The myth of marginal gains

Every January, at least one of the amateur runners I coach arrives with a new gadget and a new theory. Last year it was a heart-rate strap, a sleep tracker and a podcast about "marginal gains". The phrase comes from British Cycling, which began winning almost everything in the late 2000s. Its performance director, Dave Brailsford, put the success down to a search for hundreds of small improvements. Riders were taught to wash their hands properly to avoid colds, took their own pillows to hotels and worked from a team truck with a white floor, so that dust would be easy to spot.

I understand the appeal of the story. It is optimistic, it sounds scientific, and it suggests that success is within reach of anyone patient enough to sweat the small stuff. Business books retold it, and consultants built workshops around it. Before long it was turning up in sales meetings and school assemblies. In the past year alone I have heard it from a bank manager, a yoga teacher and my dentist. Get one per cent better every day, the slogan goes, and the results will eventually be extraordinary.

The trouble is how much the story leaves out. British Cycling's rise coincided with a sharp increase in public funding, much of it from the National Lottery, which paid for full-time coaches, world-class facilities and the best equipment money could buy. The team also had several exceptionally talented riders at the same time. Critics have pointed out, too, that some of the track events it dominated attracted far less investment from rival nations than football or athletics. Clean hands may well have helped. They are hardly the whole picture.

In my own small corner of sport, I see the same trap every season. A runner will spend an evening comparing energy gels while still sleeping five hours a night and skipping the long run on Sundays. Small tweaks are pleasant precisely because they are small: they feel productive without forcing anyone to face the dull, demanding basics. The same is true well beyond running. A company that agonises over the font on its invoices while its main product is failing is not being disciplined. It is rearranging the deckchairs.

None of this means details are worthless. At the very top of a sport, where everyone is talented and well funded, tiny differences can separate a gold medal from fourth place. My argument is about order: get the fundamentals right first, and polish the edges afterwards. When the runner with the gadgets asked me what to change this year, my answer was dull. Go to bed earlier, run slower on easy days and turn up every week. He looked disappointed. By the spring he had knocked four minutes off his half-marathon time.