Peter Attia· MD
and you know you don't nobody pbs by nine seconds — after they've been training hard for four years five years so it was just absolutely mind-boggling and you know to cut to the chase the the the post script of the story is you know chatting to one of my teammates afterwards who had taken my splits for me so that i could as as you do you put them in your training log and you plot them in lotus 123 and you analyze them obsessively for months so i wanted to get my splits and he's like yeah pretty good race and i was like yeah i can't believe i went out in 27 seconds like you didn't go out in 27 seconds you were like 30 seconds what second lap 60 seconds what so at the time my theory was that — this was a median quebec in sherbrooke and so it's like oh the guy was maybe translating from french to english and there was a three second lag maybe he just missed the start with his watch i don't know what happened but he he he basically tricked me he fooled me into into thinking i was having this amazing day and and and then i did and so that was what and and in itself that was like a very bizarre circumstance and then the question is what happens after that do i become a four-minute runner again or can i run 352 again and the answer is neither i ran 349 in my list next 1500 and i ran 344 in the race after that which qualified me for the olympic trials that summer so that's why i say you asked was this an aha moment and it's like i knew right at the time it's like something has changed and somehow so i knew it it changed my career as an athlete but then in hindsight i realized it also changed my understanding of what this whole endeavor was about and what we were trying to optimize yeah that that's i mean again i still i still sort of struggle with that and of course you want to extrapolate that does the same thing apply to strength sports well presumably it does right could you easily trick somebody into thinking you know someone who thinks i could just never break 500 pounds for a deadlift and they're sort of forever stuck at 495 pounds but is there anything really preventing them from dead lifting 550 pounds which would be as much of a breakthrough if they simply believe that that's how much weight was if they simply believed that it was only 475 pounds on the bar