[wordup] That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger

[Adam Shand]

Really interesting article on ultra endurance athletes.

Adam.

Via: Daniel Spector <danjite at gmail...>
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05robicpm.html

February 5, 2006
That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger

By DANIEL COYLE

Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra- 
endurance athlete, lives in a small fifth-floor apartment near the  
railroad tracks in the town of Koroska Bela. By nature and vocation,  
Robic is a sober-minded person, but when he appears at his doorway, he  
is smiling. Not a standard-issue smile, but a wild and fidgety grin,  
as if he were trying to contain some huge and mysterious secret.

Robic catches himself, strides inside and proceeds to lead a swift  
tour of his spare, well-kept apartment. Here is his kitchen. Here is  
his bike. Here are his wife, Petra, and year-old son, Nal. Here, on  
the coffee table, are whiskey, Jägermeister, bread, chocolate,  
prosciutto and an inky, vegetable-based soft drink he calls Communist  
Coca-Cola, left over from the old days. And here, outside the window,  
veiled by the nightly ice fog, stand the Alps and the Austrian border.  
Robic shows everything, then settles onto the couch. It’s only then  
that the smile reappears, more nervous this time, as he pulls out a  
DVD and prepares to reveal the unique talent that sets him apart from  
the rest of the world: his insanity.

Tonight, Robic’s insanity exists only in digitally recorded form, but  
the rest of the time it swirls moodily around him, his personal batch  
of ice fog. Citizens of Slovenia, a tiny, sports-happy country that  
was part of the former Yugoslavia until 1991, might glow with beatific  
pride at the success of their ski jumpers and handballers, but they  
tend to become a touch unsettled when discussing Robic, who for the  
past two years has dominated ultracycling’s hardest, longest races.  
They are proud of their man, certainly, and the way he can ride  
thousands of miles with barely a rest. But they’re also a little,  
well, concerned. Friends and colleagues tend to sidle together out of  
Robic’s earshot and whisper in urgent, hospital-corridor tones.

‘‘He pushes himself into madness,’’ says Tomaz Kovsca, a journalist  
for Slovene television. ‘‘He pushes too far.’’ Rajko Petek, a 35-year- 
old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic’s support crew, says:  
‘‘What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off  
his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.’’

What do you do then?

Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ‘‘We lock  
the doors,’’ he whispers.

When he overhears, Robic heartily dismisses their unease. ‘‘They are  
joking!’’ he shouts. ‘‘Joking!’’ But in quieter moments, he  
acknowledges their concern, even empathizes with it — though he’s  
quick to assert that nothing can be done to fix the problem. Robic  
seems to regard his racetime bouts with mental instability as one  
might regard a beloved but unruly pet: awkward and embarrassing at  
times, but impossible to live without.

‘‘During race, I am going crazy, definitely,’’ he says, smiling in  
bemused despair. ‘‘I cannot explain why is that, but it is true.’’
The craziness is methodical, however, and Robic and his crew know its  
pattern by heart. Around Day 2 of a typical weeklong race, his speech  
goes staccato. By Day 3, he is belligerent and sometimes paranoid. His  
short-term memory vanishes, and he weeps uncontrollably. The last days  
are marked by hallucinations: bears, wolves and aliens prowl the  
roadside; asphalt cracks rearrange themselves into coded messages.  
Occasionally, Robic leaps from his bike to square off with shadowy  
figures that turn out to be mailboxes. In a 2004 race, he turned to  
see himself pursued by a howling band of black-bearded men on horseback.

‘‘Mujahedeen, shooting at me,’’ he explains. ‘‘So I ride faster.’’

His wife, a nurse, interjects: ‘‘The first time I went to a race, I  
was not prepared to see what happens to his mind. We nearly split up.’’

The DVD spins, and the room vibrates with Wagner. We see a series of  
surreal images that combine violence with eerie placidity, like a  
Kubrick film. Robic’s spotlit figure rides through the dark in the  
driving rain. Robic gasps some unheard plea to a stone-faced man in  
fatigues who’s identified as his crew chief. Robic curls fetuslike on  
the pavement of a Pyrenean mountain road, having fallen asleep and  
simply tipped off his bike. Robic stalks the crossroads of a nameless  
French village at midnight, flailing his arms, screaming at his  
support crew. A baffled gendarme hurries to the scene, asking, Quel  
est le problème? I glance at Robic, and he’s staring at the screen, too.

