Pursuing Frictionless Flow Gave Me the Stamina to Keep Going

Christopher Bergland running 135 miles nonstop through Death Valley at the Badwater Ultramarathon (circa 2002).

Source: Kiehl's Since 1851, used with permission.

As a retired ultra-endurance athlete turned science reporter, the vividness of my autobiographical memories of doing things like running 135 miles nonstop through Death Valley in the middle of summer seems to fade away more and more every year. In general, I don't think much about what motivated me to keep going during the Badwater Ultramarathon (aka "The World's Toughest Footrace"), where runners traverse five back-to-back marathons in scorching heat that generally hovers a few degrees under 130°F. As you can see in the picture (above) of me running through Death Valley in 2002, I was "Making headway in near 130º temperatures."

That being said, this morning I had vivid flashbacks to what it felt like to run 135 miles nonstop through Death Valley National Park in the summertime when I read a BBC news report that the temperature there finally reached 130ºF (54.4ºC), which may be the hottest temperature ever officially recorded on planet Earth.

But there was other breaking science-based news this week about what gives humans (and mice) extraordinary stamina and physical endurance that also reminded me of my days as an ultra-endurance athlete.

In this post, I will report on two new studies that investigate enhanced exercise endurance in mice and the neuroscience of effort-based motivation in humans. Then, I'm going to explain why another new study on the observation of so-called "superfluid time crystals" actually resonates more with me as a source of inspiration to believe that you have what it takes to "Keep On Going," no matter what.

The first study (Yoon et al., 2020) by researchers at Harvard Medical School was published on August 4 in the journal Cell Metabolism and reports that blocking the production of an enzyme called PHD3 in mice significantly increased their capacity for endurance exercise.

Source: Christopher Bergland

Remarkably, the researchers found that blocking PHD3 resulted in mice running 40 percent longer and 50 percent farther on treadmills. "It was exciting to see this big, dramatic effect on exercise capacity, which could be recapitulated with a muscle-specific PHD3 knockout. The effect of PHD3 loss was very robust and reproducible," senior author Marcia Haigis said in a news release.

Hypothetically, as someone who broke a Guinness World Record by running 153.76 miles nonstop on a treadmill in 24 hours, when I filter these findings through my own capacity for endurance exercise, I wonder if my body's metabolic profile includes less PHD3 than my competitors, which might make it easier for me to run farther and faster.

The second recent study (Strasser et al., 2020) that caused me to reflect on the neurobiological underpinnings of humans' athletic stamina was published on July 20 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. In this study on the neuroscience of motivation, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) researchers found that the glutamine-to-glutamate ratio in the nucleus accumbens predicts effort-based motivated performance in humans.

By using state-of-the-art proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the researchers were able to measure the activity of different metabolites in the brain's nucleus accumbens region. The authors describe the nucleus accumbens as "a major player in functions like aversion, reward, reinforcement, and motivation."

In a series of physical "workout" experiments that used a dynamometer to measure study participants' motivation and stamina, Alina Strasser and colleagues were able to pinpoint how a specific ratio of glutamine and glutamate in the nucleus accumbens was associated with optimal motivation to perform an effort-based task. "The findings provide novel insights in the field of motivation neuroscience. They show that the balance between glutamine and glutamate can help predict specific, computational components of motivated performance," senior author Carmen Sandi said in a news release.

The third recent study (Autti et al., 2020) by a group of physicists sheds light on a prime driving force—my pursuit of a frictionless state of flow I call "superfluidity"—that inspired me to push myself to the outer limits of what was humanly possible as an ultra-endurance athlete. (See "What Driving Force Helps Us Go From 'Flow' to Superfluidity")

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This two-minute YouTube video from the BBC sums up the 20th-century discovery of superfluid helium:

Today, an international team of researchers announced that, for the first time ever, scientists had witnessed interactions between another form of matter called "superfluid time crystals." The findings by six researchers from Aalto University, Lancaster University, Royal Holloway London, and Yale University were published on Aug. 17 in the journal Nature Materials.

For this study, the researchers cooled superfluid helium-3 down to absolute zero (-273.15°C) and observed a pair of quantum time crystals inside this superfluid and allowed them to touch. "Our results demonstrate that time crystals obey the general dynamics of quantum mechanics and offer a basis to further investigate the fundamental properties of these phases, opening pathways for possible applications in developing fields, such as quantum information processing," the authors wrote.

"Controlling the interaction of two time crystals is a major achievement. Before this, nobody had observed two time crystals in the same system, let alone seen them interact," first author Samuli Autti said in a news release. "Controlled interactions are the number one item on the wish list of anyone looking to harness a time crystal for practical applications, such as quantum information processing."

Although it's interesting to learn that blocking PHD3 increases physical endurance and that having a perfect glutamine-to-glutamate ratio improves motivational stamina, for me, knowing that superfluid time crystals are observable is both mind-boggling and motivational. As an ultra-endurance athlete, my pursuit of frictionless flow and the fleeting sensation of superfluidity (performing with zero viscosity or loss of kinetic energy) was like a Holy Grail that kept me going—kind of like the Energizer Bunny.

Moments of superfluidity are episodic, ecstatic, and feel like pure bliss; tapping into this otherworldly type of flow always made me feel connected to something much bigger than myself. Knowing that quantum time crystals are real and can be seen interacting with one another reaffirms my faith in everything related to the pursuit of superfluidity.