This is as good as it gets. We're the fastest, tallest, oldest and cleverest we'll ever be. This is according to research by Paris Descartes University, France, which conducted a study of 120 years of data charting a broad range of population statistics, and the conclusion is that we've peaked.
Few people obliterate a world record. They inch it.
'These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress,' said study author, Professor Jean-François Toussaint.
In fact, due to constraints on nutrition supply and climate, we may soon move backwards. Here, MH tracks the human race's progress.
At 6.22pm on a warm Sunday evening in early June the lights dim in London’s Olympic velodrome. The capacity crowd cheers. Eyes focus on a ramp leading from the bowels of the arena into the track centre, the noise growing in intensity until eventually, emerging from the darkness and picked out by the beam of a spotlight, a figure on two wheels appears.
Sir Bradley Wiggins pedals onto the track and completes two slow laps with his head bowed, self-contained. Methodically he stops, dismounts and sits down to pull on his gold aerodynamic helmet. He climbs onto another bike, held upright in its starting gate, then stands on the pedals, pushes down and sets off. Ahead of him lies 60 minutes of solitude and suffering. His challenge – in which he will emphatically succeed – is to break cycling’s world hour record by riding further than anyone else in history.
It might seem remarkable that world records are still being broken; that there remain gains to be made at the very highest level of sport. The pioneering American sportswriter Paul Gallico, writing in 1937, had the foresight to acknowledge that the records of his own day could not represent the pinnacle of athletic achievement. Even so, he felt there were physiological limits that would one day mean man could go no faster.
“Somewhere, some time, there must be a ceiling beyond which no combination of human courage, skill, endeavour and physique can rise,” wrote Gallico. Boldly, he went further, predicting a ‘ceiling’ of 9.9 seconds for the 100 metres. He was wrong, of course. At the time of writing, that ceiling has been breached on 150 occasions and one man, Usain Bolt, has run 9.58 seconds. But can somebody, somewhere, some day still run faster? And if so, how much faster are we talking? Nine seconds? Eight?
The question of a natural limit on human performance is as pertinent as ever. Wiggins was one of many to take on the hour record this year, while Bolt has suggested that he might have another world beating time in his long legs, most likely over 200 rather than 100 metres, before his scheduled retirement in 2017. Then there’s the ambitious project, launched at the end of last year and led by Brighton-based physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis, to break the two-hour marathon barrier.
What these people have in common is a refusal to believe that the ceiling has been reached, that theirs is the generation that can go no further, no faster. But if not now, when?
Bike to basics
A record like the hour is inevitably more complicated than Bolt’s 100m sprints, or even the two-hour marathon project. It involves two elements: man and machine, body and bike. It was the fear that the balance was tilting in favour of the latter that led to a re-drawing of the hour’s rules in the late 1990s. Graeme Obree, a maverick Scotsman whose position on his homebuilt bike resembled a skier’s tuck, set a new mark in 1993. Obree was the great innovator, re-imagining the bike, constantly in search of extra speed. It turned out the problem wasn’t the machine but the human: the arms in particular. “If I could cut off my arms,” reasoned Obree, “I’d be much faster.” That wasn’t really an option, but tucking them under his body, thus removing them from the airflow, was.
The record was broken, but so too – according to cycling’s governing body, the UCI – were the rules. Somehow the purity of the attempt had been tarnished. The tuck position was banned. Undeterred, Obree returned as ‘Superman’, with handlebars raised and reaching out over the front wheel. This game of innovation and prohibition continued for months until eventually the riders lost patience and the record lost its gloss.
The hour lay dormant for more than a decade before common sense prevailed in late 2014. Modern bikes would be allowed, ruled the UCI, as long as they conformed to certain dimensions. It sparked a rush of attempts. Before Wiggins, seven had a go, with five successful. But it was another Brit, Alex Dowsett, who established the distance Wiggins had to beat. Dowsett’s record – the record – stood at 52.937km. Wiggins knew that with the right team, the right bike and the right preparation, he had it in him to lay down a new mark. One, he hoped, that would never be beaten.
In order to reach the ceiling of potential, Wiggins knew every part of his body, bike and mind would have to be perfectly poised. Few people obliterate a world record. Contenders are looking at shaving off seconds, or fractions thereof. To do so, you have to look for tiny, seemingly insignificant areas of improvement, and focus on bettering one or another. Make enough of these micro enhancements, figured Wiggins, and maybe he could lay down an indelible mark.