‘‘In race, everything inside me comes out,’’ he says, shrugging.  
‘‘Good, bad, everything. My mind, it begins to do things on its own. I  
do not like it, but this is the way I must go to win the race.’’

Over the past two years, Robic, who is 40 years old, has won almost  
every race he has entered, including the last two editions of  
ultracycling’s biggest event, the 3,000-mile Insight Race Across  
America (RAAM). In 2004, Robic set a world record in the 24-hour time  
trial by covering 518.7 miles. Last year, he did himself one better,  
following up his RAAM victory with a victory six weeks later in Le  
Tour Direct, a 2,500-mile race on a course contrived from classic Tour  
de France routes. Robic finished in 7 days and 19 hours, and climbed  
some 140,000 feet, the equivalent of nearly five trips up Mount  
Everest. ‘‘That’s just mind-boggling,’’ says Pete Penseyres, a two- 
time RAAM solo champion. ‘‘I can’t envision doing two big races back  
to back. The mental part is just too hard.’’

Hans Mauritz, the co-organizer of Le Tour Direct, says: ‘‘For me, Jure  
is on another planet. He can die on the bike and keep going.’’

And going. In addition to races, Robic trains 335 days each year,  
logging some 28,000 miles, or roughly one trip around the planet.

Yet Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always  
the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90  
minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological  
gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a  
laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on  
a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for  
the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly  
indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are  
somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because  
he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he  
loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing  
embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is  
pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point  
lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

The Insight Race Across America was not designed by overcurious  
physiologists, but it might as well have been. It’s the world’s  
longest human-powered race, a coast-to-coast haul from San Diego to  
Atlantic City. Typically, two dozen or so riders compete in the solo  
categories.

Compared with the three-week, 2,200-mile Tour de France, which is  
generally acknowledged to be the world’s most demanding event, RAAM  
requires relatively low power outputs — a contest of diesel engines as  
opposed to Ferraris. But RAAM’s unceasing nature and epic length — 800  
miles more than the Tour in roughly a third of the time — makes it in  
some ways a purer test, if only because it more closely resembles a  
giant lab experiment. (An experiment that will get more interesting if  
Lance Armstrong, the seven-time Tour winner, gives RAAM a try, as he  
has hinted he might.)

Winners average more than 13 miles an hour and finish in nine days,  
riding about 350 miles a day. The ones to watch, though, are not the  
victors but the 50 percent who do not finish, and whose breakdowns,  
like a scattering of so many piston rods and hubcaps, provide a vivid  
map of the human body’s built-in limitations.

The first breakdowns, in the California and Arizona deserts, tend to  
be related to heat and hydration (riders drink as much as a liter of  
water per hour during the race). Then, around the Plains states, comes  
the stomach trouble. Digestive tracts, overloaded by the strain of  
processing 10,000 calories a day (the equivalent of 29 cheeseburgers),  
go haywire. This is usually accompanied by a wave of structural  
problems: muscles and tendons weaken, or simply give out. Body-bike  
contact points are especially vulnerable. Feet swell two sizes, on  
average. Thumb nerves, compressed on the handlebars, stop functioning.  
For several weeks after the race, Robic, like a lot of RAAM riders,  
must use two hands to turn a key. (Don’t even ask about the derrière.  
When I did, Robic pantomimed placing a gun in his mouth and pulling  
the trigger.)

The final collapse takes place between the ears. Competitors endure  
fatigue-induced rounds of hallucinations and mood shifts. Margins for  
error in the race can be slim, a point underlined by two fatal  
accidents at RAAM in the past three years, both involving automobiles.  
Support crews, which ride along in follow cars or campers, do what  
they can to help. For Robic, his support crew serves as a second  
brain, consisting of a well-drilled cadre of a half-dozen fellow  
Slovene soldiers. It resembles other crews in that it feeds, hydrates,  
guides and motivates — but with an important distinction. The second  
brain, not Robic’s, is in charge.

‘‘By the third day, we are Jure’s software,’’ says Lt. Miran  
Stanovnik, Robic’s crew chief. ‘‘He is the hardware, going down the  
road.’’

