How Far Can the Human Body Go?

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Hello, I'm Professor Brian Cox, and I'm I'm here to explain science.

And I am Robin Ince and I am here to interrupt him every time you go, I've got absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

I mean, I'm sure that man understands it, but I have not got a clue.

Today we're talking about something very close to our hearts, which is, of course, physical exercise.

You got you right.

I knew you as a crowd would then go, that was the thing we hated most at school.

Don't tell us there was science in it.

Well, that is what we're going to talk about.

In fact, it is genuinely true true that you won't believe it because, like Brian, he loves human endurance.

I have, as regular listeners know, a bagger gymnastic 4 badge, which means that I was able at primary school to jump without falling over and also to do a forward roll.

So, both of us are very much at the cutting edge of physical stealth.

Today, we're exploring the science of human endurance.

How fast can we run?

How far can we run?

Can we run?

I think we found out with me, no.

Can I just find out from this audience who enjoys running like actually as a leisure activity?

There's a few.

Yeah, about five out of 500, which is exactly what I predicted.

Anyway, how is science transforming sports?

So...

To understand this, to go on an adventure into this, we are joined by an Olympic gold medalist, a biomechanist, the son of a silverback, and someone who I didn't shake hands with the last time I saw them because they just dissected a llama and it was still hanging off them.

Anyway, they are.

I'm Ben Garridge, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of East Anglia.

And the extreme achievement that I'm going for at the moment is to run the world's hardest mountain race called the Dragon's Back in Wales.

My name is Polly McGuigan, and I am a lecturer in biomechanics at the University of Bath, where I study muscle and tendon and how they power locomotion.

And the extreme physical challenge that I would like to achieve is something much less dramatic than that, and maybe just being able to run 10k.

I'm Sally Gunnell, Olympic gold medalist in the 400m hurdles, and my extreme challenge, I've sort of done one, but at the moment

I think it would be just to do one chin-up without the cheating band.

Do you know what I mean?

That's hard.

Can't do it.

Never have.

I'm Russell Kane, I'm a stand-up comedian, and my extreme physical challenge is trying to hold in the word bell end when I'm watching question time.

Right, Sally, we have to start with you.

And you are the only female British athlete to have won four majors, four golds in the Olympics, the World, the European, and the Commonwealth.

So how do you train?

What was the process to get to that incredible level?

It certainly doesn't happen overnight, as you can imagine.

It's about consistency.

Used to train six days a week, have one easier day, two sessions a day, five or six hours, and it's about just getting the balance because 400 hurdles, you've got to be fast, but you're not fast enough to be a sprinter.

So it's about getting that speed endurance.

Technically, you've got to be good.

You've got to do strength work in the gym to get that power.

You've got to do track work.

It's just a whole combination.

And training the mind as well.

And how did you find that sport?

Do you begin by being just fast and a good runner?

And at school, you were winning races 100, 200, 400, and so on.

And then you go to hurdles.

I remember winning my first sports day as five years old.

And I've just had this natural ability to run fast.

But I actually started off as a long jumper.

I then went and did multi-events.

So that was like high jump, shot, javelin, 800.

And I think at that age, it gave me a real sort of cross-section of strengths that I was sort of building up.

Then I did 100-metre hurdles because I wasn't particularly good at, I don't know, high jump and shot and javelin.

And then I just remember winning a Commonwealth Gold in the 100-metre hurdles.

And then my coach just saying to me, I think you'll make a brilliant 400-metre hurdler.

And I was like, Why would I want to do that?

That hurts.

That's fine.

You know, and I always remember someone saying to me that you never choose the 400 hurdles.

The 400 hurdles choose you because it is a bit of a killer event.

If you get it wrong, you hit a hurdle, it hurts, you end up on the floor.

But yeah, Bruce was right.

And it just sort of clicked really, and that was it.

Was it running at the sports day?

Was that actually the first thing?

Was it running?

Yeah, just running, yeah.

But I used to do beanbag, you know, all those sorts of things.

things.

Yeah, it can spoon.

Heated up with the speed.

It was hard boiled by the time you got to start.

I just had that natural, yeah, competitive sort of edge.

So I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about the person on the same day had won the sack race.

And then they watch you on the Olympics and they go, Well, of course, if they'd ever put the sack race in, I'd have been with Sally too.

She'd have won the running, but it turns out, after eight years old, the sack's gone.

It's just not part of the world anymore.

