. The weather conditions were good so far but forecasts say it will be pushing 90 degrees by the 8th hour. The 2-hour mountain bike climb two days ago was barbaric on the legs and its repercussions were coming to roost for many but not for Lake, he cashed in a few of his Sequoia rings. As for the frontend-heavy challengers, achy legs with seven hours to go while running low on fuel is what makes Nemesis Nemesis. The sun broke by 10 AM and a rising Fahrenheit was a new monkey wrench tossed into the cogs of the toiling human machines. At the halfway point Lake was starting to gain confidence but understood the pitfalls ahead. He already passed the two leaders but Ji shadowed him tightly in a tactic verbatim from The Art of War. Sun Tzu said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” In extreme endurance duels it is a logical but grave error to assume it is a battle just between combatants; no, you must always include Nemesis because She is more likely to beat you than any single combatant given Her multifaceted arsenal.
As opposed to shorter events that are dominated by tactics, speed and intensity, extreme endurance is dominated by time, environment, mental shortcomings, strategy and a quiver of fatigue factors. Nemesis adds these unseen opponents to the battleground and these challenges can be used as weapons by an astute combatant’s mindgame-library of tactics and strategy to defeat you without any mano-a-mano exchange. You can be manipulated into a predicament where you face off against these weapons with an outcome that forces you to a perilous edge, and there are more edges than a Rubik’s cube. Lake knew all too well that when pushing any performance envelope, catastrophe can be around the next bend and the body can shut down in the blink of an eye if you catch an edge. Lake stayed way ahead of the hydration curve because any errors there and it is not only performance that suffers; heat stroke is life threatening. Walking in circles — dazed and confused — is a typical symptom before collapse. The medical staff have i.v. bags waiting and they will be swarmed before Nemesis is done toying with overreaching paper tigers. In the meantime, the buzzards are salivating and awaiting the telltale signs of failing flesh before making their final descent.
Gabriela was staying with Airi as the sun pounced on the ascending caravan of trekkers during the 5th hour. This could have been a bad omen for Airi but she smelled blood; Gabriela was teetering at the tipping point of a razor’s edge and began to labor mechanically, a tin man but with heart. Airi — like the buzzards — had a keen eye for ensuing demise. Jōtara was behind them but Airi caught her in the corner of her eye on one of the switchbacks and got the memo that Jōtara was still dangerous game, stalking in the wings awaiting a potential checkmate opportunity to snake her. Jōtara was moving smoothly in tune to her own drummer, probably a Taiko drum from feudal Japan used to motivate troops and set a marching pace on long marches. Then — just like that — the lead squad broke away off the front but they were backend hammers with no shot at the title. But with this move, the pecking order of contenders and pretenders came into focus. Calculating endgame scenarios, Jōtara was the x-factor with Gabriela a withering non-factor — but it was Airi’s to lose.
By the 8th hour Nemesis’ full arsenal was fully deployed. Many combatants were succumbing to the volume of rolling hills, ascending heat, smothering altitude and unrelenting pain; many wannabe action heroes were doing their best imitation of bugs hitting the windshield of a F-22 Raptor at Mach 1, entrails scattered to the four winds. The leaders were now above the tree line but well below the glaciers; it was so barren, lifeless and alien that it looked like the dusty, rocky and pitted surface of the moon — even bacteria bitch up here. The dozen or so in the vanguard went nuclear with a preemptive attack off the front — a jugular move — quickly evolving into a textbook breakaway. Lake went with the attackers. Ji tried to move the needle but didn’t have the juice to hang with the surge. What the uninitiated soon realized is that conquering Nemesis is about delving deep into the inner space of the mind; past the physical layer, deeper than bone deep, venturing into a sacred space you could say was soul deep. This is the mental space our ancestors had to go to eke out one more day — inside yourself so deep you can see the wellspring of your will. You finally grok the difference between textbook pseudo-endurance and real-world endurance after you walk in the woolly mammoth sandals of our ancestors and eventually gain access to will power’s source code, a new form of knowledge you never knew existed.
The herd is culled. The dross is gone. Your mental aperture is wide open. All that remains is the galvanized steel of your will. The real race begins now.
Gabriela fell off the pace. She hung in there courageously for over two hours in difficulty but by the 7th hour her carbon muscle fiber legs were shorting out and shortening up. Airi still needed for a few more people to pass her assuming the lead pack held up their end but you could stick a fork in her already, toast. Jōtara was a junkyard dog that just wouldn’t go away and her facial expression was still as pacific as during hour one. If anyone respected tenacity fueled from beyond the physical, it was Airi. Airi learned long ago that the heart and soul of extreme endurance competition is about fatigue resistance and relative speed, not the top-end speed of shorter distances — a marathon is a test of speed, not survival. Your body has no idea what training or competition is — it only knows how to adapt to perceived stress based on ancient programs to better the survival odds of the organism. Exceeding your endurance limits is perceived as a major threat to your survival. How much energy can you marshal when your legs are wooden and your shoelaces feel tied together? If you have anything in reserve and have prescient timing, you will look like an overclocked tachyon when you make your jugular move.
