The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (24 page)

As the 1992 Olympic Trials approached, Sandoval, by then thirty-seven, realized it would be his last shot. Finally, he took time off to train, and was in phenomenal shape. On a warm, windy day in Columbus, Ohio, he felt effortless through the opening miles. “I was in heaven,” Sandoval says. “I was thinking, ‘This is my fifth Olympic Trials, and this is going to be a good day.’” And it was, until he planted his foot to make a turn at the bottom of a hill around mile eight and felt pain shoot down the back of his leg. “I figured it was my calf, so I stopped to massage it,” Sandoval says. “I was watching the time. I was in such good shape, I figured I could give the leaders about two minutes and still make the team.” By mile 13, his leg was swelling and he could hardly walk. He hobbled off the course. “I knew it was over then,” Sandoval says, quietly, “that I’d never go to the Olympics.” He had run five miles on a ruptured Achilles tendon.

Today, in an office across the street from his high school track, Sandoval is one of just a few cardiologists serving all of rural northern New Mexico. In his home, Sandoval still has the blue velour USA outfit he would have worn at the 1980 Olympics. “It just hurts when you start thinking about it,” Sandoval says. “I never got to run as hard as I
can.” His voice halts when he mentions how proud his six children—all college athletes—would have been to see Dad’s medal. “I think sometimes he wishes he’d taken more time off from medicine to train,” says Sandoval’s wife, Mary.

Even now, Sandoval is thin enough to hide behind a parking meter, and by 6:30
A.M
. most mornings he is skimming along forest switchbacks in the nearby Jemez Mountains. There is no wasted movement in his stride. His arms are carried high and tight. He seems barely to come off the ground, sweeping over the soil as lightly as a water bug flitting across a pond. He refers to some of the trees and rock outcrops along the trails as “old friends.”

David Martin, former head of USA Track and Field’s physiological testing program, studied Sandoval back when he was competing. “Anthony was a physiological specimen to be reckoned with,” Martin says. “He had long legs, a huge heart, huge lungs, and a small torso. I tested him at my lab in Atlanta, and boy could he move oxygen. I don’t want to say Anthony is a genetic freak, but he’s unusual, because even as he got older his body size remained diminutive and his heart size increased.”

Martin pauses, and considers Sandoval in his entirety. His quiet toughness. His lithe body. His huge aerobic capacity. His rural youth at eight thousand feet, and his childhood of running and walking for transportation. He clearly had physiological gifts, but he also had a unique crucible in which to discover and develop them.

“You know what he is?” Martin asks, awaking excitedly from a pensive moment. “He’s a Kenyan, that’s what he is! He’s an American Kenyan.”

•

Eldoret is a bustling city of 250,000 near the heart of the Kalenjin training region in Kenya. The occasional donkey cart jockeys with cars for right of way as they navigate the rutted roads. The rush in the street is frantic. Shoppers hustle in and out of ground-level stores or the eateries above them. Narrow alleys are stuffed with hole-in-the-wall shops. Here you can buy Nike running shoes that were brand-new
fifteen years ago but are still unworn, because Kenyan professional runners will sell the shoes they receive from sponsor companies to resellers as soon as they get them. In one alcove, a man furtively peddles Kenyan national team gear out of a backpack.

One day while I was in Eldoret, I sat in a garden behind a steel guard wall and had Kenyan tea—which has milk and sugar—with Claudio Berardelli, a young Italian who moved to Kenya and has become one of the world’s top coaches of distance runners. Berardelli was coauthor of a paper that was about to come out in the
European Journal of Applied Physiology.
The paper looked explicitly at running economy, comparing 2:08 European marathoners with 2:08 Kalenjin marathoners. Not surprisingly, the physiologies of the runners—their aerobic capacities and running economies—were very similar. The authors concluded, then, that superior running economy does not explain the dominance of Kalenjin marathoners over Europeans.

In reality, though, they did not ask a question that could provide such an answer. It is no surprise that 2:08 marathoners look physiologically similar no matter their nationality or ancestry. After all, they are all 2:08 marathoners. The question is whether there are many more people in one place who are capable of becoming 2:08 marathoners than in another or why 2:03 and 2:04 marathoners come only from Kenya and Ethiopia.

