Endure: Mind, Body and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

by Alex Hutchinson

endurance is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop.”

You judge what’s sustainable based not only on how you feel, but on how that feeling compares to how you expected to feel at that point in the race.

Just like a smile or frown, the words in your head have the power to influence the very feelings they’re supposed to reflect.

five key areas: selecting the best athletes, optimizing the course and environment, executing the best possible training, delivering the right fuel and hydration, and deploying cutting-edge shoes and apparel.

simply getting fitter doesn’t magically increase your pain tolerance; how you get fit matters: you have to suffer.

first instinct will be to rub your bruised shin with your hand. Why? Because the nonpainful sensation of rubbing competes with the pain of the bruise for the same neural signaling pathways that report back to your brain.

the end point of any performance is never an absolute fixed point but rather is when the sum of all negative factors such as fatigue and muscle pain are felt more strongly than the positive factors of motivation and will power.”

At the point of exhaustion in a long endurance challenge, the legs are merely unwilling, not incapable.

three different metabolites associated with intense exercise—lactate, protons, and adenosine triphosphate, or ATP—into

Amann’s theory is that the lactate-proton-ATP feedback is the brain’s way of ensuring that the muscles themselves never exceed a critical level of stress and disruption.

Endurance athletes have hearts that pump so powerfully that their blood barely has time to load up with oxygen as it rushes past the lungs. Even at sea level, about 70 percent of male endurance athletes start to see measurable drops in arterial oxygen levels during all-out exercise, when the heart is pumping most powerfully.

aiming to beat Nike to a sub-two-hour marathon, flew to Israel at one point to scout the possibility of holding a marathon alongside the Dead Sea, near the lowest point on earth. At a quarter mile below sea level, the air there has about 5 percent more oxygen than at sea level, offering a potential (though, for now, hypothetical) boost.

Even more significant, your body stores carbohydrate in your muscles in a form that locks away about three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate. This water isn’t available to contribute to essential cellular processes until you start unlocking the carbohydrate stores, so your body sees it as “new” water when it’s released during exercise.

But in 2007, British scientists at the University of Loughborough estimated that a marathoner could conceivably lose 1 to 3 percent of his or her body mass without any net loss of water.

Avoiding thirst, rather than avoiding dehydration, seems to be the most important key to performance.

The problem was that the fat-adapted athletes became less efficient, requiring more oxygen to sustain their race pace.

We often think of races as “painful,” but physical pain is completely distinct from the sense of effort—the struggle to keep going against a mounting desire to stop—that usually limits race speed.

for a marathoner, leg pain and shortness of breath become neutral sources of information, to be used for pacing, rather than emotionally charged warnings to panic about.

maybe that’s the real secret weapon: believing that you have another gear.

“You have to teach athletes, somewhere in their careers, that they can do more than they think they can.”

science has confirmed what athletes have always believed: that there’s more in there—if you’re willing to believe it.