Tim Noakes

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Professor Timothy Noakes is professor of exercise and sports science at the University of Cape Town. He has run more than 70 marathons and ultramarathons, and is the author of the running book The Lore of Running.^[1] He was born in 1949 and attended Monterey Preparatory School in Constantia, Cape Town, then Diocesan College. As a young boy his main sporting interest was cricket.

[edit] As researcher and educator

In 1980 Professor Noakes was tasked to start a sports science course at the University of Cape Town. From these humble beginnings Noakes went on to head the Medical Research Council funded Bioenergetics of Exercise Research Unit, which was later changed to the MRC/UCT Research Unit for Exercise Science and Sports Medicine.^[2]

In the early 1990s Prof Noakes co-founded the Sports Science Institute of South Africa,^[3] with former South African rugby player Morne du Plessis. In these new facilities his research unit's physiological research has thrived since 1996, producing over 370 scientific articles (and counting) during this time period.

Although Noakes is well known in academic circles for the high caliber of his scientific insight and work, he is perhaps best known for being the first to publish a scientific paper on the condition now known as Exercise Associated Hyponatremia (EAH). He first recognized this condition in a female runner during the 1984 Comrades Marathon, and published his findings in 1985 in the scientific and peer-reviewed journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise. Prof Noakes continues to contribute to our understanding of this condition, and in 2005 hosted the 1st International Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia Consensus Development Conference in Cape Town in May 2005. In November 2007 the 2nd Consensus Development Conference adjourned in Auckland, New Zealand.

In 2005 he undertook a series of pioneering experiments in the Arctic and Antarctic on British swimmer Lewis Gordon Pugh to understand the full range of human capability in extreme cold. He discovered that Pugh had the ability to raise his core body temperature before entering the water in anticipation of the cold and coined the phrase anticipatory thermo-genesis to describe it. In 2007 he was the expedition doctor for Pugh’s one kilometre swim at the Geographic North Pole.

[edit] Awards

Noakes is also well known for challenging common and old paradigms in the discipline of Exercise Physiology. In 1996 he was honored by the American College of Sports Medicine when he was asked to present the J.B. Wolfe Memorial Lecture, the college's keynote address at its annual meeting. In his presentation Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. (Out of Africa always something new) Noakes challenged the popular held dogma of the VO₂max plateau theory. This work lead eventually to the construction of a complex central governor model of exercise in which the brain is the primary organ that dictates how fast, how long, and how hard humans can exercise. Much of Noakes' work over the past 10 years has provided further support for this model. In 2004 he was awarded a Doctorate in Science (DSc), the highest degree the University of Cape Town can award, for his seminal contributions over the years.