Wind tunnel vision
Sir Dave Brailsford, the man who masterminded the British Cycling revolution, and now leads Team Sky, coined the phrase “the aggregation of marginal gains”, though these days he prefers to talk of “continuous improvement” – the constant quest for gains in every area. Brailsford has studied equipment, nutrition, training, the effects of altitude, and most recently sleep. (His quest to improve his riders’ slumber led to putting his team leader, Richie Porte, in a motorhome instead of a different hotel room every night during this year’s Giro d’Italia.) But the one constant area of improvement in cycling remains Obree’s great obsession: aerodynamics.
The bike is one factor (for the hour record Wiggins’s machine was engineered by Jaguar and built by Pinarello, and reckoned to be worth a 7.5% aerodynamic gain), the position another, with clothing a third. For his attempt, Wiggins donned a skin-suit made of the same rubberised material as those worn by the all-conquering British cycling team at the 2008 Olympic Games, following which the riders were ordered to return them to the team. They were then shredded, just in case a rival team laid its hands on one and copied it. On the morning of Wiggins’ attempt even his trademark facial hair was missing, on the advice of his aerodynamics specialist Dimitris Katsanis. Marginal gains, indeed.
To better understand the importance of aerodynamics I meet up with Chris Boardman, Obree’s great rival and a one-time holder of the hour record himself. Reaching for his phone, Boardman begins scrolling through images. “Look at this,” he says. “I love this picture.” It shows a split screen: on one side a large egg-shaped object, on the other a cross-section of a small round cable.
“Which object has more drag?” asks Boardman. It seems impossible not to believe that the smaller of the two objects would be quicker through the air. Boardman shakes his head: “It’s all about shape, not size, and managing air flow. So a very small piece of round cable has the same drag as a trout. When you realise that, and you start to realise the implications of things like losing weight… If you lose 2mm off your entire silhouette, the impact of that on aerodynamics is significant – and measurable.”
For now, then, with increased knowledge comes increased room for improvement. As new technology allows athletes to employ power more efficiently, the more records are there to be broken. But there’s a limit to how many millimetres you can shave off someone’s silhouette. You can change the shape and size of a human body on a bike, but only within certain parameters. Technical advancements have taken us so far, but many believe that the time will soon come when physics alone will no longer provide athletes with the necessary edge.
Runing out of times
Usain Bolt is another man well acquainted with marginal gains. On a visit to Jamaica I meet Bolt’s coach, Glen Mills. He is obsessed with mechanics, using video analysis to study his athletes’ movement and work on their defects. In fact, Mills is so good at perfecting his charges’ technique that experts claim to be able to spot one of his sprinters a mile off: “Their feet just kiss the ground,” purrs Dennis Johnson, the world’s fastest man in the early 1960s and the ‘architect’ of Jamaica’s sprinting programme. “They don’t look haggard, they look like they’re dancing.”
Bolt clearly has significantly greater resources to call upon than his forebears, from the unparalleled knowledge of his coach to the equipment at his disposal. Yet the reason he believes he can continue to go faster is down not to science and engineering but what’s inside. He maintains that, despite his talents, he is still to execute the perfect race, one in which he would award himself full marks in the five phases of sprinting: start, block clearance, acceleration, maintaining top speed and deceleration. In every sport – even one as apparently simple as sprinting over 100 metres – there are different components to break down, analyse, improve upon. It is a cruel but necessary irony that those at the pinnacle tend to identify flaws rather than see perfection.
Not everyone agrees with him, not least Johnson who believes it is the improvement in track conditions, race footwear and timing methods that have caused the most significant reductions in times. But Bolt has an unlikely ally (at least in principle) in the shape of a Greek-Australian professor of sports science based at the University of Brighton. Yannis Pitsiladis believes that Bolt’s 100m world record of 9.58 seconds, set in Berlin in 2009, can and will be beaten in the near future by focusing on an underexplored and underexploited part of the modern competitive athlete: his brain.
“I will get a sprinter below 9.55 seconds,” he tells me matter-of-factly. But first, he has a more immediate ambition: to support a runner to break two hours for a marathon.
