Sporting Intelligence

By David

Swimwatch received two interesting items of correspondence recently from New Zealand Athletic Coaching Hall of Fame member, Arch Jelley. The first referred to a Swimwatch article published last week which said that quite a few Kenyan runners, “don’t even own a pair of running shoes until pretty late in their careers.” Arch’s photograph clearly shows that quite a few Kenyan runners do own a pair of running shoes. The photograph is also proof positive of the accuracy of another claim in last week’s Swimwatch post. It said Kenyan runners were the world’s best because “they run a lot.” Just take one look at the state of some of those shoes. There is no way shoes get into that condition without having traveled quite a few miles. When Alison was among the world’s best runners we used to count on a pair of shoes lasting 1000 miles. At 100 miles a week that’s a new pair of shoes each ten weeks. My guess is that quite a few of the shoes in this photograph have seen more that their 1000 mile quota; and probably in a lot less than 10 weeks.

I wonder if any of the shoes belong to David Rudisha? This week, in Rieti Italy, the amazing Kenyan lowered the world 800 meters track record. He went through the first 400 meters in 48.20 and held on to record 1:41.01. In March 2010 the New Zealand 400 meter national track title was won by Tim Jones in 48.43. David Rudisha was 0.23 faster at 400 and still had another lap to run. The aerobic conditioning required to run that fast through the first 400 and keep going means that while none of the shoes in the photograph may be his, he has undoubtedly owned several pairs that have ended up in a similar condition.

Mind you runners are not the only ones who store their personal sporting belongings badly. The photograph below was taken this morning in my team’s equipment storage room. As you can see too many swimmers are using the floor to store their gear instead of the carefully supplied wall hooks. Fortunately our swimming equipment doesn’t show the obvious signs of wear and caked-on dirt that the Kenyans have accumulated. I also imagine the Kenyans are doing many more miles in their sporting accessories. West Auckland’s swimmers are improving though. As their miles go up the appearance of the gear room may further deteriorate but their athletic performance will hopefully become more Kenyan.

The comparison between running and swimming was taken a step further by Arch Jelley’s second item of correspondence; a copy of a British news report on the effect of running on intelligence. Evidently neuroscientists at Cambridge University have shown that running stimulates the brain to grow fresh gray matter and has a big impact on mental ability. A few days of running led to the growth of hundreds of thousands of new brain cells that improved the ability to recall memories without confusing them, a skill that is crucial for learning and other cognitive tasks, researchers said.

The new brain cells appeared in a region of the brain that is linked to the formation and recollection of memories. The work revealed why running can improve memory and learning. They studied two groups of mice, one of which had unlimited access to a running wheel throughout. The other mice formed a control group. The running mice clocked up an average of 15 miles (24km) a day. Their scores in a memory test for mice were nearly twice as high as those of the control group.

Brain tissue taken from the rodents showed that the running mice had grown fresh grey matter during the experiment. Tissue samples from the dentate gyrus part of the brain revealed on average 6,000 new brain cells in every cubic millimeter. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampus, one of the few regions of the adult human brain that can grow fresh brain cells.

Arch felt his two news reports were related; the shoes being the means by which we could all achieve superior intelligence. He was unable to resist commenting under the Guardian’s news story, “I’m not sure if swimming does the same thing.”

Well I happen to know that not only does swimming do the same thing; it does it better. The Americans keep statistics on this sort of thing. Come to think of it, the Americans keep statistics on just about everything. When Jane was a sophomore at Washington State University, on a swimming scholarship, her team ranked first in the United States among all NCAA Division One swimming teams for academic performance. There were about 23 swimmers on the Washington State team reading a range of majors that included Zoology, English (that was Jane), Criminology and Education. Their combined Grade Point Average was an impressive 3.66 (that’s a standard American academic measure graded out of a maximum score of 4).

All this academic horse power in the Washington State swim team was marginally tarnished when Jane pointed out that the team still had to read the lettering above the record board when doing the chant that spelled out “Washington State”, letter by letter. But don’t tell Arch.

[from Jane: Hahaha, yes we did always look at the back wall of the pool and read off the letters, and even then, there were screw-ups every now and again.]

–> Good memories :)