When Usain Bolt clocked 9.58 seconds (9.572 to be exact, although they force you to round up on that one) many of us shook our heads and said never.

Never would that record be broken, at least not by anyone other than Bolt himself – or some ‘roided up Russian whose urine could rust a pipe’. At some point we have to reach a ceiling right, the point at which it is impossible for the human body to perform better?

Perhaps we should rethink that train of thought though, with this below from the Daily Maverick:

Lance Walker is the Global Director of Performance at the Michael Johnson Performance (MJP) centre in McKinney, Texas and freely admits that he is afraid of what is beyond the horizon in terms of human capability.

He says, “Every day I see limitations get knocked down and the boundaries redrawn. We’re constantly reimagining the possibilities and finding out that what we thought was hypothetical is actually just a matter of time. It really is scary to think about where we’re going”…

MJP is a stateof-the-art factory that focuses on producing one product: a faster athlete. It’s a 24/7 bespoke production line that puts athletes from any sport, at any level, at any age group on one end, and finds a way to improve their speed once they reach the other side.

No stone is left unturned; stride length, co-ordination, reactive ground forces, weight training, the kinematics of arm action, sleep patterns, nutrition, flexibility, equipment, even neurocranial stimulation; the pursuit of speed is a multifactorial journey that seeks to eke out the smallest margins of improvement. Athletes spend months, even years, searching for 0.01 of a second as the margins between cementing a place in history and languishing in obscurity are getting smaller every race.

The article goes on to discuss at length the ways in which the MJP gets the best out of their athletes, but for the sake of brevity we’ll skip through to the end:

Training methods, nutrition programmes, strategies and equipment will constantly improve. Not only that, the 0.01 percent of the human population that constitute the best athletes on the planet will steadily increase in terms of athletic output simply through natural selection.

With athletic capabilities starting to enter the realm of science-fiction, there really is no telling how far we can go. What is certain is that if anyone is going to figure it out, the odds are that it is going to be someone working in the Michael Johnson Performance centre.

Personally I think it would be great if they allowed a handful of athletes to use performance enhancing drugs to see just what the human body is capable of – at least that way everything would be out in the open.

[source:dailymaverick]