There is currently as much interest in the two-hour marathon as there was around cycling’s hour record earlier this summer, though the landmark time was identified as long ago as 1991, by American academic Mike Joyner. Without setting a date for it, Joyner calculated that the ultimate human performance over 26.2miles would be 1 hour, 57 minutes, 58 seconds. The two-hour marathon, he insisted, was a case of when rather than if.
Pitsiladis agrees. What’s more, he’s braver than Joyner. He does put a date on it: 2019. Pitsiladis’ approach will be to surround his chosen athlete with experts in every imaginable field, but most crucially psychology. Whether it is cycling 55km in an hour, running a marathon in less than two hours, or sprinting 100 metres in 9.55 seconds, each mark seems outlandish, impossible even. And that is a large part of the problem: the perception that such performances are out of reach. This phenomenon is known as “programming” – the idea that elite athletes are as susceptible as anyone else to imposing limits based on what they perceive to be possible. And it lies at the heart of Pitsiladis’ ambition.
An example of programming came in swimming: world records tumbled when swimmers wore new non-textile suits at the 2009 world championships. When the suits were banned in 2010 it was assumed that times would revert to where they had been. It didn’t happen. The bar had been permanently raised. Even in their old textile suits swimmers carried on breaking world records.
Gallico identified this phenomenon back in 1937, claiming that any new record “immediately changes the mental attitude of the athlete towards the task of wrecking it further. A crack sprinter will run the hundred yards in 9.6, the world’s record time, and never improve on it. Along will come a new phenom and lower the world’s record to 9.4. The 9.6 man will suddenly, to his own great surprise, do it in 9.4, too. Why? Because he knows it can be done, has been done.”
From his Brighton base, Pitsiladis’ SUB2 project is already on the hunt for an up-and-coming talent to coach below the evocative two-hour barrier. (The theory being that reprogramming an already elite runner would be nigh on impossible.) “The mental side is absolutely essential,” he says. “When I worked with athletes like Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, they were able to push themselves to their absolute limit. That though is their limit based on the preparations that they've done – we don't expect someone to push themselves to 150%. With this project, we will prepare the athletes in a way that if they can push themselves, they could do something quite special.”
Just as Gallico before him, Pitsiladis argues that once the first man runs a sub-2-hour marathon, the proverbial floodgates will open. “It's an incredibly exciting project,” he says. “One that could completely change the way we look at sport.” Pitsiladis isn’t saying that there is no ceiling, just that it’s higher – much higher, maybe – than we can currently imagine.
On the evening of his hour challenge the temperature inside the velodrome is hotter than Wiggins would have liked, with an air pressure of 1036 millibars (which means thicker air, harder to displace, requiring more effort). But his preparation has been precise and he compensates by reducing the gearing on his bike, enabling him to keep spinning his hairless legs (another marginal gain) at 103 to 104 revs per minute. From the start, as the 6,000 crowd urges him on, Wiggins sets about his task with his head down, in his own world, eyes locked on to the black line looping around the bottom of the track.
The times are remarkably consistent: around 17 seconds per lap, every lap, for 50, 100, 150 laps. Wiggins’ body is rock solid. It’s only in the final 15 minutes that the effort starts to tell. Wiggins does well to hold his aerodynamic position, but his coach, Heiko Salzwedel, can tell he’s in trouble. The first sign is that his face turns red. Then his pedal stroke becomes more laboured. The fatigue begins to show in his eyes, which betrays an increasing sense of desperation. “I saw his face, he was struggling, it was coma – he was in a coma,” Salzwedel tells me after the ride, saying that Wiggins was fighting so hard that his vision went blurred. “He could not see the black line. But it shows what a great athlete he is, that he can dig so deep.”
(Related: The body-weight endurance-building workout)
After 211 laps and 54.526km a gun fires to signal that an hour has elapsed: Wiggins has broken the record. It takes him another two laps to be able to raise a hand from the bars and wave at the crowd. “You could see he was in distress,” says sports scientist Mark Walker. “He held his bike up, but you could see in his eyes that he was wasted.” In a typically candid post-challenge interview Wiggins compares the ordeal to childbirth. “The difference,” says Walker, “is that once a woman is in labour there’s no stopping it.” Wiggins had the choice to give up every second of the way.
