> professional endurance sports athletes / ultra distance athletes are also high performing PhD candidates
There are three ways to slice this fact, depends on who you ask. And I've asked a lot of people, because India treated "sports" as the refuge of those who cannot cut it in academics & I had two decades of people telling me to "quit running around, sit and study" which I had to unlearn in my 30s.
First is that thinking is not just limited by the "hardware" / displacement of your brain engine, but the consumable for doing it - that when I go for a walk and kick up my heart to 130 bpm, my brain is getting the equivalent of a turbo boost (literally, more oxygen to burn). The same applies to the glucose out of the liver, where a runner trains to feel the second wind coming even when the thing burning through glucose is their brain. And I've found that I can burn through a lot playing chess - heart-rates up by +30, extremities go cold and hunger stops when I'm thinking hard (or losing). Lower your heart-rate sitting still, the more boost you can push when needed.
But there's also a problem with selection bias.
Second is that running or endurance sports is not entirely physical. Nobody is chasing you to run, you are running on pure internal motivation & that selects for people who are good at staying on a chase. The mindset needed to keep running 10+ miles is basically why we tell people "this is marathon, not a sprint" when it comes to putting in time into something new. Because the mindset is about pacing, not absolute pace (the swimming scene in Gattaca comes to mind). I think this is selected for but like muscles it grows with use; you can evolve your mindset closer to being a persistence predator of ideas, beyond boredom.
Third is that the resources needed to be an amazing endurance runner and a PhD candidate are correlated - you need to focus away from paying the bills and work on doing something which has a slow burn with a very delayed reward. You need a healthy childhood, you need time to go running and you need a culture which values physical fitness as either a military tool (the himalayan hikes I went to were full of israelis in their 20s) or social status symbol (a somewhat post-scarcity economy).
I can't run as fast or in competitive fashion, a half marathon is my distance of choice, but I running for the first two reasons and can keep doing it for the third.
There are three ways to slice this fact, depends on who you ask. And I've asked a lot of people, because India treated "sports" as the refuge of those who cannot cut it in academics & I had two decades of people telling me to "quit running around, sit and study" which I had to unlearn in my 30s.
First is that thinking is not just limited by the "hardware" / displacement of your brain engine, but the consumable for doing it - that when I go for a walk and kick up my heart to 130 bpm, my brain is getting the equivalent of a turbo boost (literally, more oxygen to burn). The same applies to the glucose out of the liver, where a runner trains to feel the second wind coming even when the thing burning through glucose is their brain. And I've found that I can burn through a lot playing chess - heart-rates up by +30, extremities go cold and hunger stops when I'm thinking hard (or losing). Lower your heart-rate sitting still, the more boost you can push when needed.
But there's also a problem with selection bias.
Second is that running or endurance sports is not entirely physical. Nobody is chasing you to run, you are running on pure internal motivation & that selects for people who are good at staying on a chase. The mindset needed to keep running 10+ miles is basically why we tell people "this is marathon, not a sprint" when it comes to putting in time into something new. Because the mindset is about pacing, not absolute pace (the swimming scene in Gattaca comes to mind). I think this is selected for but like muscles it grows with use; you can evolve your mindset closer to being a persistence predator of ideas, beyond boredom.
Third is that the resources needed to be an amazing endurance runner and a PhD candidate are correlated - you need to focus away from paying the bills and work on doing something which has a slow burn with a very delayed reward. You need a healthy childhood, you need time to go running and you need a culture which values physical fitness as either a military tool (the himalayan hikes I went to were full of israelis in their 20s) or social status symbol (a somewhat post-scarcity economy).
I can't run as fast or in competitive fashion, a half marathon is my distance of choice, but I running for the first two reasons and can keep doing it for the third.