In 2011, physicist Javier Duarte and his friends ran the surface roads above the 17-mile circumference of the Large Hadron Collider, a subterranean particle accelerator located on the Franco-Swiss border. They eventually finished the tour, but it took them four increasingly agonizing hours.
“The first half was very pleasant, but the second half was much tougher,” he says. “I hadn’t trained appropriately and was not super well prepared.”
A new pair of running shoes or some carb-loaded snacks might have improved Duarte’s performance—but only slightly. To find his stride and make good time, Duarte needed more than refinement. He needed to fundamentally change his approach to running.