Most leave the Olympic velodrome beaming from ear to ear, ecstatic at having witnessed a world record. Yet Wiggins, with his elite athlete’s mind, and his realisation that it hadn’t been the perfect ride, is contented rather than elated. He appears afterwards in a black top embroidered with the new distance: 54.526km. For Wiggins it lacks the magic of the number ‘55’, which he had fixed his sights on. “It’s perhaps not as far as I dreamed or hoped but I’m satisfied,” he says. “I couldn’t have done any more today.”
His demeanour is reminiscent of Usain Bolt at the Beijing Olympics when he set a new world record in the 100 metres having coasted the last ten. Bolt couldn’t allow himself to be happy with the time, because he knew he could have gone faster. A year later in Berlin he did. Next year, he might once more. In the aftermath of his ride Wiggins insists that was it for him: that he would not have another crack at the hour record. But he knows that others will. And he knows that one day it will be broken.
By: Richard Moore
The text is a detailed article discussing the limits of human performance in sports, focusing on world records in cycling, sprinting, and marathon running. It explores the concept of "marginal gains" and the psychological barriers that athletes face.
multiple_questions

the text contains multiple implicit and explicit questions about the limits of human performance:
1. "but can somebody, somewhere, some day still run faster? and if so, how much faster are we talking? nine seconds? eight?"
2. "then there’s the ambitious project, launched at the end of last year and led by brighton-based physiologist yannis pitsiladis, to break the two-hour marathon barrier."
3. "but there’s a limit to how many millimetres you can shave off someone’s silhouette. you can change the shape and size of a human body on a bike, but only within certain parameters. technical advancements have taken us so far, but many believe that the time will soon come when physics alone will no longer provide athletes with the necessary edge."
4. "it's an incredibly exciting project,” he says. “one that could completely change the way we look at sport.” pitsiladis isn’t saying that there is no ceiling,
Given a text passage, determine:
    1. If it contains a mathematical question (including word problems or calculations)
    2. If an answer to that mathematical question is provided in the text

First, describe the content structure you found in 1-2 sentences.

Then provide your analysis in the following format:
TYPE: <one of the following values>
- NO_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION_WITH_ANSWER
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS_WITH_ANSWERS
system
This is as good as it gets. We're the fastest, tallest, oldest and cleverest we'll ever be. This is according to research by Paris Descartes University, France, which conducted a study of 120 years of data charting a broad range of population statistics, and the conclusion is that we've peaked.
Few people obliterate a world record. They inch it.
'These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress,' said study author, Professor Jean-François Toussaint.
In fact, due to constraints on nutrition supply and climate, we may soon move backwards. Here, MH tracks the human race's progress.
At 6.22pm on a warm Sunday evening in early June the lights dim in London’s Olympic velodrome. The capacity crowd cheers. Eyes focus on a ramp leading from the bowels of the arena into the track centre, the noise growing in intensity until eventually, emerging from the darkness and picked out by the beam of a spotlight, a figure on two wheels appears.
Sir Bradley Wiggins pedals onto the track and completes two slow laps with his head bowed, self-contained. Methodically he stops, dismounts and sits down to pull on his gold aerodynamic helmet. He climbs onto another bike, held upright in its starting gate, then stands on the pedals, pushes down and sets off. Ahead of him lies 60 minutes of solitude and suffering. His challenge – in which he will emphatically succeed – is to break cycling’s world hour record by riding further than anyone else in history.
It might seem remarkable that world records are still being broken; that there remain gains to be made at the very highest level of sport. The pioneering American sportswriter Paul Gallico, writing in 1937, had the foresight to acknowledge that the records of his own day could not represent the pinnacle of athletic achievement. Even so, he felt there were physiological limits that would one day mean man could go no faster.
“Somewhere, some time, there must be a ceiling beyond which no combination of human courage, skill, endeavour and physique can rise,” wrote Gallico. Boldly, he went further, predicting a ‘ceiling’ of 9.9 seconds for the 100 metres. He was wrong, of course. At the time of writing, that ceiling has been breached on 150 occasions and one man, Usain Bolt, has run 9.58 seconds. But can somebody, somewhere, some day still run faster? And if so, how much faster are we talking? Nine seconds? Eight?