I remember when I left primary school, the girl that was my sort of competitor in primary school wrote on my shirt, see you in the Olympics.

So did you feel that that was the pinnacle?

That's as fast as I can go?

Or did you think actually, no, I'm number one in the world, the fastest ever, 400 meter turtles, but I can go faster, I can go faster, there's always more.

You always look at how can I improve.

You know, I think the whole journey for me wasn't about running fast traffic, it was actually how good I could personally be.

You know, when I broke that world record, that's what it took to win that race.

And it just happened to be that two of us broke the world record, and that's what it took.

But I straight away, I was like, well, I could knock a little bit off here.

And technically, I was a little bit too high, and the angle of the dangle wasn't quite right.

And you just, and now you realize it's all those little things that add up.

It's not just one thing, there's so many little tiny things that you have to get right on that one day.

I love that idea you were saying there, Brian.

The idea, because I think that probably wouldn't be a very good coach, was it?

He just goes, Yeah, that's fast enough.

53 seconds is all right.

Don't try and go faster.

Fastest ever.

Polly, hurdles.

Could you talk us through that?

Because it's running fast, but also jumping high, and of course, a lot of techniques.

So, can you talk us through the biomechanics of hurdling?

Sorry, can you just say that again?

I just found you going, it's running fast and it's also jumping high.

It was like the most beautiful play school moment we've ever had.

There was just something about it's running fast and it's jumping, it's buying, buying, buying, vom, vom, vom.

Anyway, let's ask.

One of the audiences we plan hard to get is the under fives, and I think we finally, thanks to that delivery, we've got it.

So, no, just ask it, it was lovely.

Well, I'd just like to come back on something that Sally said earlier about the fact that she's not a sprinter, and she's, I mean, she is a sprinter.

She is running faster than anybody in this room could run and jumping high.

But it's that that business of running fast, creating power with your muscles because of the speed that you are running.

And as we run faster, the amount of time that you spend with each leg on the ground decreases, and therefore the amount of force that you have to generate with your muscles to support your body weight gets higher and higher the faster you go.

If you then bring into that the fact that you're having to jump a hurdle, which is how high, Sally?

Oh, about that.

So for the radio audience.

For the placebo,

he's a big teddy bear, bruh.

It's high if the angle of the dangle is wrong.

Exactly.

And if your legs are hurting,

then you know.

And the further you go round those 400 meters, your muscles are starting to fatigue.

They're not generating as much force as they were at the beginning of the race.

And therefore, overall, it's who can hold on to that technique and keep generating that force in your muscles as long as possible through that race.

And how much of that is training, and how much is, as you said, Sally,

you're always good at running.

So, how much is natural ability, genetics, and how much is training?

So, there's certainly a genetic element to it in terms of all sorts of elements that sort of lead to the composition of your muscles, your anthropometrics or the way that your body is made up, the length of the different segments of your limbs, that's kind of all has genetic sort of determinants to it.

But then it's also about the way in which you condition that system through childhood, through adulthood, and through training.

But

the extra thing that makes elite athletes on top of all of that is the ability to push themselves through training and in competition as well.

So, your world record was 52.74 seconds, 1993.

Current world record, 50.68.

It's a big gap.

It is.

What do you attribute that gap to?

A very talented young lady, right from a very young age.

You could see the talent she had.

But it would be Sydney McCloughlin.

Yeah, Sydney Cloughlin.

It would be the science behind it.

You know, I think now the thing is that I would get an injury and I might have missed three weeks or whatever.

Whereas now,

the science that's behind it, they're in, they're found it, it's preventative, it's that sort of stuff.

Equipment plays it a little bit, you know, the spikes, the weight of the spikes, what they're made out of, and things like that.

Clothing, shorts, and the top that she's got on, you know, small little things.

I think it's really interesting because they did a, I don't know if you guys know, but they did a whole research piece about what made people succeed, you know, like mass medal winners, the Chris Hoyes and the Matthew Pince and Stephen Redgraves.

And there were three three things that came out with all of us.

And one was how active you are as a child.

So it doesn't have to mean you have to do, you know, your 10,000 hours or anything like that.

But I grew up on a farm, so I was riding a bike, I was running up the fields, I was doing all those sorts of things.

Second one was somebody that you wanted to please in your life.

So it could have been your coach or a parent or just somebody, but you wanted to get their approval.

And the third one one was trauma.

So it doesn't have to be massive, but it could be a divorce or an illness.