Berardelli’s opinion, outside of the paper, was very different from the conclusion in it: “I don’t believe that in Italy there is not somewhere another [Stefano] Baldini,” he says, referencing the Italian who won gold in the 2004 Olympic marathon. “And Italians are probably saying, ‘There is no need to look for him, because Kenyans always win.’ So they don’t find him.” But does he think there are as many potential Baldinis in Italy as in Kenya? “I think in Kenya maybe you will find ten Baldinis, and in Italy maybe you find two Baldinis. But
come on guys,
work on finding them!”
So, then, Berardelli’s opinion is that gold-medal marathon potential is not exclusive to Kenya, but that
it is more common there. “I think the Kenyan lifestyle probably fixed genetically some characteristics good for running,” he says.

And while a naturally narrow body type is crucial to running economy, economy can also be improved. There is no better example than the greatest female marathoner of all time, Britain’s Paula Radcliffe. Radcliffe entered her first races at nine, though she hadn’t begun real training. By seventeen, Radcliffe was a promising junior athlete, and Andrew M. Jones, a British physiologist, started working with her. Immediately, Jones saw that Radcliffe was gifted. There were outstanding athletes in her family—her great aunt Charlotte was an Olympic silver medalist swimmer—and she had a VO
₂
max essentially as high as elite female athletes ever get, even though she was training less than thirty miles a week. “Clearly, she was exceptionally talented,” Jones wrote of Radcliffe. “However, this athletic potential was only achieved following ten further years of increasingly arduous training.”

Over those years, Radcliffe got taller, but stayed the same weight as she trained maniacally, often at altitude. Her VO
₂
max did not improve at all—it was already at the top—but each year her running economy got incrementally better, presumably at least partly because her legs got longer while her weight did not increase. In 2003, eleven years after she was first tested, Radcliffe’s VO
₂
max was no different from what it was when she was eighteen and training lightly, but her running economy had improved dramatically, and she shattered the women’s world marathon record in 2:15:25. Obviously, Radcliffe’s exceptional running economy was at least partly created by her training.
*

Genetic science, even as it matures, is unlikely to provide anything resembling a complete answer to the questions behind Kenyan running prowess. Just as it is tough to find genes for height—even though we know they exist—it is extraordinarily difficult to pin down genes
for even one physiological factor involved in running, let alone all of them. As Sir Roger Bannister, a world-renowned neurologist and the first man to break four minutes in the mile, once said: “The human body is centuries in advance of the physiologist, and can perform an integration of heart, lungs, and muscles which is too complex for the scientist to analyze.”

Additionally, the prevalence of gene variants differs to such an extent among ethnicities that geneticists use ethnically matched control subjects in their studies. So a Kalenjin genetic study uses Kalenjin runners and compares them with Kalenjin controls. Thus, genetic studies usually look for differences
among
members of an ethnic group, and usually say little about differences
between
ethnic groups. With the physiology of running far from fully understood, we should not hold our breath for genetic technology in itself to solve the Kenyan question, at least not anytime soon. We will have to look other places for insight, as did the Danish researchers who tested running economy in Kalenjin boys.

When I last spoke with Berardelli he had just begun to coach a group of Indian athletes who came to Kenya to train. On the face of it, they have incredible environmental similarities to his Kenyan runners: impoverished backgrounds, high motivation, and childhoods filled with running for transportation. If distance running success requires only monetary incentives, childhood running, and world-class training, then expect to see some of Berardelli’s Indian pupils alongside the Kenyans soon.

“So,” Berardelli said, with a doubtful smirk. “We will see.”

Berardelli believes that the Kenyans are, in general, more likely to be gifted runners. But he also knows that no matter their talent or body type or childhood environment or country of origin, 2:05 marathoners do not fall from the sky. Their gifts must be coupled with herculean will.

Although that, too, is not entirely separable from innate talent.

Sled Dogs, Ultrarunners, and Couch Potato Genes

T
he aluminum sign for Comeback Kennel is nailed haphazardly to an evergreen tree north of Fairbanks, Alaska, off the Elliott Highway and two miles in on a dirt road. The gravel driveway is packed hard from the cold and steep enough to make entry without an SUV precarious. This solitary spot befits Alaskan taste. If you can see the smoke from your neighbor’s chimney, he probably lives too close.

