Over the past long weekend I finished reading a brilliant book: The Sports Gene by David Epstein. It was recommended to me (and in fact leant to me!) by a good friend, colleague and mentor: Dr Dave Pollock.
It is a thoroughly gripping read for anyone who is interested in sports performance.
Here are but a few extracts from the book that I found enlightening (Mr. Epstein’s word are quoted in italic):
1. “Once the database is in place, however an athlete who possesses outstanding visual hardware can put it to superior use. In others, as with the ability to respond rapidly to endurance exercise, genes mediate the very improvements that come from hard training. In all likelihood, we oversubscribe our skills and traits to either innate talent or training, depending on what fits our personal narratives.”
Having myself been involved in sport most of my life, I have before fallen into the trap of blowing my own trumpet far too often. Reading this book was very sobering!
2. “Genetic variation among individuals, it seems, ensures that none of us can truly know another’s physical pain”. “Pain is innate, but it also must be learned. It is unavoidable, and yet modifiable. It is common to all people and all athletes but never experienced quite the same way by any two individuals or even by the same individual in two different situations.”
I see such a wide pain response in patients to the same procedure and I found his comments on pain to reflect my experience as a surgeon.
3. With regards to becoming a great distance runner he states: “A helpful combination perhaps is to have sea-level ancestry (so that haemoglobin can elevate quickly upon training), but to be born at altitude (in order to develop larger lung surface area) and then to train in the sweet spot. That is exactly the story of legions of the Kalenjin Kenyans and Oromo Ethiopians. “The sweet spot Mr. Epstein refers to is “around six to nine thousand feet, high enough to cause physiological changes, but not so high that the air is too thin for hard training”.
These are but a few extracts for the book. It is very well researched and easy to read. I highly recommend it for any person with an interest in the reasons for the wide variation in the sporting performances we see.