In my case, my mum was quite ill when I was 15 with mental health issues.

So I sort of had to, you know, really grow up.

And they think that was part of why I had that sort of determination and that, yeah, I just put it in the right place and that mental sort of side of it.

I thought that's quite fascinating.

Well, that's very interesting from Russell because I was thinking as you went through those things,

that is very similar to a lot lot of performers, isn't it?

Certainly a lot of

the idea of trauma, the idea of wanting to please, all of those things.

So I wonder how much, in terms of different forms of performance, we actually find out the divisions that sometimes people make, that actually there may well be a lot of common ground in terms of whether it is

doing something physically marvellous or puns.

Whatever you're doing, what would be the equivalent of physically active as a child, though, for the nascent stand-up?

But it's not the end.

It's dancing, performing.

Talking a lot when you're five years old.

But isn't it very often a younger sibling that is one of the deciding factors about whether you become a stand-up?

But also, I'm an older sibling, but there's also a correlation between where you're born in the year.

This is also true for sport.

So, you see a disproportionate amount of people in the UK at top gaming sports born in September and October purely because when you're learning sport at school and you're five, six, seven, you're the tallest and the fastest, so your confidence is sort of building itself because you're always bigger and faster, and then that feeds into our muscle.

But I was a July baby.

Yeah, no, it's not February.

And David, it's quite a few athletes.

But it's not across the board, it's just more than chance.

And the same with stand-ups.

Many more of us are born in June, July, and August, and we were the smallest.

It was be funny or be punched.

They were your options.

I was born in February.

No wonder I don't get TV work.

Ben, it's interesting that Sally was talking about the idea that an athlete will often begin early in life.

But you, later in life, decided to take on an astonishing challenge.

I hated sport as a kid.

And something you said earlier, Sally, was I never liked being competitive with anyone else.

And it took me a long time to realise I could just do it against myself.

And then I was, I had various illnesses, and I had quite bad arthritis in my spine a few years ago, and they operated, and the pandemic struck.

So I had loads of metal in there, and I thought, I'm going to get fit again.

And as an academic, I thought I'll be really science-savvy with this.

I'll do the Couch to 5K.

It's a good thing, it won't be too bad.

I read up my science like a nerd and did the Couch to 5K.

And I thought I could have probably gone further.

So I thought I'll do a 10k and did a 10k and was quite proud of myself.

Didn't hurt.

Never had a blister as a runner, which I know I'm going to regret saying that for the time this car.

I then got to half marathon, got to marathon and just kept going and I kind of forest gumped it.

I thought well how far can I go as a classic academic, how far can I go?

So now having entered this 380 kilometer race over six days,

I don't know Sally.

I like a challenge.

But yeah, you're right, it was a late onset start.

And in running, especially as you know, Brian, endurance running, we tend to do better as we get older.

And we don't really know why.

And maybe there's more research now, but a lot of it is the psychology.

And I think we hadn't really understood the benefits of that driven psychology and that sense of well-being and the impact of that until recently.

But I'm quite a late bloomer.

I once got banned from a school cross-country because I got so distracted I found a dead shark on the beach and

took it back to dissect and called massive bollocking by my PU teacher who couldn't, to be fair, couldn't catch me.

But I did have a big dead seven-foot shark over my shoulder.

380k.

Can you describe a bit more about that race?

So that's not continuous running, is it?

So it's over six days, so it's 250 miles in old money.

It's twice the height of Everest and elevation across that time.

And it's from Conway Castle in the north of Wales to Cardiff Castle in the south.

It's middle of September this year coming.

There's about 500 runners each time, and there are stops each night.

So You've got to get certain thresholds across each day and just see if you can make it.

I think there's between a 70 and 80 percent dropout

or lack of success.

That's all about fueling.

A lot of it's fueling.

I've been really been going deep into this one.

And I keep thinking of why and trying to find out why they're not doing very well.

And a lot of it is it's lonely.

And I don't know, but again, you, Brian, and Sally, but I always train on my own, and I don't really mind if I'm not in a group or I don't run with anyone else.

And I think, again, come back to psychology.

I'm trying to prepare for lots of night runs, lots of cold runs.

I do lots of exercise in Bristol on the Downs, and then go for a 10K afterwards.

It's that training when you're already tired.

What's the furthest you've been so far?

50 miles.

50 miles, right?

And I'm interested to know, and I want to know from you, Sally, as well, which is about where your mind goes.