It’s an unlikely address for a collection of the planet’s greatest and most steel-willed endurance athletes. But there, on a sloped clearing framed by black spruce, are 120 of dogsled racing’s most distinguished Alaskan huskies. Comeback Kennel is really just the name of the frosted front yard belonging to Lance Mackey.

Mackey is an icon in the dogsled racing world, where he essentially invented the thousand-mile double. That is, in both 2007 and ’08, Mackey won the thousand-mile Yukon Quest, and then, just weeks later, the world’s other thousand-miler: the Iditarod, known to the faithful as “The Last Great Race on Earth.” Prior to Mackey’s back-to-back doubles, the feat was thought to be impossible. A musher was lucky to escape even one of the races without illness or serious injury to himself or his dogs. Even if he did, there is the problem of will, for both the dogs and their master.

Eminent mushers have had to withdraw from the Iditarod when
their dogs simply lie down in the snow and refuse to go another step. And the freezing cold and sleep deprivation of the long Alaska nights are famous for divorcing Iditarod mushers from their better judgment. From time to time, a musher crossing atop the frozen Bering Sea will gaze into the bright sunlight after a deep black night and start removing his jacket and gloves, only to be greeted by -50 degree air, and instant frostbite. Mackey himself has heard voices. Once, after a long, cold stretch with no sleep he was pleased to see an Inuit woman beside the trail smiling at him. He turned and started waving, and only then realized that she was gone. Or, rather, that she had never been there at all.

Prior to Mackey’s runs, just to attempt to finish the Yukon Quest and the Iditarod back-to-back was considered foolhardy. Even if the musher survived the Quest with his vital signs intact, what about the dogs? Assuming they were healthy, would they want to keep running? Sled dogs, like their masters, must have the will to forge ahead.

“These aren’t house dogs. Food will not work as a training device for sled dogs,” says Eric Morris, a musher and biochemist who created Redpaw dog food for canine athletes. “Negative reinforcement will not work as a training device for sled dogs either. To go that distance, it’s like a bird dog sniffing down a pheasant, it has to be the one thing in their life that brings them the greatest amount of pleasure. They have to have the innate desire to pull [the sled] . . . and you will find varying degrees of that in different dogs.”

•

Each of the Alaskan huskies in Mackey’s yard is chained to a metal ring that is looped around a pole, restricting its movement to a circle several meters in diameter that includes entrance into its own wooden house. Each dog, that is, except for Zorro.

On top of the hill in the yard is Zorro’s fenced-in pen. He has more space, and no chain. It’s his “condo on the hill,” Mackey jokes. From here, Zorro looks down on the nighttime lights of Fairbanks far below,
and also on his nieces, nephews, sisters, brothers, and sons and daughters, all here in this yard.

As Mackey walks toward Zorro, he pauses to point. “That’s my main bitch right there,” Mackey says, gesturing to one of Zorro’s granddaughters, a female dog named Maple whose golden brown coat is the color of cinnamon toast. In 2010, Maple led Mackey’s team—meaning she was at the head of the group of dogs—and won the Golden Harness Award for the most outstanding performer in the Iditarod. Like Maple, all of Mackey’s champion dogs are in Zorro’s line. “It was pretty ballsy,” Mackey says, “to base the whole kennel around one dog.” He leans down to nuzzle the blond rings of fur around Zorro’s eyes, the ones that resemble the mask his namesake wore.

After communing with Zorro, Mackey walks back to the half-constructed house that he and his wife Tonya share. It’s full of exposed wiring, and still partially wrapped in Tyvek sheets, but it belongs to them, along with the garage that holds a limited-edition Dodge Charger and three Dodge trucks, all prizes for Iditarod wins. “The dogs bought all of this,” Mackey says. None more so than Zorro.

Zorro is the genetic nexus of the kennel, and not because he was a particularly fast husky. (He wasn’t.) Rather, Mackey bred for the genes of work ethic. He had no other choice. In 1999, when Mackey began his breeding program, he couldn’t afford the fastest, sleekest dogs.

•

Lance Mackey’s father, Dick, was one of the cofounders of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, first run in 1973. In his first five attempts at the race, Dick never finished higher than sixth. In his sixth attempt, in 1978, something so unexpected occurred that the fledgling race had no rule to adjudicate it.