Stanovnik, at 41, emanates the cowboy charisma of a special-ops  
soldier, though he isn’t one: his background consists most notably of  
riding the famously grueling Paris-to-Dakar rally on his motorcycle.  
But he’s impressively alpha nonetheless, referring to a recent crash  
in which he broke ribs, fractured vertebrae and ruptured his spleen as  
‘‘my small tumble.’’

His system is straightforward. During the race, Robic’s brain is  
allowed control over choice of music (usually a mix of traditional  
Slovene marches and Lenny Kravitz), food selection and bathroom  
breaks. The second brain dictates everything else, including rest  
times, meal times, food amounts and even average speed. Unless Robic  
asks, he is not informed of the remaining mileage or even how many  
days are left in the race.

‘‘It is best if he has no idea,’’ Stanovnik says. ‘‘He rides — that is  
all.’’

Robic’s season consists of a handful of 24-hour races built around  
RAAM and, last year, Le Tour Direct. As in most ultra sports, prize  
money is more derisory than motivational. Even with the Slovene Army  
picking up much of the travel tab, the $10,000 check from RAAM barely  
covers Robic’s cost of competing. His sponsorships, mostly with  
Slovene sports-nutrition and bike-equipment companies, aren’t enough  
to put him in the black. (Stanovnik lent Robic’s team $8,500 last year.)

Stanovnik is adept at motivating Robic along the way. When the  
mujahedeen appeared in 2004, Stanovnik pretended to see them too, and  
urged Robic to ride faster. When an addled Robic believes himself to  
be back in Slovenia, Stanovnik informs him that his hometown is just a  
few miles ahead. He also employs more time-honored, drill-sergeant  
techniques.

‘‘They would shout insults at him,’’ says Hans Mauritz. ‘‘It woke him  
up, and he kept going.’’

(Naturally, these tactics add an element of tension between Robic and  
team members, and account for his bouts of hostility toward them,  
including, in 2003, Robic’s mistaken but passionately held impression  
that Stanovnik was having an affair with his wife.)

In all decisions, Stanovnik governs according to a rule of thumb that  
he has developed over the years: at the dark moment when Robic feels  
utterly exhausted, when he is so empty and sleep-deprived that he  
feels as if he might literally die on the bike, he actually has 50  
percent more energy to give.

‘‘That is our method,’’ Stanovnik says. ‘‘When Jure cannot go any  
more, he can still go. We must motivate him sometimes, but he goes.’’

In this dual-brain system, Robic’s mental breakdowns are not an  
unwanted side effect, but rather an integral part of the process:  
welcome proof that the other limiting factors have been eliminated and  
that maximum stress has been placed firmly on the final link, Robic’s  
mind. While his long-term memory appears unaffected (he can recall  
route landmarks from year to year), his short-term memory evaporates.  
Robic will repeat the same question 10 times in five minutes. His mind  
exists completely in the present.

‘‘When I am tired, Miran can take me to the edge,’’ Robic says  
appreciatively, ‘‘to the last atoms of my power.’’ How far past the 50  
percent limit can Robic be pushed? ‘‘Ninety, maybe 95 percent,’’  
Stanovnik says thoughtfully. ‘‘But that would probably be unhealthy.’’

Interestingly — or unnervingly, depending on how you look at it — some  
researchers are uncovering evidence that Stanovnik’s rule of thumb  
might be right. A spate of recent studies has contributed to growing  
support for the notion that the origins and controls of fatigue lie  
partly, if not mostly, within the brain and the central nervous  
system. The new research puts fresh weight to the hoary coaching  
cliché: you only think you’re tired.

 From the time of Hippocrates, the limits of human exertion were  
thought to reside in the muscles themselves, a hypothesis that was  
established in 1922 with the Nobel Prize-winning work of Dr. A.V.  
Hill. The theory went like this: working muscles, pushed to their  
limit, accumulated lactic acid. When concentrations of lactic acid  
reached a certain level, so the argument went, the muscles could no  
longer function. Muscles contained an ‘‘automatic brake,’’ Hill wrote,  
‘‘carefully adjusted by nature.’’

Researchers, however, have long noted a link between neurological  
disorders and athletic potential. In the late 1800’s, the pioneering  
French doctor Philippe Tissié observed that phobias and epilepsy could  
be beneficial for athletic training. A few decades later, the German  
surgeon August Bier measured the spontaneous long jump of a mentally  
disturbed patient, noting that it compared favorably to the existing  
world record. These types of exertions seemed to defy the notion of  
built-in muscular limits and, Bier noted, were made possible by  
‘‘powerful mental stimuli and the simultaneous elimination of  
inhibitions.’’