I mean, hurdling 400 meters is just, to me, such a remarkable.

I mean, I can't imagine either what we're actually practicing for.

You know, it's in pole vaults to invade a castle.

400, you know, that's a long.

But

where is your mind

as you are?

I hope that hasn't in any way belittle your achievement.

Your achievement is remarkable.

Call this bit out, right?

And all the transferable.

Some of them you go, right, I see what that would have been, Lerfo.

And then you go, that's a lot of fences when you're running away, isn't it, from the Normans or whatever it might be.

But where is your mind when you are...

Are you able to go back and go, I remember doing that?

It's a journey you go on, you know, when I first started out, and if I think about the first Olympics I did, I'd be looking at, oh, their bikes look nice, and oh, they've gone off a bit fast.

And you can't think like that.

I'd have to re-watch your racing asses.

And they think, oh, they're all so big, and they're all so tall of them.

Oh, my God, they're gonna.

And that's what I used to do.

I would be like putting myself down.

So I had to learn that you can't do that.

I only learned this probably a year before winning in Barcelona:

you have to do that whole mental side of it and the preparation.

And that was about actually knowing what you've got to execute.

So I sat down, sports psychologist, and you work out your touchdown times,

you know, just how high you're gonna be over the hurdle, absolutely everything.

What leg, what happens if things go wrong, absolutely everything, and you just rehearse it in your mind.

So, on the day,

you're not thinking about, oh, she looks nice over there, or look at that nice little makeup she's got on, or whatever.

You are, you've gone through it all, you know exactly what you've got to execute, and it just happens.

And I remember one bit of the race over the eighth hurdle because the year before I made a mistake and I started looking around and thinking people were looking good.

And I was in the lead at the eighth hurdle and I just had learnt to say to myself, You've got this.

And as soon as I said that, I was then on to that next bit.

And you cross the line and you go, Did I win that?

Did I not?

You can be on stage for 60, 70, 80 minutes and be in that flow state and sort of get to the end, like, how did I do that?

But when it stops, is the work.

If you like, you float above yourself and start planning your delivery, or what wine will I have in the travel lodge?

And you're holding a mic, and you're like, oh my god, there's 3,000 people, it's the worst feeling in the world.

That must happen during a long race.

Yeah, you just lose that concentration.

That bit, like Russell, when you were talking about, by the way, which travel lodge are you going to?

You just got a selection of wines.

I bought at the BP garage, and you well know it.

The travel lodge bus.

But it's an interesting thing.

I was just thinking that the physical side, I suppose some people can imagine that in physical things you can be so focused that actually the conscious mind doesn't seem to be there.

But from what you were just saying there, and I would agree with this as well, which is sometimes you can do a very long show and you're going off on all manner of tangents, and someone will come up to you afterwards and say, Russell, I really love that routine you did about your offsets and you go, Did I?

And so even the conscious mind, even words, there is a point of, as you said, that flow state, which is both physical and can also be very specifically verbal and mental.

Yeah, which and it's more profound because we're we're working with language, but I cannot remember using the language like a fuge almost.

But you're in control.

I've had that happen countless times where I've improvised a bit and then someone will go, I like that bit you improvised, and I'm like, what did I say?

So I can write it down because

I can't recall it.

I couldn't do it week in, week out.

It was like I could do that at a major when it was all on and full-on, but I would struggle trying to get into that state week in, week out.

That's the state you have to be in every time you go on stage.

I'm not trying to be over-dramatic here, but if you're not in that state, you're getting a bottle of wee thrown at your head at a Leeds Festival.

You sort of stay in it.

I'm being seriously, it could be a hundred-seater art centre, but if you drift out of that state you've described, time slows down.

You'd need Professor Stephen Hawking to explain what was happening.

It's like one second can last a year if you lose that focus.

And if he can still explain that, that means that the brief history of time was wrong.

You can go backwards.

Polly, we've talked about speed and distance, and you study humans but also animals.

So, the animals, you know, you could name the cheetah, for example, it'll run faster than a human being.

But in terms of endurance, where do humans rank in that league table?

Actually, much better than you think they would.

So, in terms of sprinters, we're not great compared to present company accepted, of course, but compared to cheetahs, antelope, galloping species, we're not that great.

But in terms of endurance runners, running at a reasonably fast speed for a prolonged period of time, actually, we're remarkably good.