Lance was seven years old, standing near the burled arch that marks the finish, when his father, running alongside his sled and almost suffocating in his parka, sprinted down Front Street in a dead heat with defending champion Rick Swenson, also on foot beside his sled. As
Dick Mackey’s lead dog crossed the finish first, by a nose, Mackey collapsed to the ground, leaving his team straddling the line as Swenson’s sled zoomed past. At the end of 14 days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 24 seconds, the Iditarod had come down to whether race marshal Myron Gavin would rule that the first musher with a single dog across the line won or whether it was the musher with all his dogs across the line. “They don’t take a picture of the horse’s ass, do they?” Gavin asked, rhetorically. And so Dick Mackey won the Iditarod, and became a full-fledged hero to his son.

“I was standing right at the finish line,” says Lance, who grew up in Wasilla, Alaska. “It was exciting. It was dramatic. It was emotional. It was embedded in my head. I have no doubt that something in that moment, in that one second, affected my passion or my drive or my commitment. It not only changed my dad’s life, it changed mine.” From that moment on, Lance Mackey always told himself that one day he would win the Iditarod too. But the path would be tortuous.

Three years after his father won the Iditarod, Mackey’s parents divorced. He began to see little of his father, an ironworker who was off building up the remote reaches of Alaska. His mother, Kathie, worked as a bush pilot and dishwasher to support the family, so Lance had all the unsupervised time in the world to seek out trouble. He excelled at finding it.

By fifteen, Mackey was a one-boy crime wave: fighting, consumption of alcohol by a minor, more fighting, drunk and disorderly, public urination, and a little more fighting. Before he had a driver’s license, he stole Kathie’s checkbook, used it to buy a ’68 Dodge Charger and drove it north to pawn three firearms he’d swiped from the family gun cabinet.

So Kathie sent her son above the Arctic Circle to spend some quality time with his father, who was selling food out of a converted school bus to truckers passing along the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. That operation would become a restaurant and service station and then the town of Coldfoot, Alaska, population: a dozen.

Working at his father’s service station, Mackey learned to barter truck repairs for drugs. “Truck drivers are as bad of junkies as anybody you ever met,” he says. “So I had access to just about every drug I could get my hands on.” Mackey returned to Wasilla just before his eighteenth birthday and picked up his life of petty crime where he had left off—until one Saturday, when Kathie refused to bail her son out of jail.

When Lance got out, he headed to the Bering Sea, where he spent the next decade as a commercial fisherman on long-liners. Even then, Mackey would tell crewmates on fishing vessels—many of whom were from Mexico and had never heard of the Iditarod—that one day he would win the race that his father cofounded. “You ain’t nothing as a musher unless you win the Iditarod,” Mackey would recount his father saying.

By 1997, Mackey was living with Tonya in Nenana, Alaska, and both were addicted to cocaine. They occasionally used Amanda, Tonya’s daughter from a previous marriage, as a designated driver. “She had a cushion so she could see over the wheel,” Mackey says. “She thought it was cool as hell, being nine years old driving down the highway.”

On June 2, 1998, Mackey’s twenty-eighth birthday—and not long after he’d nearly gotten himself killed in a gun-filled bar brawl—he and Tonya decided to go cold turkey. On one night’s packing, they moved 465 miles south to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula and left their drug habits behind. There, Lance and Tonya lived with Amanda and Brittney—Tonya’s other daughter, then eight—beneath a tarp on the beach. A pup tent served as the master bedroom. For dinner, Tonya made a campfire and cooked flounder that the girls plucked from the sand. Lance started working for a construction crew and at a local sawmill. It was enough to make a down payment on a plot of land where he and Tonya built a timber house and stuffed the walls with clothing from the Salvation Army for insulation. With cocaine behind him, Mackey threw himself into a new addiction: breeding and raising sled dogs.

He had no money to buy the trim and powerful huskies that had already distinguished themselves in races, so he took in mutts from
the street or adopted the castoffs of other mushers. Mackey accepted that his motley band of dogs would never be the sprinters of the canine world, so he decided to breed for other qualities, and that’s when he met Rosie.