The question of a natural limit on human performance is as pertinent as ever. Wiggins was one of many to take on the hour record this year, while Bolt has suggested that he might have another world beating time in his long legs, most likely over 200 rather than 100 metres, before his scheduled retirement in 2017. Then there’s the ambitious project, launched at the end of last year and led by Brighton-based physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis, to break the two-hour marathon barrier.
What these people have in common is a refusal to believe that the ceiling has been reached, that theirs is the generation that can go no further, no faster. But if not now, when?
Bike to basics
A record like the hour is inevitably more complicated than Bolt’s 100m sprints, or even the two-hour marathon project. It involves two elements: man and machine, body and bike. It was the fear that the balance was tilting in favour of the latter that led to a re-drawing of the hour’s rules in the late 1990s. Graeme Obree, a maverick Scotsman whose position on his homebuilt bike resembled a skier’s tuck, set a new mark in 1993. Obree was the great innovator, re-imagining the bike, constantly in search of extra speed. It turned out the problem wasn’t the machine but the human: the arms in particular. “If I could cut off my arms,” reasoned Obree, “I’d be much faster.” That wasn’t really an option, but tucking them under his body, thus removing them from the airflow, was.
The record was broken, but so too – according to cycling’s governing body, the UCI – were the rules. Somehow the purity of the attempt had been tarnished. The tuck position was banned. Undeterred, Obree returned as ‘Superman’, with handlebars raised and reaching out over the front wheel. This game of innovation and prohibition continued for months until eventually the riders lost patience and the record lost its gloss.
The hour lay dormant for more than a decade before common sense prevailed in late 2014. Modern bikes would be allowed, ruled the UCI, as long as they conformed to certain dimensions. It sparked a rush of attempts. Before Wiggins, seven had a go, with five successful. But it was another Brit, Alex Dowsett, who established the distance Wiggins had to beat. Dowsett’s record – the record – stood at 52.937km. Wiggins knew that with the right team, the right bike and the right preparation, he had it in him to lay down a new mark. One, he hoped, that would never be beaten.
In order to reach the ceiling of potential, Wiggins knew every part of his body, bike and mind would have to be perfectly poised. Few people obliterate a world record. Contenders are looking at shaving off seconds, or fractions thereof. To do so, you have to look for tiny, seemingly insignificant areas of improvement, and focus on bettering one or another. Make enough of these micro enhancements, figured Wiggins, and maybe he could lay down an indelible mark.
Wind tunnel vision
Sir Dave Brailsford, the man who masterminded the British Cycling revolution, and now leads Team Sky, coined the phrase “the aggregation of marginal gains”, though these days he prefers to talk of “continuous improvement” – the constant quest for gains in every area. Brailsford has studied equipment, nutrition, training, the effects of altitude, and most recently sleep. (His quest to improve his riders’ slumber led to putting his team leader, Richie Porte, in a motorhome instead of a different hotel room every night during this year’s Giro d’Italia.) But the one constant area of improvement in cycling remains Obree’s great obsession: aerodynamics.
The bike is one factor (for the hour record Wiggins’s machine was engineered by Jaguar and built by Pinarello, and reckoned to be worth a 7.5% aerodynamic gain), the position another, with clothing a third. For his attempt, Wiggins donned a skin-suit made of the same rubberised material as those worn by the all-conquering British cycling team at the 2008 Olympic Games, following which the riders were ordered to return them to the team. They were then shredded, just in case a rival team laid its hands on one and copied it. On the morning of Wiggins’ attempt even his trademark facial hair was missing, on the advice of his aerodynamics specialist Dimitris Katsanis. Marginal gains, indeed.
To better understand the importance of aerodynamics I meet up with Chris Boardman, Obree’s great rival and a one-time holder of the hour record himself. Reaching for his phone, Boardman begins scrolling through images. “Look at this,” he says. “I love this picture.” It shows a split screen: on one side a large egg-shaped object, on the other a cross-section of a small round cable.
“Which object has more drag?” asks Boardman. It seems impossible not to believe that the smaller of the two objects would be quicker through the air. Boardman shakes his head: “It’s all about shape, not size, and managing air flow. So a very small piece of round cable has the same drag as a trout. When you realise that, and you start to realise the implications of things like losing weight… If you lose 2mm off your entire silhouette, the impact of that on aerodynamics is significant – and measurable.”
