Runners like Jeremy Wariner, Otis Harris and Derrick Brew studly runners with bodies seemingly cut from rock were dropping after 400 meters. Just once around the track.
Anyone who doesn't run could be forgiven for thinking that two laps take twice the effort of one, four laps twice as much again.
But anyone who does run knows the truth: The 400 is the hardest, most painful race anywhere in the Olympics.
"Tell me about it," said Derrick Patterson, a Missouri runner who races everything from 400 to 5,000 meters but made the Olympics team at 800.
The 400-meter race, only 17 yards short of a quarter-mile, lives in a scary netherworld of track. It's not a glamour sprint, like the 100, which is over oh-so-thankfully soon. It's not an endurance race in which athletes can settle in and let their lungs find rhythm.
The 400 is an agonizing test of mind over body, but it's more than that. The race is a physical test of the body's middle-energy system the one that produces power and pain in equal amounts.
At 45 seconds, give or take a few tenths for Olympians, the race falls on the body's internal dividing line. The 400, more than any other distance, separates the men from the boys, the women from the wannabes and the champs from the chafe.
FUEL IN THE TANK
The human body is a miraculous machine, engineered in such a way that it would take millions of years to recreate.
Inside the body, three systems produce energy. They work at different rates, consume different fuel sources and spew different byproducts, but they all come down to the same thing: Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
"Think of this molecule as a dollar of energy," said Randy Wilber, a senior sports physiologist with the U.S. Olympic Committee.
It's those dollars of energy that the human body collects and spends on everything from breathing to bending to flexing a muscle.
The first system is immediate. Your body just grabs whatever ATP it has lying around, breaks it in two and uses the energy that is released. The whole thing takes no time, but the energy produced lasts only slightly longer, a few seconds 10 at most.
"Think of this as the money in your wallet," Wilber said. "It's limited, but you can have it instantly."
The first system will get you off the couch, let you hop a curb, lift a weight or throw a baseball.
If you want to do anything that takes longer say, ride a bike or take a hike you rely on your third energy system, the aerobic one.
For that, the body takes sugars and fats from places in which they are stored, mixes in some oxygen, spins the mess through something called the Krebs cycle and produces energy, carbon dioxide and sweat.
In Wilber's financial analogy, this is the 401(k) of human power. It takes awhile, but the payoff is pretty big. If you use it right, you can ride it a long time.
The first system fires Maurice Greene across a 100-meter sprint, but it's the aerobic system that powers Lance Armstrong all over France and sends marathoner Colleen De Reuck through 26.2 miles of road.
MEN IN THE MIDDLE
Runners like Wariner and Harris, and other 400-meter men, fall somewhere in between. The first system is too short, and the third takes too long. They rely mostly on their middle system, called glycolysis.
The system lasts about 45 seconds enough for the fastest runners to get around the track. It's the money machine of human energy. It takes a little effort to get the cash; you have to find the ATM.
Once there, you can take some money, but not as much as you might need. The limit is $200 at most machines, and once you have spent it, you're toast until the bank opens in the morning.
Glycolysis, also called the lactic system, needs no oxygen, but it creates a nasty byproduct: lactic acid.
"It's just like you touched your finger to battery acid," Wilber said. "It hurts."
Anyone who has sprinted too fast or cycled too hard knows that burning feeling in the legs. That's the lactic acid searing the muscle tissue. Elite 400 runners start hurting the first second, then they run another 43.
"They're swimming in lactic acid," Wilber said.
But that's not even the worst of it. When the energy system peters out (at 45 seconds, give or take), things really go south.
The lactic acid breaks down one step further, into lactate and hydrogen ions. And those pesky ions roam the body and get into trouble. They insert themselves into muscle tissue.
"It's like pouring sugar in the gas tank," Wilber said. "It just gums it all up."
Muscles can't contract or release, and the runner tightens up. Often in the last 50 meters, you see someone "running" like he is in "Night of the Living Dead." His limbs stiffen and refuse to listen to his brain. Runners call it the Bear.
THE MASTER
In Waco, Texas, Clyde Hart has figured all this out. Hart, the assistant athletic director and coach at Baylor University, has spent 41 years building a track program that doubles as a 400-meter factory.
Baylor's 4x400-meter relay teams have reached the final in 26 consecutive NCAA Championships. Twenty-five teams were named All-American.
"The 400 is just something we happened to have success with," Hart said in absolute understatement.
Hart, more than anyone else, has figured out how to extend a runner's middle-energy system so it can deliver power for an entire lap around the track. His athletes suffer, but they finish the race before the Bear.
Three of Hart's charges are running in Athens. Wariner, 22, is the fastest, clocking in at 44.37 seconds. Darold Williamson, a Hart-trained relay runner, finishes in 44.95. The third runner, Zsolt Szeglet, competes for Hungary.
None compares to Hart's greatest runner to date, Michael Johnson not yet, anyway. But then again, no one does. After five years, Johnson's world-record time of 43.18 remains an unattainable goal for everyone else.
Johnson came to Texas as a hard-working sprinter, but Hart stretched him into an unbeatable 400-meter man. And that's part of Hart's success. He gets them to undertake a race that hurts.
"Sometimes I coerce them," Hart admitted. "I ask a 200-meter runner to run the 4x400 relay. I tell them it will build strength for the 200.
"After awhile, they see it's not so bad."