And that came from the fact that, in terms of the origins of the human species and the evolutionary drivers of that,

actually running down prey and exhausting that prey became a sort of selection pressure on early homo species.

And therefore, those kind of characteristics that made us good endurance runners, such as having relatively long legs for our size, having springy bits within our legs, so our Achilles tendon, the elastic structures within our foot, all mean that we are pretty efficient runners because as we run, we store elastic energy within the muscle tendon units of our legs, which means that our muscles have to work less hard than if those tendons weren't there.

We're also pretty good at thermoregulating compared to many animal species, and we can therefore run for longer at a speed which stresses our system to a certain extent.

Because we're very good at sweating, we can lose the heat that comes from that intense exercise in a way that other running animal species are not as good at.

So, this is our niche, Ben, our evolutionary niche, is relentless.

Essentially, being relentless and chasing.

All you've got to do is outrun a cheetah by about 100 meters.

First 100 meters, then you're good.

Sally's got a chance.

She was putting the needles out for the cheetah like that.

Jump out as you little shit.

But yeah, as you say, Brian, we've evolved, and it goes back about seven million years.

So before our early hominin ancestors and hominid ancestors started going bipedals, so started walking upright, that was the catalyst that sort of cascaded everything else.

And I work with chimps and gorillas mostly in the wild and across Africa, and they've got these wonderful feet with big toes that come out at the sides, just like our hands.

And we jokingly refer to them as four-handed, but they're flat, so chimps and gorillas walk on these big, flat feet in the back, and it's really just constant banging.

And it's not, as you said, not springy at all.

Our big toe has just completely moved, and when you do that and bring it to the side of your hand, you create this wonderful little cupping area underneath, and that's where we've got got these big arches in our feet.

And it's all these little tweaks and changes.

There's nothing in particular, but it's a little tweak here, a little change there.

The fact our Achilles is about 11-12 centimeters and goes right into our calf.

A chimp Achilles is about a centimeter and a half long, and they've got terrible flexion of the foot.

Who likes being sweaty?

No one especially wants to be sweaty.

It's one of the best unique features about being a human that we can sweat.

And as you said, it allows us to go and go and go.

Most animals can't sweat.

Even horses have a different sweat system than we do, and then chimps, gorillas, the rest of them don't sweat.

And so it's being sweaty, being mostly hairless, being upright, having that lovely series of curves in our backs.

It's these tweaks.

And you mentioned cheetah.

I dissected cheetah recently.

Again, ethically sourced.

How do you ethically source it?

Waitrose.

We expected a big heart, a big set of lungs.

And it was just the physics.

Not just the physics, Brian, sorry.

It was the physics.

It was really interesting.

It was the biomechanics.

It was the slightly longer angles of the electron process of the radius nulna, and it's slightly longer levers.

And it's what's great is, you said to Sally earlier, what was it about you?

It's it'll be tiny micro tweaks that's slightly different from Sally to the person next to her.

The wonderful thing about Sally's.

That person next to her.

Are you saying I've got a tiny Achilles?

But I think that's the thing, is these tiny tweaks that just set you apart.

It might be seconds or microseconds, but that's been going on for several million years.

So wasn't it in evolutionary terms?

It's being upright, so walking on two legs.

That opens up the possibility of moving fast and also endurance.

Absolutely, yeah.

And it's, and there are still a few tribal groups around the world in sub-Saharan Africa who will, in terms of endurance, go after these large ungula, these large hoofed animals, and just go and go and go for days sometimes.

And we are the only species that can do that.

And that's, I mean, that's endurance that nothing can replicate.

It's interesting, isn't it?

That the modern human, you think of the shape of a modern human, our body plan.

A great deal of that comes from this selection pressure to just run.

Yeah.

Well, it's like think about Kip Chago, don't you?

The Kenyan that's trying to run under two hours for the first marathon.

And, you know, you just watch him and it's just incredible

his makeup, and you're talking about that.

But but it will be so much of the science that they're putting in aren't they to try and get him under that two hours the science is improving so people are still running as fast as they can but whether it's reducing injury time or whether it's the diet or whether you mentioned elliotic joggie i watched this documentary with him recently in terms of prepping for this sub two hour marathon and what was really cool was he and his colleagues were doing loads of mindfulness and loads of chill time.

And I wonder when your training, how often did you sit there in a group and do mindfulness training, and which is a really serious part of endurance racing now?

