The thing is, jocks aren’t really dumb. Statistically speaking, they’re actually quite smart. And elite jocks—those good enough to make a living at their sport—are especially smart. A 2022 review paper published in the International Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology reported that elite athletes “outperform control groups on a battery of cognitive tasks, including attentional allocation and cognitive flexibility.”
When you see an NFL wide receiver make a diving one-handed catch at full speed and tap his toes at the very edge of the field, millimeters from the out-of-bounds stripe, it’s easy to credit the athlete’s body and not his brain, but it’s wrong. A diving catch is an amazing feat of motor coordination, and your arms and legs don’t coordinate themselves, your brain does. An amazing catch is a smart catch.
Also, when an athlete exercises their body, they’re also exercising their brain. This makes endurance athletes especially even smarter. Neuroscientist Vincent Walsh of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience has argued that piloting the body through an endurance race is among the most difficult tasks the brain can perform, subjecting our most vital organ to the simultaneous demands of driving maximal levels of motor output, managing crisis-level discomfort, and handling the immense cognitive and perceptual challenge that pacing presents. We tend to think of sophisticated mental operations such as landing a spacecraft on Mars as requiring more brainpower than athletic challenges like running 50K trail running events. But in fact the opposite is true because an endurance race entails both mental work and physical work, and physical work is mental work. As science fiction writer Ted Chiang wrote in the novella “Understand,” “It is a misconception to think that during evolution humans sacrificed physical skill in exchange for intelligence: wielding one’s body is a mental activity.”
The human brain grows measurably in response to physical training. In a 2010 study, South African scientists scanned the brains of twelve ultraendurance athletes and nine sedentary volunteers of similar age and found that the athletes had more grey matter, more white matter, and bigger overall brains. (Don’t let that give you a swelled head.)
The best athletes are also the best learners. As I’ve said a million times before in this space, the most talented junior athletes seldom go on to become the highest-performing professional athletes. Rather, it’s those who improve the most between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five who dominate the world championship and Olympic podiums. And who improves the most? The best learners—i.e., the smartest athletes. The sports development pipeline weeds out less-intelligent athletes as ruthlessly as it weeds out less physically gifted athletes.
Even at the elite level, small differences in intelligence influence degrees of success. Scientists use an alternative version of the standard IQ test called that Athlete Intelligence Quotient (AIQ) to measure intelligence in athletes. A study of 149 professional baseball players, for example, found that those with higher AIQ scores had superior batting and pitching statistics.
In light of how important intelligence is to athletic success, it’s surprising how little encouragement athletes receive to use their brains in training and racing. They get all kinds of encouragement to be tough, gritty, and resilient, but it’s difficult to gain an advantage over the competition but out-toughing them because everyone is trying to be tough, whereas it’s quite easy to outsmart the competition because it hasn’t even crossed the competition’s mind to apply their intelligence to training and racing.
I see this bias daily in the athletes I coach. One athlete told me recently after a workout in which he pushed too hard and overcooked himself, “I’m probably the kind of person who, when given a range of possibilities, is likely to choose the hardest one.” The problem is that every athlete is this kind of person because they’ve been socialized to glorify toughness and overlook intelligence.
The most successful athletes are smart enough to realize on their own that their best advantage over the competition is to let them be gritty idiots while they themselves focus on making better decisions. Here’s how one such athlete, six-time Olympic and world champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen, answered a reporter’s question about whether he blames himself exclusively when he races poorly:
Yes, because my starting point is that everyone else is an idiot, and I know that in advance. Then it does little good to be surprised by it afterwards. That’s how I look at people, especially in the opening rounds of 1500 meters. Then you have to start from the fact that people do stupid things, and if you screw up because someone around you screws up, then you only have yourself to blame. Because it’s going to happen. And then it’s easy to put oneself as responsible for stupid things that happen.
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Matt Fitzgerald and MarathonGuide Team
I belong to the tribe of endurance athletes.
This is regarding running but be can be applied to different walks of life as well. Not every moment of life needs to be optimized. Before adding things into our lives, we can looks for things that can be subtracted or can be eliminated.
I started running back in June of 2020. I was firstly using a classic Samsung button phone for a couple of months to track just the total time of my runs as I didn't kept a smartphone from 2016 to 2022. Then I bought a Casio watch, not taking my phone on the run to note the total timings of my run. I kept it this way till November of 2024. No smart watch, no Strava and no other app to track the metrics. This was also because I didn't intended to keep running for this long. Now I have been using both Coros Pace Pro & Strava since last November. I have been some sort of like Anti Technology and didn't wanted to be tied to all these numbers. It is all just I wanted to keep intact the love for running and not get hooked to numbers on day to day basis.
In my day to day life as well outside the sport, I am some what blunt & I preach radical honesty.
A lot of the times people get fazed by that he has no mask put on, he is not pretending and there is no fluff but then a lot of the times people love it I am not just being like tip of the iceberg while talking to them. I can't do small talk even for a minute with anyone, so I have kept my circle small. There is no time for small talks for hours on end, it is sheer time waste. Do what you want to pursue, create frameworks & systems for it and go all in to achieve it and then think what else can be done. The way endurance sports peels out every bit of layer from a human being is quite great and the bonds shared doesn't mean it is just because of they are pursuing these different endurance sports. It is all behind the doing of all this- they share aligned values. They know what it means to go sleep on time to wake up early to put in the required work. They know what it means to take care of our physical, mental & emotional health and the importance of it to peak perform in any walk of life. They know what it means to have self control to just have a clean diet for months on end. It has become a part of system now, it is no more for a couple of days or weeks. It is a life long pursuit and lifelong practice. They know when going through the trenches of pain how a human is left bare naked physically, mentally & emotionally. It is just that the pursuit of endurance sports is a byproduct of their tiny habits. What an individual values & prioritizes they practice on daily basis.
They don't want to live life on some sort of automation as they want to steer the ship on their own terms. They know complacency kills. They know the importance of SHOWING UP and the significance of CONSISTENCY as CONSISTENCY IS THE NAME OF THE GAME.
Good article. I hadn’t read about this topic before. I had misconceptions. Oops.