"Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education, choose to benefit from the technology that is made possible by the scientific education of others."

-- Richard Dawkins, "A Devil's Chaplain"

Morris Guadalcanal wants some serious improvement talk. Out on a long training run on a club night, he's fallen in step with Osprey Lyons and Davida Desmond, both of whom he knows better by reputation than in person. Osprey coaches at a high school. Davida has made a name for herself in her age group in big marathons.

According to Morris's thinking, one or both might have an answer to a hurdle he's run into. A mainstay at middle distances at a state university a decade ago, Morris decided early in the year to extend his race mileage. To his surprise he sustains such high rates of speed over the long haul that he finds himself on the heels of runners he'd never thought to challenge.

The rewards in marathons could be gratifying, but the effect at a certain point goes haywire. "I get sick to my stomach. Every time I hit about 25- or 30K I have to throw up. You can't beat the elites when you're doubled over by the side of the road. What should I do? Any ideas?"

Osprey has a lot of practical wisdom for all his youth. "Take a pain reliever an hour or so before the race. I've been doing that for a while now."

Davida, aside from a go-for-the-jugular competitiveness, has nothing going for her if not ideas. But before she makes adjustments to Morris's preparations she has to find out some background. "Are you carbo-loading?"

Morris looks sheepish. "It's a psychological thing. If I don't get something down ahead of time, I feel like I'm going to die on the course. I eat breakfast on race day, even if I have to get up way early."

Davida says, "It won't help anyway. The body can't metabolize food that fast. You've got to figure out when to carbo-load. It might be the evening before a race. It might be even earlier in the day. Your body's rhythms should set the time."

"I know all that. It's a ritual, you know?"

"You're only fighting yourself. Your animal side's in conflict with your rational side. You crave food, then it ruins all you've trained for by weighing down your system."

Osprey says, "Maybe he's just got a delicate stomach."

Morris says, "Actually I've been diagnosed with irritable-bowel syndrome."

Osprey gives him a sidelong look of surprise and sympathy. "Try the pain relievers."

Experimental medicine over years inventoried an abundance of information and substances competitive runners need to achieve fitness. Someone, somewhere, did all the research into the settling effects of buffers in pain relievers on digestive tracts; someone, somewhere, did all the replication and verification of the research; someone, somewhere mixed and packaged the results as pills.

Someone, somewhere, synthesized for popular consumption all the scattered knowledge about the human body's tendencies in metabolizing carbohydrates.

Osprey never tested aspirin against a placebo in a double-blind experiment. Davida never drew blood samples to check the effect of a high-carb diet on blood sugar. Morris never analyzed a fecal sample to confirm his syndrome.

All three believe in found truths.

It's an enigma of modern civilization that millions of people accept and apply knowledge garnered from a discipline, science, the methodology of which they reject as cold, soulless, godless. Dawkins, a biologist and fierce defender of science, wrote in "A Devil's Chaplain" of the loyalty of people to a list of cultural givens they ingest with their upbringing: "Scientific truth is the only member of the list which regularly persuades converts of its superiority."

Davida follows the truths of science if they lead to practices that satisfy her goals. She's happy to pass them along as advice to Morris on how to solve problems, as long as he observes some decorum. "As long as he doesn't start talking about bowel movements."

Getting Armstronger

Jackie Arbovoid entertains friends while munching a bagel and sipping Gatorade after a race. Jackie might attract such a circle after any running event anywhere in the state. She has lots of friends.

She tells today's circle she'll move her 5K times into the 17s and her 10K times into the 36s by fall. "I increased my baseline fitness at the Great Lakes Relay. That's why I did it. Now it's just a matter of mixing speed work with endurance runs."

Babs Uccello happens by as Jackie holds forth. A woman of mature years and ample flesh, of jolly personality and shrewd eye, Babs volunteers at races at the drop of a hat. She gives Jackie a once-over look. "You're past college age."

"Twenty-six."

"And your time today?"

"Eighteen forty-nine."

"And your best time?"

"Eighteen thirty-six."

"I don't think I'm going out on a limb if I say you've gotten pretty close to the edge of your envelope."

"I should hope not."

"Have you heard about the physiology of Lance Armstrong?" Jackie shakes her head as if wondering whether she's admitting to ignorance of a subject she's supposed to know ... or wondering what the question's got to do with anything.