In the inner game of extreme endurance you think like a scavenger, behave like an opportunist, and win by attrition. As body fades mind bares its fangs, emerging from the opaque depths as the dominant weapon in the endgame; like some draconian Dracula you siphon your competitors’ will and energy in mind-to-mind combat.
Janu, a Nepalese sherpa, opened a preposterously unbreachable gap exceeding 20 minutes about two hour ago and Lake is in the distant second group near the tail end with about 3 miles to go but this is in the bowels of Nemesis — cruelly steep and gravity grants no quarter. Well over a vertical mile above them, the summit of Monte Rosa Massif is visible notwithstanding the intense solar glare off the glacier’s immense north face. The backend top guns sustain a carnivorous pace in the precipitous sections just like in the classic Tour de France stage at the Alps’ Col du Galibier when the alphas with the big aerobic motors go wide open throttle past the redline, dropping the mere mortals off the back while opening gashing time gaps on their flagging beta rivals. These backend hammers have something left and commandingly pull away while everyone else is left holding the bag, running on fumes, and relying on prayers for Gale-force tailwinds. At this juncture in the venture, the alphas can produce more energy from fats and protein than the betas because their endurance limits have been exceeded countless times over the years. They have built a different motor than elite marathoners; they have the motor of our ancestors. Lake can’t keep up such a ludicrous pace 11 hours in but he doesn’t have to because he racked scoreboard on the frontend. Lake finishes in 12:33, 48 minutes back from Janu, the runaway victor, and is 11th overall today but, more importantly, he is the fittest man on the third rock from the sun. Ji scrapes together enough octane, chi, will and Sun Tzu to leapfrog into 2nd overall.
The banner says “2 Kilometers” to go and Airi is in 6th but more importantly Gabriela is somewhere in the middle of the pack over an hour behind. Gabriela has cracked and is rudderless, kaput. The sun is beginning to set with blinding reflection off the adjacent alpine peaks, earmarking the Herculean efforts of a cadre of bold humans challenging Nemesis from sunrise to sunset on Her turf. The backend women an hour ago had already passed some of the frontend men; these wasted husks look like zombies in the Bataan Death March, casualties of metabolic nuclear war. Ivan — sinking ingloriously from Titan to Titanic — is one of them. Their psyches are crushed like an Abrams tank rolling over chihuahua shit.
Airi passes two survivors that are barely able to shuffle their feet and these men were bad asses just 48 hours ago. Dashed spirits, phantom bodies, broken minds, they are.
The thin air is taking its toll now as the radiance of the setting sun lights up Airi’s Finnish jersey, white with a blue cross, and Jōtara’s red fireball. Airi didn’t have to beat Jōtara to claim victory but wants to test the mettle of the samurai princess’ phenomic mind. This last kilometer is above 9,000 feet and in sections the trail narrows and is so vertical that you almost have to scramble on all fours to assure traction. Airi digs in — boring down into the core of her Finnish Sisu mental backbone — and drives up with everything she has, touching hands to the ground more often than not. A Swiss media helicopter swerves in for a closer look as the crowd goes ape, astonished by Airi’s verve to lock horns with Nemesis while going mind-to-mind with the samurai princess. Jōtara tries to counter the Sisu blitzkrieg but Musashi’s heir can’t will a steely death-stroke, not today. But for a 22-year-old with the stones to get in the face of Nemesis and not get decapitated, she is a phenom and Japan’s Rising Sun in future Phenomic Games. Airi crosses the finish line in 4th and is now the reigning Jaguaress Queen, living proof of a beautiful mind in a beautiful body.
The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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I hope you enjoyed the Introduction to The World’s Fittest Humans, a delicious recipe of realistic fiction brewed in a searing cauldron of cutting-edge ingredients from theoretical biology, biological anthropology, network theory, embodied cognition, eco-evo-devo, physiology of the deadly encounter, exercise physiology and philosophy of mind. Beginning with the next chapter, the Phenomic competitors up their game (big-time!) and train for next season’s Phenomic Worlds in Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.
Each chapter will explore the life of twelve very different competitors including in-depth and personal interviews as you go globe hopping all around the world to their training facilities and learn their philosophies, theories, and training methods. You will get up real close and personal with Airi, Jōtara, Gabriela, Lake, Ji, Ivan, Janu and five new Phenomic Games competitors along with their world-renowned coaches and bleeding-edge sports scientists as they push the human performance envelope in every mental and physical facet imaginable; by showtime in Whistler they redefine what is possible. The first casualty in this blood bath is your definition of fitness.
Brace yourself for serious fun, folks.
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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