Adrenaline rush may put the records straight

My old friends at letsrun.com – now the global leaders in running websites – are conducting a “clean or dirty” poll of all current world records. The results are still coming in, and in most cases won’t tell us anything we don’t already know: think 1980s, taking-the-piss drug testing, and industrial amounts of anabolic steroids.

Many of those records are so artificially injected into the books that they’d need to be surgically removed, at least without resorting to the methods that created them in the first place. That’s not saying they’re all dirty. Some of the men’s records have been broken in more recent years at a time when drug-testing has improved (at least supposedly so), although most of the women’s records remain so ridiculously unbreakable they can’t possibly be clean.

Few, if any, of the athletes who set those records actually failed a drugs test. But when nine of the 14 most prominent world records for women date back to the 1980s (compared to just one for the men), when we know some of the old steroids were particularly effective for women, and were particularly rampant among the East European nations that produced them, what hope do we have of those records ever being broken?

Take, if only for comparison purposes, the women's world record for the 100 metres hurdles – the 12.21 seconds set by Yordanka Donkova from Bulgaria, back in August, 1988. There's no doubt Donkova was an incredibly powerful athlete, and in fact broke the world record on five occasions, the only worry being one of those was never ratified because the little bottle carrying her drugs sample taken at the time was broken in transit. Donkova still holds three of the five fastest times for the 100m hurdles, her 12.21 still almost half a second faster than the 12.65 Irish record set by Derval O'Rourke 22 years later, in 2010.

Irish records
What hope then for any young Irish athlete aspiring towards these records of other worldliness? I put this to one such athlete this week, Sarah Lavin, partly because she's already surpassed O'Rourke's Irish records at junior level and partly because she displays an air of intelligence and confidence seemingly years ahead of her time. "Well I look at Derval's 12.65, and know she ran that clean," she told me. "I would certainly aspire towards that sort of time. And people sometimes forget just what Derval achieved. She was a World Indoor champion. Her 7.84 indoors is phenomenal. Sure, I'm following her, but nowhere near her standards yet, and may never be. But I'd like to think as well that everybody trains that bit better these days, with better technology, better strength and conditioning."

Cosmic coincidence
Lavin was, by cosmic coincidence, born on the same day as O'Rourke, 13 years later: in 2013, her last as a junior, the Limerick athlete broke both O'Rourke's Irish junior records, indoors and out, her 13.34 outdoors also earning her the silver medal at the European Juniors in Rieti, Italy. Now, still only 19, Lavin finds herself fast chasing the athlete who first inspired her as nine-year-old, and still does today: she's also chasing it while studying physiotherapy at UCD, with daily views of their half-demolished running track as she waits for the bus to either Santry, or Ringsend, where there is still a track. This is by choice, however, as Lavin also had the confidence to opt out of the hallowed halls of the Ivy League this time last year, after her first term on scholarship at Princeton, New Jersey, having realised her athletic career was probably being steered off track. "I never dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize. I just dream of winning the Olympics."

Still, can Lavin ever dream of breaking a world record, at least as long as Donkova's time remains in the books? Well, thanks to a little more cosmic coincidence, there may be some hope currently being displayed down at the RDS as the part of BT Young Scientist Exhibition. Kathy Devaney and Laura Joyce, both transition-year students from Ursuline College in Sligo, both keen athletes too, have come up with a quite brilliant project titled "Stimulating Adrenaline Production in Athletic Performance". Their project was actually inspired by Con Houlihan, who we all know was quite brilliant, and in his later years, reckoned drugs in sport would someday be looked upon as very old-fashioned. "Scientists and chemists will give way to psychologists," Con once wrote. "Because when a man is running from a tiger he produces times that do not compare with his times on the track. In trying to save his life he produces something extra. You can be certain that some psychologist will discover a way of creating that".

That something “extra” is of course adrenaline. What Kathy and Laura have discovered, albeit on a very basic level, is that respiratory and heart rates can be willingly stimulated by psychological means (by giving their subjects a placebo, and telling them it stimulates adrenaline), as well as by physical means (by scaring their subjects with a loud bang, which also stimulates adrenaline, as for safety reasons they couldn’t actually have them chased by a tiger).

Kathy and Laura may not win the Nobel Prize, but if these young scientists really are the future, and in turn inspire the sports psychologists that can also shape what is to come, then perhaps someday some of those dirty world records will be broken.

PS It's not too late to sign up for Get Running, a free online beginner course with The Irish Times. The course starts on Monday. To get involved see irishtimes.com/getrunning.