Competition Pushes Performance Over The Top

When it comes of performing at our very best, training lays the foundation, but a serious competitor is what pushes us over the top. So, at least, say researchers at Northumbrian University in England, who used competitive avatars to trick cyclists into setting new personal bests. Gina Kolata reports in the New York Times that the researchers first had the cyclists pedal as hard as they could on a stationary bicycle for about 2.5 miles. Then they asked the cyclists to race against an avatar on a computer screen.  Each rider was shown two avatars; one representing himself moving along a virtual course at the rate he was actually pedaling the stationary bicycle, and one moving at the pace of the cyclist’s own best effort — or so the cyclists were told. Kolata reports that the second avatar was in fact programmed to ride faster than the cyclist ever had — using 2 percent more power, which translates into a 1 percent increase in speed. And when the cyclists were told to race against them, they ended going faster than they ever had gone before. What’s up with that? Kolata says the results suggest that our limits may be set by a mysterious “central governor” in the brain that determines pacing and effort and, ultimately, performance. She cites other research conducted at the University of Portsmouth, in England, in which cyclists were asked to ride as hard and as fast as they could on a stationary bicycle for the equivalent of 2,000 meters while watching an on-screen figure representing the cyclist riding the course. Each athlete was told that he would be racing against another rider hidden behind a screen, and the researchers projected two figures on the screen: one the outline of the rider and the other the outline of the competitor. In fact, writes Kolata, the competitor on the screen was a computer-generated image of the athlete himself in his own best attempt to ride those 2,000 meters. End of story: the cyclists beat their best times. Impressive? To learn what competition can and cannot do, read more from Gina Kolata in the New York Times.