Questions about the muscle-centered model came up again in 1989 when  
Canadian researchers published the results of an experiment called  
Operation Everest II, in which athletes did heavy exercise in altitude  
chambers. The athletes reached exhaustion despite the fact that their  
lactic-acid concentrations remained comfortably low. Fatigue, it  
seemed, might be caused by something else.

In 1999, three physiologists from the University of Cape Town Medical  
School in South Africa took the next step. They worked a group of  
cyclists to exhaustion during a 62-mile laboratory ride and measured,  
via electrodes, the percentage of leg muscles they were using at the  
fatigue limit. If standard theories were true, they reasoned, the body  
should recruit more muscle fibers as it approached exhaustion — a  
natural compensation for tired, weakening muscles.

Instead, the researchers observed the opposite result. As the riders  
approached complete fatigue, the percentage of active muscle fibers  
decreased, until they were using only about 30 percent. Even as the  
athletes felt they were giving their all, the reality was that more of  
their muscles were at rest. Was the brain purposely holding back the  
body?

‘‘It was as if the brain was playing a trick on the body, to save  
it,’’ says Timothy Noakes, head of the Cape Town group. ‘‘Which makes  
a lot of sense, if you think about it. In fatigue, it only feels like  
we’re going to die. The actual physiological risks that fatigue  
represents are essentially trivial.’’

 From this, Noakes and his colleagues concluded that A.V. Hill had  
been right about the automatic brake, but wrong about its location.  
They postulated the existence of what they called a central governor:  
a neural system that monitors carbohydrate stores, the levels of  
glucose and oxygen in the blood, the rates of heat gain and loss, and  
work rates. The governor’s job is to hold our bodies safely back from  
the brink of collapse by creating painful sensations that we interpret  
as unendurable muscle fatigue.

Fatigue, the researchers argue, is less an objective event than a  
subjective emotion — the brain’s clever, self-interested attempt to  
scare you into stopping. The way past fatigue, then, is to return the  
favor: to fool the brain by lying to it, distracting it or even  
provoking it. (That said, mental gamesmanship can never overcome a  
basic lack of fitness. As Noakes says, the body always holds veto  
power.)

‘‘Athletes and coaches already do a lot of this instinctively,’’  
Noakes says. ‘‘What is a coach, after all, but a technique for  
overcoming the governor?’’

The governor theory is far from conclusive, but some scientists are  
focusing on a walnut-size area in the front portion of the brain  
called the anterior cingulate cortex. This has been linked to a host  
of core functions, including handling pain, creating emotion and  
playing a key role in what’s known loosely as willpower. Sir Francis  
Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, thought the anterior cingulate cortex  
to be the seat of the soul. In the sports world, perhaps no soul  
relies on it more than Jure Robic’s.

Some people ‘‘have the ability to reprocess the pain signal,’’ says  
Daniel Galper, a senior researcher in the psychiatry department at the  
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. ‘‘It’s not  
that they don’t feel the pain; they just shift their brain dynamics  
and alter their perception of reality so the pain matters less. It’s  
basically a purposeful hallucination.’’

Noakes and his colleagues speculate that the central governor theory  
holds the potential to explain not just feats of stamina but also  
their opposite: chronic fatigue syndrome (a malfunctioning, overactive  
governor, in this view). Moreover, the governor theory makes  
evolutionary sense. Animals whose brains safeguarded an emergency  
stash of physical reserves might well have survived at a higher rate  
than animals that could drain their fuel tanks at will.

The theory would also seem to explain a sports landscape in which  
ultra-endurance events have gone from being considered medically  
hazardous to something perilously close to routine. The Ironman  
triathlon in Hawaii — a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and marathon- 
length run — was the ne plus ultra in endurance in the 1980’s, but has  
now been topped by the Ultraman, which is more than twice as long.  
Once obscure, the genre known as adventure racing, which includes 500- 
plus-mile wilderness races like Primal Quest, has grown to more than  
400 events each year. Ultramarathoners, defined as those who  
participate in running events exceeding the official marathon distance  
of 26.2 miles, now number some 15,000 in the United States alone. The  
underlying physics have not changed, but rather our sense of  
possibility. Athletic culture, like Robic, has discovered a way to  
tweak its collective governor.

