The New Jersey senator broke congressional records by speaking for more than 25 hours. How?
Al Drago / The New York Times / Redux
The idea of politics as a sport is a familiar analogy. For a little more than 25 hours from Monday to Tuesday evening, politics left behind the metaphor and became a grueling, perhaps even dangerous, ultramarathon. Senator Cory Booker’s record-breaking speech—an “oratorical marathon” and a “feat of political endurance,” according to reporters—was nearly an hour longer than Strom Thurmond’s 1957 attempt to filibuster the Civil Rights Act. The impact of Booker’s effort remains to be seen, but to judge it through a strictly political lens is to miss a grittier athletic drama—and overlook how sports science might help a future senator extend “filibusterthon” endurance even further.
Before he took to the lectern, clad in a dark suit and black sneakers, Booker announced his intention of pushing the limits of his 56-year-old body. “I’m going to go for as long as I’m physically able to go,” he said.
This is precisely the kind of challenge that animates amateur endurance athletes like me, as well as the professionals I write about as a journalist who specializes in the science of endurance. The open-ended nature of such boundary-pushing is particularly alluring. The current world record for “backyard ultras,” which involve running about four miles every hour until everyone else gives up, is 110 laps—that’s 458 miles over four and a half days. Research on these competitors has found that the physical demands of such a prolonged effort pale in comparison to the psychological toll.
Still, Booker’s speech presented some unique physiological challenges—most notably that he couldn’t yield the floor to go to the bathroom. That’s no trivial feat: In 2007, a woman died shortly after participating in an on-air “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest held by a radio station. Her problem was drinking too much. To forestall the call of nature, Booker stopped eating on Friday, and refrained from drinking on Sunday evening, a full 24 hours before he started speaking.
Scientists assess that, on average, humans can survive without water for about three days. Long before that, your kidneys will be stressed, your cognitive function will be impaired, and you may develop a headache as your brain—which is mostly water—shrinks. Just as well that Booker didn’t have to debate anyone.
Then there’s the effect on your muscles. “I’m a former athlete, so I know when you get dehydrated you get a lot cramps,” Booker, who played football for Stanford in the early 1990s, told reporters after his speech. “That was the biggest thing I was fighting, is that different muscles were really starting to cramp up, and every once in a while I’d have a spasm.” As a matter of scientific fact, the link between dehydration and muscle cramps is no longer as widely accepted as it was when Booker was in college. Instead of sipping water occasionally during his speech, he might have had better luck warding off cramps with pickle juice, which is thought to reset the nervous-system reflexes that go haywire when you cramp.
Fasting for more than four days also made Booker’s task considerably harder. Among Tour de France cyclists and other endurance athletes, the trend is to scarf down astonishingly large quantities of carbohydrates, as much as 120 grams—the equivalent of three plates of pasta—every hour while competing. Booker’s jaw muscles clearly didn’t need that much fuel, but letting blood-sugar levels drop is associated with mental fog, lightheadedness, and the risk of fainting. Strangely enough, you can counteract some of these symptoms simply by swishing sports drink in your mouth and then spitting the drink out. Just a whiff of glucose will trigger calorie sensors in your brain and make you feel better. It’s the perfect solution for future filibusterers, because it won’t make you need to pee.
Missing a night’s sleep is one element of Booker’s feat that most of us have replicated at some point in our life. That’s nothing compared with what those backyard-ultra competitors endure, but it has an effect: Researchers have famously found that staying awake for 24 hours makes you a worse driver than drinking alcohol to the legal limit. The standard advice among ultrarunners, backed by scientific findings, is that getting extra sleep in the week prior to your ordeal can help buffer some of the effects of sleep deprivation.
Even if the distance Booker covered during his event was zero miles, he still faced the considerable physical challenge of standing for more than 24 hours. Just a few hours into his speech, he had a Senate page remove his chair—to eliminate the temptation to sit down.
Although the evils of sitting all day are well known, standing all day is no picnic either. Research has found that people whose jobs require standing all day are twice as likely to develop heart disease as those who sit, and are vulnerable to a host of other ills, ranging from varicose veins to “spontaneous abortions.” And yes, muscle cramps: the most likely culprit for Booker’s spasms was muscle fatigue rather than dehydration. There’s no easy fix, but marching in place might help engage different muscles to spread the strain, along with a pair of highly cushioned supershoes.
The shoes of Senator Cory Booker, photographed while he spoke to reporters on Tuesday after surpassing the record for the longest Senate speech (Eric Lee / The New York Times / Redux)
Even if another senator optimized all of these details, could they break Booker’s new record? For an answer on that, I am persuaded by the great Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi. “Mind is everything: muscles—pieces of rubber,” he said. “All that I am, I am because of my mind.”
When he emerged from the Senate Chamber after his oratorical marathon, Booker pulled a slip of paper from his pocket. It was a passage from the Book of Isaiah: “But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.” Anyone who wants to beat Booker will need to draw from a similar wellspring of belief and commitment. But they should probably also bring some pickle juice.