For now, then, with increased knowledge comes increased room for improvement. As new technology allows athletes to employ power more efficiently, the more records are there to be broken. But there’s a limit to how many millimetres you can shave off someone’s silhouette. You can change the shape and size of a human body on a bike, but only within certain parameters. Technical advancements have taken us so far, but many believe that the time will soon come when physics alone will no longer provide athletes with the necessary edge.
Runing out of times
Usain Bolt is another man well acquainted with marginal gains. On a visit to Jamaica I meet Bolt’s coach, Glen Mills. He is obsessed with mechanics, using video analysis to study his athletes’ movement and work on their defects. In fact, Mills is so good at perfecting his charges’ technique that experts claim to be able to spot one of his sprinters a mile off: “Their feet just kiss the ground,” purrs Dennis Johnson, the world’s fastest man in the early 1960s and the ‘architect’ of Jamaica’s sprinting programme. “They don’t look haggard, they look like they’re dancing.”
Bolt clearly has significantly greater resources to call upon than his forebears, from the unparalleled knowledge of his coach to the equipment at his disposal. Yet the reason he believes he can continue to go faster is down not to science and engineering but what’s inside. He maintains that, despite his talents, he is still to execute the perfect race, one in which he would award himself full marks in the five phases of sprinting: start, block clearance, acceleration, maintaining top speed and deceleration. In every sport – even one as apparently simple as sprinting over 100 metres – there are different components to break down, analyse, improve upon. It is a cruel but necessary irony that those at the pinnacle tend to identify flaws rather than see perfection.
Not everyone agrees with him, not least Johnson who believes it is the improvement in track conditions, race footwear and timing methods that have caused the most significant reductions in times. But Bolt has an unlikely ally (at least in principle) in the shape of a Greek-Australian professor of sports science based at the University of Brighton. Yannis Pitsiladis believes that Bolt’s 100m world record of 9.58 seconds, set in Berlin in 2009, can and will be beaten in the near future by focusing on an underexplored and underexploited part of the modern competitive athlete: his brain.
“I will get a sprinter below 9.55 seconds,” he tells me matter-of-factly. But first, he has a more immediate ambition: to support a runner to break two hours for a marathon.
There is currently as much interest in the two-hour marathon as there was around cycling’s hour record earlier this summer, though the landmark time was identified as long ago as 1991, by American academic Mike Joyner. Without setting a date for it, Joyner calculated that the ultimate human performance over 26.2miles would be 1 hour, 57 minutes, 58 seconds. The two-hour marathon, he insisted, was a case of when rather than if.
Pitsiladis agrees. What’s more, he’s braver than Joyner. He does put a date on it: 2019. Pitsiladis’ approach will be to surround his chosen athlete with experts in every imaginable field, but most crucially psychology. Whether it is cycling 55km in an hour, running a marathon in less than two hours, or sprinting 100 metres in 9.55 seconds, each mark seems outlandish, impossible even. And that is a large part of the problem: the perception that such performances are out of reach. This phenomenon is known as “programming” – the idea that elite athletes are as susceptible as anyone else to imposing limits based on what they perceive to be possible. And it lies at the heart of Pitsiladis’ ambition.
An example of programming came in swimming: world records tumbled when swimmers wore new non-textile suits at the 2009 world championships. When the suits were banned in 2010 it was assumed that times would revert to where they had been. It didn’t happen. The bar had been permanently raised. Even in their old textile suits swimmers carried on breaking world records.
Gallico identified this phenomenon back in 1937, claiming that any new record “immediately changes the mental attitude of the athlete towards the task of wrecking it further. A crack sprinter will run the hundred yards in 9.6, the world’s record time, and never improve on it. Along will come a new phenom and lower the world’s record to 9.4. The 9.6 man will suddenly, to his own great surprise, do it in 9.4, too. Why? Because he knows it can be done, has been done.”
From his Brighton base, Pitsiladis’ SUB2 project is already on the hunt for an up-and-coming talent to coach below the evocative two-hour barrier. (The theory being that reprogramming an already elite runner would be nigh on impossible.) “The mental side is absolutely essential,” he says. “When I worked with athletes like Haile Gebrselassie and Kenenisa Bekele, they were able to push themselves to their absolute limit. That though is their limit based on the preparations that they've done – we don't expect someone to push themselves to 150%. With this project, we will prepare the athletes in a way that if they can push themselves, they could do something quite special.”