When we try understanding Robic’s relationship to severe pain,  
however, our interest tends to be more visceral. Namely, how does it  
feel?

‘‘I feel like if I go on, I will die,’’ he says, struggling for words.  
‘‘It is everything at the same moment, piled up over and over. Head,  
muscles, bones. Nobody can understand. You cannot imagine it until you  
feel it.’’

A few moments later, he says: ‘‘The pain doesn’t exist for me. I know  
it is there because I feel it, but I don’t pay attention to it. I  
sometimes see myself from the other view, looking down at me riding  
the bike. It is strange, but it happens like that.’’ Robic veers like  
this when he discusses pain. He talks of incomprehensible suffering  
one moment and of dreamlike anesthesia the next. If pain is in fact  
both signal and emotion, perhaps that makes sense. Perhaps the closer  
we get to its dual nature, the more elusive any single truth becomes,  
and the better we understand what Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote  
that ‘‘pain has an element of blank.’’

It’s a gray morning in December, and Robic is driving his silver  
Peugeot to one of his favorite training rides in the hills along  
Slovenia’s Adriatic coast. The wind is blowing 50 miles an hour, and  
the temperature is in the 40’s. If Robic’s anterior cingulate cortex  
can sometimes block out negative information, this is definitely not  
one of those times.

‘‘This is bad,’’ he says, peering at the wind-shredded clouds. ‘‘It  
makes no sense to train. You cannot train, and I am out there, cold  
and freezing for hours. I am shivering and wondering, Why do I do  
this?’’

Robic often complains like this. Even when the weather is ideal, he  
points out the clouds blowing in and how horrible and lonely his  
workout will be. At first it seems like showboat kvetching that will  
diminish as he gets more familiar with you, but as time wears on it’s  
apparent that his complaints are sincere. He isn’t just acting  
miserable — he is miserable.

The negativity is accentuated, perhaps, by the fact that Robic trains  
exclusively alone. What’s more, he’s famously disinclined to seek  
advice when it comes to training, medical treatment and nutrition.  
‘‘Completely uncoachable,’’ says his friend Uros Velepec, a two-time  
winner of the Ultraman World Championships. Robic invents eclectic  
workout schedules: six hours of biking one day, seven hours of Nordic  
skiing the next, with perhaps a mountain climb or two in between, all  
faithfully tracked and recorded in a series of battered notebooks.

‘‘I find motivation everywhere,’’ Robic says. ‘‘If right now you look  
at me and wonder if I cannot go up the mountain, even if you are  
joking, I will do it. Then I will do it again, and maybe again.’’ He  
gestures to Mount Stol, a snowy Goliath crouched 7,300 feet above him,  
as remote as the moon. ‘‘Three years ago, I got angry at the mountain.  
I climbed it 38 times in two months.’’

Robic goes on to detail his motivational fuel sources, including his  
neglectful father, persistent near poverty (three years ago, he was  
reduced to asking for food from a farmer friend) and a lack of large- 
sponsor support because of Slovenia’s small size. (‘‘If I lived in  
Austria, I would be millionaire,’’ he says unconvincingly.) There is  
also a psychological twist of biblical flavor: a half brother born out  
of wedlock named Marko, Jure’s age to the month. Robic says his father  
favored Marko to the extent that the old man made him part owner of  
his restaurant, leaving Jure, at age 28, to beg them for a dishwashing  
job.

‘‘All my life I was pushed away,’’ he says. ‘‘I get the feeling that  
I’m not good enough to be the good one. And so now I am good at  
something, and I want revenge to prove to all the people who thought I  
was some kind of loser. These feelings are all the time present in me.  
They are where my power is coming from.’’

As a young man, Robic was known as a village racer, decent enough  
locally but not talented enough to land a professional contract.  
Throughout his 20’s, he rode with small Slovene teams, supporting  
himself with a sales job for a bike-parts dealer. It was with the  
death of his mother in 1997 and his subsequent depression that Robic  
discovered his calling. On the advice of a cyclist friend, he started  
training for the 1999 Crocodile Trophy, a notoriously painful week-and- 
a-half-long mountain bike race across Australia. Robic finished third.