I mean it's funny because I didn't realize that when I used to get into the core rooms you're in this horrible room for 20 minutes before you race with all your competitors and this is where you sort of like

your green room.

This is where you either psych everybody out and that's what everybody used to try and do to me.

So you have to turn it into positive.

But I used to do this thing which I never knew what I was doing but I used to like try and block everybody out.

So I'd just go and lie on the side and put my feet up and just go through the race and block everything out.

But I actually realize now that that probably was my mindful bit.

Well, it's the point where I could nearly fall asleep and I was just about to go out there and race.

But I think it was that whole sort of like the body just needed to be quiet and shut down.

And it's only sort of in the last five years that I've realized that's what I probably did

without anybody telling me what I was doing.

What's the difference in the team between the

long-distance runners, the marathon runners, and then the sprinters?

And the marathoners,

the javelin throwers and the throwers used to be drinking pints the night before and they're all friends.

The sprinters absolutely hated each other and

they would just be eyeballing each other and psyching each other out.

And the endurance lot, they're quite friendly, they'd go for runs and they think they're friends, but they're not really on the other side.

So yeah, it was very different in whatever group you were with, for sure.

It was about 54 seconds that you did the 400 metre hurdles.

Is that right?

52 seconds.

52 seconds.

Now it's gone down to 50 seconds,

approximately.

And I looked it up earlier, and it was 54 seconds in 1980.

So that should mean that in 300 years, we can do the 400-metre hurdles in about nine seconds if we continue at that rate.

It would depend on trainer technology.

But my eldest sister, she does those things where you swim across a lake and then you get on a bicycle and you ride for Mars and then

you go for a run.

There's a desire in human beings that now that we don't actually have to necessarily endure, we still, for some people, feel that they must endure.

This is something that's brought up quite often that we are apparently the only species that exercises for a non-beneficial reason.

It's not play

young deer running around and it's all developing motor skills.

I mean most of us in here now have got the point where we're not developing new skills in terms of strategically important for your life and yet we're the only species that goes for a run for no reason.

We're intentionally expending energy.

I think part of that comes from this concept that we're one of the few species that takes in far more calories than we could ever hope to burn on a regular basis.

And we can afford to do that.

Most of nature doesn't waste stuff.

You don't see chimps like, I'm going to go for a quick jog.

Those chimps are spending up to 70% of their waking day foraging and feeding.

They can't waste their energy.

We have got so much energy, we just don't need it.

Almost a byproduct of our very efficient lifestyles.

I've got another curious fact I've talked.

I've just been making a documentary for Channel 4 about the decline in male sperm count globally and trying to work out what it is.

And we run a number of experiments.

And one of the things driving it, the sports clothes that men are now wearing and our obsession with exercise and the improved technology in sportswear, and obviously the testicles are supposed to be 32 degrees and we're not.

The rest of the body is 36, so this very tight clothing is part of the problem.

And men are doing all kinds of stuff.

We're waxing, we're over-bathing, we're sitting in hot tubs.

So we're the only species on earth that attempts to make ourselves more attractive to the opposite sex by becoming more infertile.

I love that list you made because it means my sperm count must be pretty high still.

You just looked at me all the way through that, Russell.

I've never felt so uncomfortable.

It blows my mind that we've got to a place where we're exercising and doing things that actually make our chance of successful mating less.

To be fair, that's way down my list of why I'm not a successful

fact my balls are too close because of my library is not on that list list, really.

I just follow Robin, I carry mine over my shoulder for safety.

You are, Russell, a very physical comedian.

You really stroll around, you move.

I mean, I remember once, years ago, we were on the Radio 4 show Loose Ends, where you have to stand statically behind a microphone.

Afterwards, I told you, do you realise one of your legs was still moving as if you were going around the stage?

It was really fascinating.

One leg had to remain still, and the other leg went, I'm sorry, I've still got to walk around the stage.

And it was kind of going, it was a really, you know, that level of energy that you have, you like to kind of explode on something.

And it also helps with what Sally was talking about earlier because there's such a physical component to what I'm doing.

It helps me stay in the flow state.

It's almost like a distraction.

I'm not doing it on purpose.

I didn't like think up a persona in drama school or something.

It just happens naturally with nerves.

I'm naturally an energetic person.

I did put some technology on it.

I slung a Fitbit on just to see what's happening.

So in a 70-minute show, I'm doing 730 calories, about 13,000 steps.

My resting heart rate's 59, and it's at 110 as I walk on.