Jody Berger is a sportswriter for the Rocky Mountain News.
Anyone who doesn't run could be forgiven for thinking that two laps take twice the effort of one, four laps twice as much again.
But anyone who does run knows the truth: The 400 is the hardest, most painful race anywhere in the Olympics.
"Tell me about it," said Derrick Patterson, a Missouri runner who races everything from 400 to 5,000 meters but made the Olympics team at 800.
The 400-meter race, only 17 yards short of a quarter-mile, lives in a scary netherworld of track. It's not a glamour sprint, like the 100, which is over oh-so-thankfully soon. It's not an endurance race in which athletes can settle in and let their lungs find rhythm.
The 400 is an agonizing test of mind over body, but it's more than that. The race is a physical test of the body's middle-energy system the one that produces power and pain in equal amounts.
At 45 seconds, give or take a few tenths for Olympians, the race falls on the body's internal dividing line. The 400, more than any other distance, separates the men from the boys, the women from the wannabes and the champs from the chafe.
FUEL IN THE TANK
The human body is a miraculous machine, engineered in such a way that it would take millions of years to recreate.
Inside the body, three systems produce energy. They work at different rates, consume different fuel sources and spew different byproducts, but they all come down to the same thing: Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP.
"Think of this molecule as a dollar of energy," said Randy Wilber, a senior sports physiologist with the U.S. Olympic Committee.
It's those dollars of energy that the human body collects and spends on everything from breathing to bending to flexing a muscle.
The first system is immediate. Your body just grabs whatever ATP it has lying around, breaks it in two and uses the energy that is released. The whole thing takes no time, but the energy produced lasts only slightly longer, a few seconds 10 at most.
"Think of this as the money in your wallet," Wilber said. "It's limited, but you can have it instantly."
The first system will get you off the couch, let you hop a curb, lift a weight or throw a baseball.
If you want to do anything that takes longer say, ride a bike or take a hike you rely on your third energy system, the aerobic one.
For that, the body takes sugars and fats from places in which they are stored, mixes in some oxygen, spins the mess through something called the Krebs cycle and produces energy, carbon dioxide and sweat.
In Wilber's financial analogy, this is the 401(k) of human power. It takes awhile, but the payoff is pretty big. If you use it right, you can ride it a long time.
The first system fires Maurice Greene across a 100-meter sprint, but it's the aerobic system that powers Lance Armstrong all over France and sends marathoner Colleen De Reuck through 26.2 miles of road.
MEN IN THE MIDDLE
Runners like Wariner and Harris, and other 400-meter men, fall somewhere in between. The first system is too short, and the third takes too long. They rely mostly on their middle system, called glycolysis.
The system lasts about 45 seconds enough for the fastest runners to get around the track. It's the money machine of human energy. It takes a little effort to get the cash; you have to find the ATM.
Once there, you can take some money, but not as much as you might need. The limit is $200 at most machines, and once you have spent it, you're toast until the bank opens in the morning.
Glycolysis, also called the lactic system, needs no oxygen, but it creates a nasty byproduct: lactic acid.
"It's just like you touched your finger to battery acid," Wilber said. "It hurts."
Anyone who has sprinted too fast or cycled too hard knows that burning feeling in the legs. That's the lactic acid searing the muscle tissue. Elite 400 runners start hurting the first second, then they run another 43.
"They're swimming in lactic acid," Wilber said.
But that's not even the worst of it. When the energy system peters out (at 45 seconds, give or take), things really go south.
The lactic acid breaks down one step further, into lactate and hydrogen ions. And those pesky ions roam the body and get into trouble. They insert themselves into muscle tissue.
"It's like pouring sugar in the gas tank," Wilber said. "It just gums it all up."
Muscles can't contract or release, and the runner tightens up. Often in the last 50 meters, you see someone "running" like he is in "Night of the Living Dead." His limbs stiffen and refuse to listen to his brain. Runners call it the Bear.
THE MASTER
In Waco, Texas, Clyde Hart has figured all this out. Hart, the assistant athletic director and coach at Baylor University, has spent 41 years building a track program that doubles as a 400-meter factory.
Baylor's 4x400-meter relay teams have reached the final in 26 consecutive NCAA Championships. Twenty-five teams were named All-American.
"The 400 is just something we happened to have success with," Hart said in absolute understatement.
Hart, more than anyone else, has figured out how to extend a runner's middle-energy system so it can deliver power for an entire lap around the track. His athletes suffer, but they finish the race before the Bear.
Three of Hart's charges are running in Athens. Wariner, 22, is the fastest, clocking in at 44.37 seconds. Darold Williamson, a Hart-trained relay runner, finishes in 44.95. The third runner, Zsolt Szeglet, competes for Hungary.
None compares to Hart's greatest runner to date, Michael Johnson not yet, anyway. But then again, no one does. After five years, Johnson's world-record time of 43.18 remains an unattainable goal for everyone else.
Johnson came to Texas as a hard-working sprinter, but Hart stretched him into an unbeatable 400-meter man. And that's part of Hart's success. He gets them to undertake a race that hurts.
"Sometimes I coerce them," Hart admitted. "I ask a 200-meter runner to run the 4x400 relay. I tell them it will build strength for the 200.
"After awhile, they see it's not so bad."
Jody Berger is a sportswriter for the Rocky Mountain News.