In October of 2001, Robic set out to see how far he could cycle in 24  
hours. The day was unpromising: raw and wet. He nearly didn’t ride.  
But he did — and went an estimated 498 miles, almost a world record.

‘‘That was the day I knew I could do this,’’ he says. ‘‘I know that  
the thing that does not kill me makes me stronger. I can feel it, and  
when I want to quit I hear this voice say, ‘Come on, Jure,’ and I keep  
going.’’

A year later, he quit his job and volunteered to join the Slovene  
military, undergoing nine months of intensive combat training (he  
surprised his unit with his penchant for late-night training runs). He  
earned a coveted spot in the sports division, which exists solely to  
support the nation’s top athletes. For Robic, the post meant a salary  
of 700 euros (about $850) a month and the freedom to train full time.

This day, despite the foul conditions, Robic trains for five and a  
half hours. He rides through toylike stone villages and fields of  
olive trees; he climbs mountains from whose peaks he can see the blue  
Adriatic and the coast of Italy. He rides across the border checkpoint  
into Croatia, along a deserted beach and past groves of fanlike  
bamboo. He rides in a powerful crouch, his big legs churning, his face  
impassive.

While I watch from the car, I’m reminded of a scene the previous  
night. Robic and his support crew of fellow soldiers met at a small  
restaurant for a RAAM reunion. For several hours, they ate veal, drank  
wine out of small glass pitchers and reminisced in high spirits about  
the race. They spoke of the time Robic became unshakably convinced his  
team was making fun of him, and the time he sat on a curb in Athens,  
Ohio, and refused to budge for an hour, and the time they had to lift  
his sleeping body back onto his bike.

Stanovnik told of an incident in the Appalachians, when Robic, who  
seemed about to give up, suddenly found an unexpected burst of energy.  
‘‘He goes like madman for one hour, two hours,’’ Stanovnik recalled.  
‘‘I am shouting at him, ‘You show Slovenia, you show army, you show  
world what you are!’ I have tears on my face, watching him.’’

At the end of the table, Rajko Petek wondered whether he could  
continue to work on the crew. ‘‘It is too much,’’ he said to a round  
of understanding nods. ‘‘This kind of racing leaves damage upon Jure’s  
mind. Too much fighting, too much craziness. I cannot take it anymore.’’

Robic sat quietly in their midst, his eyes darting and quick.  
Sometimes he’d offer a word or a joke, but mostly he listened. At  
first it seemed he was being shy, but after a while it became apparent  
that he was curious to hear the stories. The person of whom they spoke  
— this sometimes frightening, sometimes inspiring man named Jure Robic  
— remained a stranger to him.

Robic finishes his ride as the winter sun is going down. As we drive  
back toward Koroska Bela, a lens of white fog descends on the roadway.  
We pass ghostlike farms, factories and church spires while Robic talks  
about his plans for the coming year. He talks about his wife, whose  
job has supported them, and he talks about their son, who is starting  
to walk. He talks about how he will try to win a record third  
consecutive RAAM in June, and how he hopes race officials won’t react  
to the recent fatalities by adding mandatory rest stops. (‘‘Then it  
will not be a true race,’’ he says.) In a few months, he’ll do his  
signature 48-hour training, in which he rides for 24 hours straight,  
stays awake all night, and then does a 12-hour workout.

But this year is going to be different in one respect. Robic is going  
to start working with a local sports psychologist who has previously  
helped several Slovene Olympians. It seems that Robic, the uncoachable  
one, is looking for guidance.

‘‘I want to solve the demon,’’ he says. ‘‘I do not want to be so crazy  
during the races. Every man has black and white inside of him, and the  
black should stay inside.’’

He presses the accelerator, weaving through drivers made timid by the  
fog. ‘‘This will be good for me,’’ he adds, his voice growing louder.  
‘‘I am older now, but I have the feeling that I am stronger than ever  
before. Now I am reaching where there is nothing that is too hard for  
my body because my mind is hard. Nothing!’’

Robic attempts to convey the intensity of his feeling, but can only  
gesture dramatically with his hands, which unfortunately are needed to  
control the steering wheel. The car veers toward a ditch.

Acting quickly, Robic regrips the wheel. After a shaky second or two,  
he regains control of the car. We barrel onward through the mist. His  
sidelong smile is pure confidence.