That's amazing.

But well, I don't know if it is because if my heart rate is going up to 110 based on anxiety at the microphone, that's not good heart rate increase.

But it stays within 110 to 150 for that whole 70 minutes, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and then drops back down when I'm off.

But yeah, I'm exhausted at the end.

I get jealous of someone, you know, like John Bishop, who's probably burnt about 20 calories.

Joe Nombo One, Joel

Cheers,

Lying in a bath of baroque or something.

But yeah, it's a way of handling the nerves.

You know, when we do these stand-up gigs on radio, something more is lost because I use my body to tell the story as well, to communicate.

I'm on the floor, I'm up, I'm jumping.

So I really miss that when I'm in a medium that's not visual.

No disrespect, radio for.

So I mean, when you have time off,

how many days does it take you to not at seven o'clock every night start to go, I don't know, I've got got to go on, I've got to go on, and then you know, you're kind of your partner's there and she's going, Oh, God, he's going to do a show next to the gas hop, you know, God is making mental soup.

I'm very lucky, I don't seem to have a sort of energy spike in the evening.

What I have noticed once I've got past a certain age was I've had to stay fit, not because I enjoy exercise or I'm an athlete, but to maintain 70 minutes of super fast storytelling and not be going

at the end, which is very unattractive.

I've been blackmailed commercially by my own creative endeavors to stay unusually fit for my age.

I'm 48 in August.

So I exercise six days a week.

And I've got the opposite thing.

The reason I've never been into exercise in my life until late on is I can't exercise if people are looking at me.

So the types of things you're doing on my idea of hell, running in a group of people.

I have to be on my own because I get bored so quickly.

I need an amazing podcast, Monkey Cage would do it.

Or even better, a screen open.

So I prefer a treadmill so I can actually watch Stephen Fry discuss adjectives for an hour or something while I'm running I can't just run I can't do it see that was interesting when Brian and me first started when we first went on tour and uh Brian went you've got to come and do exercising with us and he basically thought I'd die right we we went up on the moors with a great big long bit of the rope and it was probably on the moors wasn't it on a windy day I didn't have any tracks just wore my jeans and it's like you know waving these ropes around all this stuff and then when I was still alive he seemed shocked yeah I know what you were doing.

But you have to remember, I tour the whole time, I don't drive, so I have a rucksack on my back, and I just perpetually go into Oxfam's and buy more and more books.

So it's kind of like watching a charity shop version of the world's strongest man.

And so I've got stamina because the rest of my lifestyle, though it had no specific fitness to it, was like kind of, oh, I'm going to buy those encyclopedias today, and I'm going to have to take them all the way to Aberdeen and then down to Penzan.

What's your personal best?

The collected works of Balzac.

Yeah.

Polly, could you describe what is happening in the body as you go further and further and further?

Where are the limits?

Is it purely fuel?

If you could continually eat and refuel, could you continually run?

So, I think that if we're talking about a marathon or something like that, I think the figure is something like 3,000 calories to run a marathon.

And there was an amazing gentleman called Gary McKee who ran 365 marathons last year.

Just the most amazing feat of mental and physical endurance.

There's sort of been lots of reports about how much he had to eat to fuel his body through that.

In terms of finite periods of exercise, like a marathon every day and things like that, then

yes, it is an element of fueling yourself through that, and you can ingest sufficient calories to provide your muscles with enough fuel to keep generating force.

And if you're physiologically fit enough, you will have enough oxygen in those muscles to generate the ATP to keep those muscles contracting.

The things that become limits to that do really become mental limits,

and also those limits of, well, as you get more fatigued and your muscles are maybe not generating as much force, then there are potentially injury limits to that as well.

And what is fatigue physiologically?

That's a really hard question.

So, from a mechanical perspective, fatigue is the point at which, for the same level of neurological input, your muscle doesn't generate as much force.

But there are all sorts of different definitions of fatigue as well.

It's about

when

your system, for whatever reason, cannot do what it could do because of the stress that's been placed upon it.

Now, that can be mental, it can be physiological, and it's also different things for different people.

So, different people will reach their stopping point for different reasons.

For some people, it will be the mental trigger of, I just can't keep doing this.

For others, it will be pain, for others, it will be the fact that your muscles aren't generating enough force to support your body weight and you will collapse.

There's a paradox in my life, okay?

So, I got more power, I'm faster, and more energy when I'm fasted and I've drunk coffee.