Babs says, "Armstrong was born to race bicycles over mountains. His heart pumps almost double the volume of blood per beat as the average person. His lungs convert more oxygen. His blood has more red cells to carry it. His muscles build up less lactic acid. Because of all that, he recovers faster than his competitors. That's why he wins the Tour de France every year."

"So?"

"It's genetics. Nobody can train for greater pumping volume or for better chemistry. They can only train their hearts to hold stress levels for longer periods of time, half an hour for a 5K, three hours for a marathon. They can't train themselves into Lance Armstrong."

Jackie says, "Well, thanks for nothing."

Babs walks away with a jolly laugh. Jackie mutters curses and contradictions at her back until one of the circle tells her the fat lady once sprinted her way to notoriety at an Olympic trials.

Knowledge of blood circulation grew from roots in a scientific breakthrough by William Harvey. The English court physician in 1628 published "On the Movement of the Heart and Blood in Animals." Like his contemporary, Galileo, who upset the orthodoxy of divine motion in the heavens, Harvey upset the medical orthodoxy of Galen, whose authority had been sacrosanct for centuries.

Harvey did so with careful observations that proved the heart pumped blood through a contained system of valves, ventricles, arteries and veins.

Lactic acid became the suspect in muscle fatigue, the cause of the wearying of athletes during exertion, with publication of research by Archibald Vivian Hill in 1929. Hill's work with frog muscles suggested function diminished with accumulation of lactic acid and recovered with its removal by nitrogen. But experiments since the 1960s cast doubt on the findings, suggesting a beneficial influence on function by lactic acid, part of a chemical complex that promotes muscle contraction.

Beginning in 2001 potassium replaced lactic acid as a favorite among supposed culprits in muscle fatigue.

Davida needs convincing. "Isn't it just like scientists to say one thing for 70 years and then say the opposite? But then, just to be safe, maybe I'll cut down on bananas."

Faster by Design

Mary Spotcheck has never worked out hard enough to sweat in her life, let alone raced. Her look's office-chic rather than exercise-sleek. But Mary brings her cheery glow to a race here and there during the summer, backing her daughter, Shy, who's keeping fit between racing seasons at her university. Mary's met Saul Billiams a few times; he belongs to Shy's set in terms of talent and dedication.

But Mary's never talked with Saul until an August morning at a race by the big waters. She wonders why he's standing around while Shy cruises through a 10K. "You, young man, are no idler."

Saul says, "Did the 5K."

"And how did you do?"

"Went under 15 minutes. First time since I graduated."

"Are you through with college, then? My, how time flies. The university must have had a hard time replacing you."

"Nah. There's plenty where I came from. I wasn't even the fastest guy at my college from my own hometown."

Mary's impressed when he says the name of his native city. "I remember somebody saying that some of the best track programs in the country have a runner from your hometown. Is it something in the water?"

"Nah. Selective breeding."

"I beg your pardon."

"Selective breeding. You know; like dogs, or cattle, or sheep. You bring together people with traits you want to pass on to children. I'm living proof."

"But that would mean your parents ..."

"Were part of an experiment? Actually they got recruited. Actually they got ordered. Don't forget about the army base in my hometown."

"Are you telling me your parents had no choice?"

"Dad would never have chased mom down. She was a sprinter. He was a distance guy. That's why I can sprint for a 5K."

"Things like that do not really happen, young man."

"Not any more. Except at one or two universities. Probably not at Shy's school."

Alfred Russel Wallace, while collecting specimens in the Malay Archipelago in the first half of the 19th century, had momentous insights into the origin of species. Even the father of the Theory of Evolution, Charles Darwin, failed to grasp the genius of Wallace's vision of the drift of inherited characteristics.

David Quammen in "The Song of the Dodo" described how even scientists ignored seminal 1855 and 1857 papers by Wallace regarding speciation on Sarawak and the Aru Islands. "This is typical of the way Wallace's work has been overlooked, dismissed and forgotten. The Aru paper lies interred, like a Gnostic gospel, in a cave of oblivion." Gregor Mendel in 1856 in Brunn (now Brno), Moravia, began hybrid research with peas. Andrea Barrett, in the short story "The Behavior of the Hawkweeds," wrote, "... Mendel performed hundreds of experiments on thousands of plants, tracing the ways in which characteristics were passed through generations." By 1865 he completed his project.

"Mendel knew nothing of genes or chromosomes or DNA," Barrett wrote, "but he'd discovered the principles that made the search for those things possible."