Just as Gallico before him, Pitsiladis argues that once the first man runs a sub-2-hour marathon, the proverbial floodgates will open. “It's an incredibly exciting project,” he says. “One that could completely change the way we look at sport.” Pitsiladis isn’t saying that there is no ceiling, just that it’s higher – much higher, maybe – than we can currently imagine.
On the evening of his hour challenge the temperature inside the velodrome is hotter than Wiggins would have liked, with an air pressure of 1036 millibars (which means thicker air, harder to displace, requiring more effort). But his preparation has been precise and he compensates by reducing the gearing on his bike, enabling him to keep spinning his hairless legs (another marginal gain) at 103 to 104 revs per minute. From the start, as the 6,000 crowd urges him on, Wiggins sets about his task with his head down, in his own world, eyes locked on to the black line looping around the bottom of the track.
The times are remarkably consistent: around 17 seconds per lap, every lap, for 50, 100, 150 laps. Wiggins’ body is rock solid. It’s only in the final 15 minutes that the effort starts to tell. Wiggins does well to hold his aerodynamic position, but his coach, Heiko Salzwedel, can tell he’s in trouble. The first sign is that his face turns red. Then his pedal stroke becomes more laboured. The fatigue begins to show in his eyes, which betrays an increasing sense of desperation. “I saw his face, he was struggling, it was coma – he was in a coma,” Salzwedel tells me after the ride, saying that Wiggins was fighting so hard that his vision went blurred. “He could not see the black line. But it shows what a great athlete he is, that he can dig so deep.”
(Related: The body-weight endurance-building workout)
After 211 laps and 54.526km a gun fires to signal that an hour has elapsed: Wiggins has broken the record. It takes him another two laps to be able to raise a hand from the bars and wave at the crowd. “You could see he was in distress,” says sports scientist Mark Walker. “He held his bike up, but you could see in his eyes that he was wasted.” In a typically candid post-challenge interview Wiggins compares the ordeal to childbirth. “The difference,” says Walker, “is that once a woman is in labour there’s no stopping it.” Wiggins had the choice to give up every second of the way.
Most leave the Olympic velodrome beaming from ear to ear, ecstatic at having witnessed a world record. Yet Wiggins, with his elite athlete’s mind, and his realisation that it hadn’t been the perfect ride, is contented rather than elated. He appears afterwards in a black top embroidered with the new distance: 54.526km. For Wiggins it lacks the magic of the number ‘55’, which he had fixed his sights on. “It’s perhaps not as far as I dreamed or hoped but I’m satisfied,” he says. “I couldn’t have done any more today.”
His demeanour is reminiscent of Usain Bolt at the Beijing Olympics when he set a new world record in the 100 metres having coasted the last ten. Bolt couldn’t allow himself to be happy with the time, because he knew he could have gone faster. A year later in Berlin he did. Next year, he might once more. In the aftermath of his ride Wiggins insists that was it for him: that he would not have another crack at the hour record. But he knows that others will. And he knows that one day it will be broken.
By: Richard Moore
user
The text is a detailed article discussing the limits of human performance in sports, focusing on world records in cycling, sprinting, and marathon running. It explores the concept of "marginal gains" and the psychological barriers that athletes face.

TYPE: MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS

The text contains multiple implicit and explicit questions about the limits of human performance:
1. "But can somebody, somewhere, some day still run faster? And if so, how much faster are we talking? Nine seconds? Eight?"
2. "Then there’s the ambitious project, launched at the end of last year and led by Brighton-based physiologist Yannis Pitsiladis, to break the two-hour marathon barrier."
3. "But there’s a limit to how many millimetres you can shave off someone’s silhouette. You can change the shape and size of a human body on a bike, but only within certain parameters. Technical advancements have taken us so far, but many believe that the time will soon come when physics alone will no longer provide athletes with the necessary edge."
4. "It's an incredibly exciting project,” he says. “One that could completely change the way we look at sport.” Pitsiladis isn’t saying that there is no ceiling,