So, if I go on stage empty, or if I do a workout empty and have like a quadruple espresso, I'm so strong.

But if I eat food beforehand, I'm definitely not as strong, and I definitely couldn't do that before a gig.

More sluggish.

I couldn't live without coffee.

I'm cradling one right now, listeners.

But it's fake energy.

There's no calories there.

So what's going on?

You've got massive stores.

Again, don't gazelle.

Listeners, I'm kissing the guns.

But the gazelle on

the plane is the perfect weight, that perfect balance, and it's on the knife edge.

Again, we're all sitting here with a little bit too much in terms of the stores.

I bet you couldn't do a week of gigs just on coffee.

You would crash really, really quickly.

What I mean is I would eat at lunchtime, but I would always eat, eat, like, I wouldn't eat before this.

So I'd eat that.

No, but I think that's quite true because I think the process there is that, especially because you're using your mind and you're thinking about blood flow, that if you have a nice big meal, it does feel also like, one, I wonder if there is a psychological thing in the evolution, which is you have then succeeded because you have managed to gather the food.

And secondly, also, your blood's going, I'm so sorry I can't help with this thinking, but we're trying to digest this savaloy.

You know what I mean?

So I think that might be part of it as well.

But anyway, we are now going to do an experiment.

You're now not going to eat for the next week.

This audience are going to stay and watch every night of the show.

They used to say two hours before you start doing our warm-up.

You've got to have something two hours before.

Did you have a shot of caffeine or anything like that?

I didn't, but Mo Farrah does.

Yeah, he's totally would be on espresso shots.

Exactly.

I'm going to beat that cheetah.

I'm determined.

Imagine if you had two shots of coffee.

You'd be well in.

To see the cheetah with a macchiato.

Oh, damn it.

By the way, I never told you what my sporting prowess is.

I was in the third 11 cricket team at school.

Yeah, and you know why?

Because they only had six people.

So if anyone else was there,

they'd just go, Can you get in the minibus as well?

Turn up there.

As soon as I finish this savale, I will be done.

As usual, we also asked our audience a question, and today it was: What is your most impressive sporting achievement?

This is from Mark, who says, I once cycled from Land's End to Penzance

without wearing lycra.

So,

good news for Mark's first cow.

Robert said, My biggest achievement in sport was once getting stuck on a cross trainer for 30 minutes.

I couldn't get my legs and arms to stop at the same time.

I ended up having to jump off.

And

that's the only time I went to the gym, and it only cost me $19.99 a month for a year.

When I was 12, I was playing cricket with my mum in the garden before I accidentally bowled the ball too high, which ended up breaking her nose.

That Christmas, my three siblings got a lot more than me.

I'm really sorry, mum.

Can I have that scale extrix?

This is from Toby, who says, I was runner-up in the 2013 World Pea Shooting Championship.

And I would say that is the answer I would have expected most from an infant monkey age audience.

Can I ask where was it?

Was it in somewhere exotic?

It was obviously a good match.

It wasn't just Cambridge, it was the whole county.

It's a pretty impressive piece of money.

Probably the parents' wheelbarrow race at Junior Sports Day.

We won, despite my wife's arm packing up midway, resulting in her being plowed over the line for the last 10 lectres.

Apparently, it was impressive to watch.

Thank you, Paul and Karen.

There we are, yeah.

But when I was younger I did three marathons over one weekend.

But now I'm older I reckon I could only probably do one Snickers.

So thank you very much for all of your answers.

And next week we are going to be talking about materials that have changed our life.

It's wool innit for you.

It is.

The cardigan has made me become the man that I am.

And we'll probably also be talking about the material that Brian's face and body is made of.

Certainly not human, that's for sure.

So, thank you very much to our panel: Russell Kane, Sally Gunnell, Ben Garrett, and Polly McGuigan.

We'll see you next time.

Bye-bye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

I mean this stuff is jar-droppingly shocking.

I'll be asking lots of questions.

What's at the heart of the story?

How does it achieve its effect?

What makes it special?

History is usually written by winners, but he wants to give a voice to people who are not usually heard.

I'll be hearing from people who know and love these works.

Writers.

We do have an orgasm evoked on the page.

Dramatists, biographers.

It's worn better as a book about England than it has as a book about sex, I think.

And directors too.

In the end, I'll be asking, what makes this work worth reading now?

Join me to find out in opening lines from BBC Radio 4 and available on BBC Sounds.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.