The Space Between: Exploring the Limits of Human Performance

When Alison Sheets-Singer was a young gymnast in Maryland, her coach, Steve Cornelison, held his day job with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Cornelison held a Ph.D. degree in physics and was often executing calculations focused on improving his gymnasts? performances. She may not have understood much about it at the time, but Sheets-Singer knew that whatever it was that he was working out on paper was leading to suggestions that had a measurable impact. Cornelison could tell her, for example, exactly how much higher she would be able to fly through the air on the vault if she could just run 2% faster down the runway.