Rosie was a tiny female dog that once belonged to sprint racer Patty Moran. Moran decided that Rosie was too slow, so she sold her for a pittance to Rob Sparks, a musher who raced longer distances. When Sparks saw that Rosie refused to switch from a trot to a lope, he, too, decided that little Rosie was just too slow to race. At Sparks’s offering, Mackey took Rosie out for a test drive. Sure, she wasn’t fast, but Mackey saw something else: hook Rosie up to a sled harness and she’ll trot, as Mackey puts it, until she bores a hole through the earth. He was glad to take her off Sparks’s hands. His “trotting tornado,” he called her.

Mackey bred Rosie with Doc Holliday, another husky that would never win a sprint but that yearned for nothing more than to run, eat, and run some more. From the union of Rosie and Doc Holliday, Mackey got Zorro.

Even elite-bred and trained sled dogs will regularly coast on a long run. That is, they’ll slyly back off the pace when other members of the team are working hard. An experienced musher can tell when a dog is backing off because the rope—known as the “tug line”—that connects the dog to the sled’s main line won’t be perfectly taut. But Zorro was
always
pulling. From his very first race Zorro had to be restrained at the starting line and kept right on pulling even after the finish. Though Zorro was on the heavy side for a racing dog, “I told my brother Rick,” Mackey says, “I’m breeding Zorro to every dog I own.”

In 2001, Mackey picked a team from his band of rejects and hand-me-downs and put them together with Zorro—the lone dog he’d bred and raised—and entered the Iditarod. It took Mackey 12 days, 18 hours, 35 minutes, and 13 seconds to finish the race, good enough for thirty-sixth place. Zorro, not yet two years old, was the youngest dog in the entire field to complete the 1,100 miles, and he did it in great shape, barking and yanking the sled across the finish.

Mackey himself was less chipper. He had pushed through the pain of what multiple doctors had told him, erroneously, was an abscessed tooth. During the race he suffered from blurry vision, headaches, and blackouts. After the finish, he collapsed. Tonya took him straight to the hospital. The following week Mackey was in emergency surgery for throat cancer. It was the kind of surgery before which the doctor tells the patient to make sure there’s nothing he’d regret having left unsaid to his wife and family. Mackey’s normally staid father, Dick, was inconsolable.

Surgeons removed a grapefruit-sized tumor from Mackey’s throat, along with the skin, muscle tissue, and salivary glands with which it was entangled. From then on, Mackey had to sip constantly from a water bottle or on the juice from a fruit cup in order to keep his throat moist enough that he could breathe. Radiation treatments that damaged Mackey’s nerves left him with pulsing pain in his left index finger, so he went from doctor to doctor until he persuaded one to just cut the thing off.

Through it all, even when it seemed as though Mackey might not survive, Tonya kept his breeding plan going. At Mackey’s direction, she bred Zorro with females in the yard. By the winter after his surgery, Mackey was well enough to return to work with sixty-six of Zorro’s tongue-and-tail-wagging puppies to greet him.

Mackey returned to the Iditarod in 2002—with a feeding tube in his stomach—but withdrew after 440 miles. He skipped the next Iditarod, and for the next few years concentrated on raising and training Zorro’s children and grandchildren. Mackey’s training plan was tailored to his initial breeding strategy of mating the hardest-working dogs—the strategy foisted upon him because he couldn’t afford the fastest dogs. Knowing he would never outrace his Iditarod competitors between checkpoints, Mackey developed what he calls his “marathon style,” a technique that would transform long-distance dogsled racing. Rather than sprint between rest stops—as many successful mushers did at speeds up to 12, or occasionally 15 miles per hour—Mackey had
dogs that were slower but would trot till they bored a hole in the earth. “At seven miles per hour, that’s poking,” Mackey says, “but if the dogs will go seven miles per hour for nineteen straight hours, then you’re going to go places.”

In 2007, Mackey started the Iditarod with a sixteen-dog team that consisted almost entirely of Zorro’s progeny. Those that weren’t directly from Zorro included his half-brother Larry, his nephew Battel, and Zorro himself. Just more than nine days later, with tears frozen to his face, Mackey passed beneath the burled arch in first place. “Life just changed,” Mackey told his dogs. And so did dogsled racing.