Unfortunately his reading of a paper on his findings fell on deaf ears with fellow scientists. "Only in 1900 was his lost paper rediscovered and his work appreciated by a new generation of scientists."

Wallace and Mendel might have seconded each other, strengthening their groundwork, but each toiled in ignorance of the other's complementary breakthrough.

Over the course of a century and a half, as scientists got the message and got on the case, an overwhelming body of observation and experimentation proved the principles of speciation and genetics pioneered by Wallace and Mendel.

But the public never got the message. A 2005 poll found 64 percent of Americans favored creationism and 22 percent evolution. Few of the 64 percent, though, suffering an inherited disease, would refuse a cure arising from the human genome project, a descendant of Wallace and Mendel through molecular biology.

Davida follows the profitable side of the creationism-evolution divide. "I'm all for intelligent design. It's intelligent to design a faster running body. Fit me with the first one out of the vat." Warp Speed

Sangfreud Sessob rubs elbows mostly with runners of his own age and speed class. But by temperament, if no one in his category is handy, Sangfreud rubs elbows with anyone who comes within hailing distance. When on a spring morning he finds himself in the pre-race company of Victor Challenger, an elite middle-distance man from out of state, he rubs elbows.

He tells Victor his plan for the event. "I'm still doing both the 5K and 10K. But it's going to be slow going. I had a little quad strain this week and only did 63 miles."

Victor says, "You keep that close a distance log?"

"Right down to the tenth of a mile. Don't you?"

"Nope. Two years ago I started logging time along with distance. Hours and minutes of cardiovascular exercise. Then I saw it was a better way of fine-turning my training. About a year ago I dropped the mileage part altogether."

"And you're getting better training?"

"Yup. Better results. A mile's just a mile. But an hour might be so many minutes at a low heart rate, so many minutes at a moderate heart rate, and so many minutes at an elevated heart rate."

"You're telling me you log the difference?"

"Yup."

"I'll be a monkey's uncle. I got to try that."

Albert Einstein fused time and space into a single gravitational package almost a century ago with the theories of Relativity and Special Relativity. Within 10 years Werner Heisenberg and other quantum mechanics jimmied Einstein's elegant universe, introducing uncertainties he never came to grips with, showing that the laws of a gravitational macrocosm went kerflooey when applied to a nuclear microcosm. To this day the relativists and the quantum mechanics seek in vain for a single package of laws to explain everthing from the vast to the minute.

String theorists insist they're on the brink of answering the riddle with a concept of energy strings so tiny they elude experimentation.

Conceptual differences among physicists couldn't prevent the delivery of technologies to the general public that flowed out of nuclear research. The common man and woman might dismiss the competing theories as illogical, as counterintuitive, but few if any ever disconnected from the power grid because a portion of their electricity came from esoteric knowledge of the invisible atom.

Davida has to stop and think about it all. "Einstein and those quantum guys couldn't see eye to eye, but they got together and made hydrogen bombs and nuclear power plants. Sangfreud knows his mileage, but not if he knows his time. Victor know his time as long as he wears a heart monitor, but not if he knows his mileage. Is that what we're saying? I'm confused."

Seeing the Light

String theory is the sexiest subject in the cosmos for writers on popular science.

In an article for Smithsonian Magazine, "The Year of Albert Einstein," author Richard Panek revealed how the iconic scientist acted out the obsessions of today in advance. Panek wrote, "... to the increasing exasperation of colleagues, he spent the last three decades of his life trying -- without success -- to find a grand unified theory that would banish such uncertainty."

In his book, "The Theory of Everything," physicist Stephen Hawking looked forward to the teaching in a simplified form of a unified theory, once the breakthrough comes, to young students. Hawking wrote, "We would then all be able to have some understanding of the laws that govern the universe and which are responsible for our existence."

Yet science writers to date have failed to grasp the source of fascination in string theory. Not only could it wrap all the cosmic forces into a neat gift, but because of its intuitive nature, it could invite a melding of spiritualism, philosophy and science.

Runners could find all the goods they desire in one conceptual store.

In an article for the New York Times, "A New View of Our Universe," science reporter Dennis Overbye edged toward a grasp of the promise of a theory of everything. Overbye wrote, "If the universe is big enough, ... everything that can happen will happen, so that if we could look out far enough we would eventually discover an exact replica of ourselves."

Yes.

That's the light in a running theory of everything.

Davida sees it. "Finally I come to know myself." MR